Danny hadn’t died. He’d been captured after the attack his friend wrote to me about, and he’d spent years as a prisoner of war, and when he was finally released, his body was broken and it took him a long time to learn to walk again. But the whole time, he told me, the thing that kept him alive was me — the promise, the ring, the girl in the white sundress at the courthouse. He survived unsurvivable things because he was coming home to me.
And he did come home. Two years after the war ended, healed enough to travel, Danny came back to our town and went straight to my parents’ house, because that’s where I’d been living when he left.
My sister, Margaret, answered the door.
Margaret was two years older than me, and she’d spent our whole childhood in a quiet competition I never fully understood — always measuring, always resenting, always feeling that I got something she deserved. And what she couldn’t stand, it turned out, was Danny. Margaret had wanted Danny herself, in high school, before he ever noticed me. She’d never forgiven me for being the one he chose.
