“Save this for me. Don’t marry anyone else in it.”
“I promise.”
Then he left.
Months later, his parents were told he was missing in action.
Years became decades.
My friends married, raised children, and became grandparents.
I never married.
People called me stubborn. My older sister, Margaret, called me unrealistic.
“You’re seventy-three,” she told me. “You can’t spend your whole life waiting for a ghost.”
She had said versions of that sentence for years.
But I never could let Daniel go.
I had written letters, contacted veterans’ offices, and asked Margaret repeatedly whether anyone had ever come to our childhood home looking for me.
Her answer was always the same.
“Not a soul.”
That evening, someone knocked on my front door.
Slowly.
Uncertainly.
I opened it.
The man standing there had silver hair and trembling hands.
But I knew his eyes immediately.
“I’ve been trying to find my way back to you,” Daniel whispered.
