Eleanor came in slowly and sank into a chair. She spoke in a voice that shook. In 1971 she was twenty and worked at the town post office. When Thomas was listed missing, she grieved for me. But when he was released two years later and began writing from a hospital, something darker took hold. She had loved him since she was a girl, and she could not bear for me to be happy while she stayed alone.

So she kept every letter. When Thomas finally came home that winter, she met him at the train station and told him I had married and moved away. She told me his name had been dropped from every list, and she burned the notices that might have proved otherwise. He believed her, because he had no reason not to. He left town that same night, and I never knew he had stood on our street.

Thomas spent the next fifty years as a carpenter in Oregon. He never married, and he wore the ring he had bought for me in 1971. Last month, ill and afraid, Eleanor wrote to him and confessed everything. That was why he came to my door, and why he had taken off the ring on our wedding night, asking me to forgive him for waiting so long.

I was silent for a long time. Anger and grief rose together, and I did not hide either. But I looked at my sister, who had waited fifty-three years to tell the truth, and I told her I could not forgive her tonight. Thomas took her hand anyway. She passed away that spring, with both of us beside her. Each year now we air the ivory dress together, no longer to keep a promise, only to remember.