How awful! It has to be terrible that you didn’t know she was missing. Little ones can disappear so quickly. My 5 year old is a master at disappearing. Started doing it when she was two.
When she was three, she was playing in the snow with her brother and sister and they looked up and she was gone. We had plowed the circle driveway. No footprints were heading off anywhere. We looked frantically for 15 minutes. I thought someone had pulled into the drive and put her in their car. About the time I started to break down we heard her voice calling for us. It sounded far off. She had climbed in our car and shut the door without disturbing the snow on the windows.
Neither of my other children did things like that. They were always content to stay near my husband or me. This girl is going to give me gray hair!
I had one who would crawl into places and go to sleep. I had several horrible scares. Once she was asleep in a lump of covers on her bed. Who’d be silly enough to look there? :)
When I was four, my parents had to call the cops when I couldn’t be found around the house.
They found me on my tricycle four blocks up the street looking at the trains.
I still do that, although not on a tricycle.