Two little girls banished from a neighbourhood birthday party take a wrong turn down an unfamiliar Baltimore street - and encounter an abandoned stroller with an infant inside. What happens next is shocking and terrible, and three families are irrevocably destroyed.

Seven yars later, Alice Manning and Ronnie Fuller, now eighteen, are released from "kid prison" to begin their lives over again. But the secrets swirling around the original crime continue to haunt the parents, the lawyers, the police - all the adults in Alice and Ronnie's lives. And now another child has disappeared, under freakishly similar circumstances...