“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.”

His status was missing in action.

I asked whether he might be a prisoner.

“We can’t rule that out,” one officer said.

For years, those words were enough to keep me waiting.

Thomas’s parents moved out of state the following year. We exchanged a few letters, but by 1973, we’d lost touch.

When American prisoners began returning home in 1973, I searched the reports and lists that reached our local newspaper. I never found his name in the ones I saw.

I wrote to the last addressI had for his