But when he reached for my hand, I remembered Thomas promising me that engagement ring.
I couldn’t do it.
Years passed. I became an English teacher, built a respectable career, bought a small house, and watched my students grow into adults with families of their own.
I had a life. I had friends. I traveled occasionally and learned to enjoy my independence.
But I never married.
People assumed I had simply never found the right man. I rarely corrected them.
The truth was more complicated. Somewhere inside me, a part of that twenty-one-year-old girl was still waiting for a knock at the door.
Every year on Thomas’s birthday, I visited a memorial dedicated to missing servicemen. I brought a white rose and the photograph we had taken during our final year of college.
I would sit quietly, hold the photograph in my lap, and tell him about everything that had happened.
