William Keane, played by Damian Lewis, searches for his missing daughter Sophia — played by Abigail Breslin — in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, from which she was abducted several months earlier. He shows a newspaper account to ticket agents and random passersby, but no one recalls seeing the little girl. After spending the night wandering the streets and sleeping along the side of the highway, he returns to the cheap hotel where he lives and finds he is unable to get into his room. The desk clerk tells him his payment is in arrears, and Keane covers the cost of another week's stay with a disability check.
Alone in his hotel room, Keane drinks beer and talks to himself about his ex-wife and the birth of their daughter, and he reads the clippings he keeps in an envelope about another abducted New Jersey girl who was found and reunited with her parents. He makes contact with a drug dealer and purchases cocaine, and the more he ingests the more paranoid he becomes, certain he is being followed and watched and even going so far as physically attacking a man he believed was watching him. He goes to a nightclub and snorts coke with a woman named Michelle, then has sex in a bathroom stall with her.
Back at his motel, Keane meets Lynn Bedik, Amy Ryan, and her daughter Kira, who is close in age to his missing child. Lynn clearly is having financial difficulties, and he insists she take the $100 he offers her. She asks Keane to watch Kira for a few hours, then calls the motel and leaves a message she will not be returning that night as planned. Keane reassures a despondent Kira, who fears Lynn has abandoned her, that her mother loves her and will be back.
The following day, Keane takes Kira to a local indoor skating rink and teaches her how to ice skate. While they are playing skee ball in the adjacent arcade, Keane believes he is being watched by another patron and becomes agitated. Kira manages to calm him and they return to the motel. When Lynn arrives later, she explains she was with Kira's father Eric, who has arranged for them to move to Albany, New York, where he has found a job.
Desperate not to lose Kira because she reminds him so much of Sophia, Keane goes to her school, takes her without permission, and brings her with him to the Port Authority, allegedly to meet her mother there and board a bus to Albany. There he sends her to buy candies, as his daughter had done several months earlier, just minutes before she was abducted. It seems as if Keane is reviving the tragic loss of his daughter, perhaps expecting the abductor to show up again and try this time to abduct Kira too — as he was expecting him to show up every time he was visiting the station for all those months, imagining his plan and his schedule. This doesn't happen. He cries for his losses and decides to really get her to her mother. Kira tells him she loves him and he says he loves her too.
