At 19, I promised my husband that I would wait for him to return from Vietnam. Then he disappeared without a trace. Fifty-five years later, he knocked on my door… and said, “There’s a reason I never came back. And when you find out who stopped me,s, you’ll never see your family the same way again.”

I thought that forgiving the person who had kept us apart would be the hardest part. I was wrong. A name made my husband quiet and suddenly I also started to have my own questions.

When I was nineteen, I promised my husband, Danny, that I would wait for him while I was in Vietnam. I kept that promise for fifty-five years.

Danny and I were together from high school. We were young, we had no money and we were completely convinced that none of that mattered.

One afternoon, Danny bought two  rings cheap metal in a vending machine outside our favorite restaurant.

“There you have,” he said as he slipped one on my finger. Now we can afford to get married.

A week later, we got married on the civil registry.

Seven days after that, Danny was called up.

At first, his letters were constantly coming. Then, six months later, they stopped arriving.

I waited.

Finally, one of Danny’s friends came home.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Danny went missing after an attack.

I cried until I didn’t have tears left.

My sister, Helen, tried to convince me to move on.

You can’t spend your whole life waiting.

He promised he would come home.

What if he can’t?

Eventually, Helen moved in with her husband, one of Danny’s friends, and also convinced me to start over.