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I watched her, from across the park. Watched her pushing the little boy on the swing. Watched her catch him as he squealed down the slide. Watched as she knelt to tie a trailing shoe-lace, the baby and pram, crucially, out of sight for a few perilous seconds. She ought to be more careful. You never know who could be watching.

I'd not walked past the house before, because I don't usually go that way, but my mind must have been wandering and I took a wrong turn at the junction of Askew Road, ending up on an unfamiliar street. I was halfway along, must have been walking for a good five minutes or so, before I was brought up short. A lilac bush, delicately frilled and lightly scented, caused me to pause, and I was just straightening up from taking a restorative lungful when I caught her reflection in the porch window.

I turn, but she's gone. Maybe I straightened up too fast, maybe my mind is playing the same cruel trick it used to play, not so much now but in the early days when the distant sight of any girl approximating her height and age and hair colour would set my heart racing.

But then she's back, ducking out from the back seat of the car. She's wearing cropped khaki trousers, the sort with all the pockets that they refer to as "combat" (why are young women so angry these days?) and a pair of those ugly, clumpy boots that are ubiquitous on any woman under the age of forty.

And then I see that she's extracting a baby-seat. This is more than I could have hoped for.

I'm torn. I want to run across the road, throw my arms around her, feel that she's real. But I want to stay here, absorbing the image of her. And then a movement from the front door reveals a small boy, saying something I cannot hear, and his face is so exactly her at that same age, that I am stone-struck and couldn't move if I wanted to.

All too soon, they're gone: babies, shopping, boy and all, locked inside their blue-doored fortress that keeps family firmly in and non-family firmly out.

You can run it in your head, over and over. The moment that the tiny fingers slipped through yours like soap, the crowd foaming around you. By the time you turn around there's nothing to see, just a sick hole where your child should be.

You can run it in your head, over and over, straining to glean some tiny clue from that last second of contact, listening for that chime in your DNA that tells you where she is.

You can rerun it. That's all you can do. Day after day. You can't go back and you can't change a thing.

But I never stopped looking, and suddenly, one day, there she was, as obvious as fate, as everyday as bread. Beyond doubt, my daughter. Sarah.

I know this to be a fact, as every cell of my body is singing out in a symphony of genetic recognition. It is all the proof I need.

She's taller than I thought she'd be (I am of decidedly average height, wouldn't stand out in a crowd, and her father was on the short side). She's rangy, athletically built. Recessive genetics, I think they call it. And she's looking older than her thirty-two years, but with two little ones to run around after it's understandable. I wonder if she knows who she is, when her real birthday falls? I wonder if she reads her horoscope and wonders why her day turns out like that of Gemini, when she thinks that she was born under a different sign? I wonder what They told her, and if she holds any memory of a clown cake with five fizzing candles, which took three attempts to blow out? Maybe she thinks it all happened to someone else. Sometimes I wonder the same thing myself.

It took a few weeks to work out which supermarket Sarah uses. She drives in from the Hawsley end, and that put three branches in the running. It's not where I usually shopped, but it couldn't hurt to give them a go, see what their selection is like. I tried a different one each week (always on a Thursday afternoon, of course), but after three weeks I'd covered them all and I hadn't seen Sarah.

I thought about doing the rounds again, but to be honest it was more expensive than I was used to and I didn't think I could justify it, what with me not having much of an income. I was sure I had the right chain; I'd made a note of it from the shopping bags. I'd seen her unloading her groceries often enough to know that I wasn't wrong.

But they say that patience is a virtue and after one more week my perseverance was rewarded.

I caught up with her by the dairy cabinets - yogurts for the children, parmesan, semi-skimmed milk - and traced the rest of their shop at a discreet distance, adding un-needed items to my own basket to complete my 'cover'. I abandoned the contents, unpaid for, once she was through the checkout and out the automatic doors.

It wasn't like it is now, when a child disappears. Nowadays there are appeals, campaigns, posters, emails, websites, twenty-four hour rolling news, celebrity support... it never ends, never stops. I'll bet you could still name them now, that sandy-haired little boy last seen heading to the corner shop to spend his pocket money on football stickers, the gap-toothed girl with the lopsided pony-tail who evaporated from the CCTV screens in a Wakefield shopping centre. They are as familiar to you as friends, tiny recipients of a perverse modern eminence.

It wasn't like that when Sarah was taken. The police treated it seriously enough, once they had were satisfied that I was neither delusional nor wicked. There were searches, calls for witnesses. I described her blue anorak, over and over again, hunted out grainy Kodak snaps. I even made an appeal, which was shown on the local news, but bumped from the national evening news to make way for the news of John Lennon's assassination. I never was much of a one for The Beatles.

A couple of witnesses came forward: a handful of well-intentioned but misguided busybodies, plus a couple of malicious cranks (inevitable, Detective Joyner said).

And then - nothing. The investigation limped as far along as it could on limited evidence and resources. All that was left was a big, silent hole.

We ate sandwiches off our laps, not wanting to sit at the table where that gaping place setting made a mockery of 'family' meal times. We rarely spoke, chewing in sticky silence, until the day he left. He now lives in Horwell with a woman called Barbara and a substitute daughter.

'Nice...' I have no idea what comes next.

'Sorry?'

'Nice day for the park.' It is chilly, with intermittent drizzle. 'I mean, always nice for the little ones to have fresh air at their age.'

'Yes. Yes, it is...'

'How old are they?'

She looks at me for an intense second, trying to read my nature in my face. I know this look because for twenty-eight years I have peered into the faces of passing strangers with the same searching stare, wondering Was it you? Do you know where she is?

I pass her test, because she tells me that 'Thomas' is just coming up to four, whilst 'Freya' is eighteen months. I'm a little disappointed - these aren't the names I would have steered her towards, had I had the chance, but there's no time to dwell on this as she's asking me:

'Do you have any grandchildren?'

I look at Thomas, crouching and poking at a beetle with a discarded lollipop stick, and at Freya, gazing intently into the middle distance.

'Yes,' I smile. 'One of each.'

'Lovely. They're lucky, to have a grandma.'

Twenty-eight years of silence stretches between us. I have to say something quickly before this sliver of opportunity recedes.

'Are yours? Lucky, I mean? To have a grandma?'

'Umm...' I see that she was not anticipating a continuance of this conversation, that she was speaking from politeness, not genuine interest, but I cannot let her go. Not after all this time.

'Your mother, I mean. Is she Granny or Grandma? Nana?'

'She's not... She died. Sorry, don't mean to be rude, but we've got to get back...' And she's gone before I can think of anything else to say.

Everyone had a theory, of course. They might not have known what had happened, but they knew why. The 'what' was irrelevant; the 'why' was salivated over like a bone. I was the 'why'; that most unnatural, snake-headed of creatures: the failed mother. No-one commented directly, of course, nothing so unseemly as naked confrontation. Social propriety enforced the compulsory head-tilt, the wan sympathy of a half-smile. I'd barely be out of the door of the butcher's shop, barely out of earshot, and the temperature would drop behind me, the air sibilant with hissed accusations. Other mothers drew their children close as I passed by. I was tainted, and it was contagious.

Over the next few weeks I see a lot of Sarah and the children. We're all creatures of habit, and she predictably stuck to her weekly routine: shopping, park, playgroup, coffee morning, kiddie-swim. Pieces of the jigsaw were slotting together. The glint of a wedding ring is consolidated by the sight of a tall man washing the car, putting out the bins, drawing the curtains. At the supermarket I have mastered the art of casual conversation, pointing out a two-for-one offer here, a healthier alternative there. She doesn't always stop to chat - who listens to everything their mother says, after all? - but I'm becoming familiar to her, I'm sure. I am almost part of her life again.

The next few weeks pass, as hundreds have done before, without notable event: I eat breakfast (wholemeal toast and honey), dust (the mantelpiece, the sideboard, my dressing table, Sarah's room), hang washing on the line, go to church, hoover (living room, hall, stairs, landing, my bedroom, Sarah's room), go shopping (she's not in the supermarket. Is she ill? Are they away? I have no idea). I eat lunch, I eat dinner. I wash the dishes. I walk past the house, and back again, and again, but catch no glimpse. I go to bed, I wake up. I keep going, keep going, keep going, just as I have done for the last twenty-eight years, two months, three weeks and some days.

It's not as if I've spent the last twenty-eight years, two months, three weeks and some days suspended, like a fly in amber. I'm not stalled, mid-movement, like a Grecian marble. I've moved on, as far as I can. Which is a mere handful of steps, but it's enough to prevent me crumbling on a daily basis; so don't imagine that I've wasted all that time, those twenty-eight years, two months, three weeks and some days.

On Friday, as is now usual, I head to the park at the allotted time. She's back - finally - in the under-fives play area.

I take a short cut across the grass, waving cheerfully as I advance. She sees me, or at least I think she does, and then suddenly she's bundling Thomas off the roundabout, gathering up her bags and hurriedly strapping Freya into the pushchair.

I pick up my pace, breaking into that awkward run-walk that looks so ridiculous on a woman of my age, and get to the playground just as she's fumbling with the bottom gate.

'Cooee! It's me!'

'We've got to go. I've just got to...' She's floundering, she doesn't have to 'just' anything. I can tell this from her tight smile and cold eyes. She's holding Thomas close to her leg. And then:

'I've seen you.' Her voice is shaking. 'I've seen you near our house...'

I am about to invent a housebound friend who lives in her street, a charitable undertaking on my part, but a cough to the left draws my attention.

A man, vaguely familiar, is sitting on the bench overlooking the children's area. Ostensibly he's reading the paper, but suddenly I know the reason for Sarah's fright and flight. He's here every Friday, always in the same spot, at the same time.

'You go home.' I tell her. 'Your children will be safe at home.'

And she's away as fast as Thomas's legs will carry him. I watch until they're out of sight.

The side gate, unusually, was ajar. This afforded me a titillating glimpse of a prone tricycle on a sliver of damp grass.

I'd not seen the back garden before, that place where grandchildren grazed their knees and family memories were formed.

'Hello?'

It was a question, not a greeting. I attempted nonchalance.

'I was just admiring your...' I swept my arm across the garden, which served only to emphasise the lack of admirable qualities contained therewith.

There followed an awkward pause, in which presumably I was meant to apologise for my intrusion and offer to retreat. But I don't.

'Could I come in for a moment?'

'No. We, err, we were just about to eat...'

The drain below the kitchen window is filled with snowy foam, and I surmise from this that the evening meal has been completed, the dishes washed. I decide I won't back down.

'It really would just be a minute. I need to tell you something. Something important.'

All credit to Them, she's been well enough brought up not to refuse me a second time.

To stand in your daughter's kitchen is a pleasure denied to few mothers and I wanted to savour it before heading through to the living room, where no doubt a freshly bathed Thomas would be eking out the last few precious minutes of pre-bed playtime.

We remained in the kitchen, Sarah taking a territorial stance in front of the doorway to the hall.

'Take a seat. I'll just...' She backed out of the room.

I stationed myself at the battered kitchen table, taking care not to trail my sleeve through a smear of ketchup that had been missed by the bitty J-Cloth that lurked at the far corner.

I was there for a while, gradually becoming aware of voices rising over the noise of the TV, the hissing of allegation to which I had become so well attenuated over the years.

'...say something. Otherwise I'll go through and I'll say...'

'...being silly, Fran...'

'...children snatched everyday. What if...'

My heart soars. My brilliant, bright, perfect Sarah! She's worked it out! Unable to wait a second longer, I rush down the hall, arms open to reclaim her, crying, 'Sarah! Oh, my Sarah!' through tears and laughter.

Fran and Glen were very understanding. The police too, all things considered. The older one remembered me, not from when Sarah went missing (he hadn't even been a police officer back then, as it happens), but from nine years back when a student lodging at number thirty-three made a complaint. It was all cleared up, of course, but they've got good memories for faces, some of these policemen. And Fran agreed not to press charges (not that there were any to press, as far as I'm concerned. Can you arrest someone for a belief in mistaken identity?).

But it's alright. Really, it is. I know that she's out there, living a day-to-day life of meals and sleep, chores and tasks. I'll find her. I only need to be right once. She's somewhere, Sarah.

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