“My college sweetheart vanished over Vietnam 55 years ago. Every year, I traveled to a memorial carrying one white rose and our old photograph. But last Tuesday, a stranger was waiting at the airport—holding the exact same picture.”

very sick.”

I thought about all the years I’d waited for someone to tell me Thomas was coming home.

Now a stranger was telling me he’d been home for decades.

“Did Thomas send you because he was too frightened to face me himself?” I asked.

Daniel shifted uncomfortably.

“He said you’d be happy to see him. That you’d both lost so much time.”

As though time had simply misplaced us, rather than given him decades in which to write a letter.