At twenty-one, I believed my college sweetheart, Thomas, would return from the Vietnam War and marry me. But six months after his deployment, military officers informed me that his aircraft had disappeared. No body was found, and he was declared missing in action. Before leaving, he had promised, “I’ll buy you a proper engagement ring when I get back.” I held onto those words for decades, never marrying and keeping his memory alive as I built a career as an English teacher.
Every year on Thomas’s birthday, I visited a memorial for missing servicemen and placed a white rose there. I brought our old college photograph and quietly told him about my life, never knowing whether he was alive. Then, at seventy-six, everything changed when a young man approached me at the airport holding a photograph of Thomas and me. “My grandfather asked me to find you,” he said. “His name is Thomas, and he’s alive.”
