My best friend Nancy and I took our kids—my 6-year-old daughter and her 5-year-old son—to an amusement park. After a long, happy day, we stopped for ice cream. While we were chatting, I showed Nancy a few vacation photos of me, my husband, and our daughter.
Suddenly, her son pointed at one picture and said, “That’s Daddy.”
Nancy laughed it off. “No, sweetie, that’s not Daddy.” But he insisted.
“It is. He came last week and brought me a teddy bear.”
A chill ran through me.
Despite her protests, I pulled up a photo of my husband alone and showed it to him. He looked straight at it and said, “That’s him. He told me not to tell.”
We both tried to smile it off, blaming imagination and a sugar-filled day—but the unease lingered.
That night, Nancy called, shaken. Her son had been mentioning a “friendly man” visiting for weeks. She’d assumed it was pretend—until now. I reassured her my husband had been with me the entire time, but neither of us slept well.
The next day, she called again—relieved.
She’d shown her son a photo of their new neighbor, who had recently dropped off a misdelivered package. Her son immediately smiled.
“That’s him! The man with the teddy bear.”
The neighbor had unknowingly delivered a stuffed toy Nancy had ordered.
We laughed, deeply relieved—and reminded how easily children blur details, and how quickly imagination can turn ordinary moments into something terrifying.
