The nurse warned me that Danny’s speech still came slowly since the accident, and that he had been rehearsing this day for forty-five years. Then she opened the door. A gray-bearded man sat by the window with a cane across his knees. He looked far older than sixty-two, but his eyes were the same, and when they found the locket in my hand, they filled. “Nora Beth,” he said. I could not speak. I held up the hospital wristband, and he nodded slowly, like a man setting down something he had carried for too long.

He told me the truth in pieces. On the night of June 9, 1981, he left my porch after my mother told him I never wanted to see him again, and a delivery truck hit him on River Road. He spent five months in a hospital bed, learning to speak and walk again. His family then moved to Memphis so he could keep recovering. Danny wrote me eleven letters, and every one came back unopened, marked in my mother’s handwriting: Return to sender.

Danny gave up at nineteen and built a quiet life in Memphis. When his wife died last spring, he moved back to be near the river. This summer’s drought exposed the mudflats below the bluff, and with a rented metal detector, he found my locket in the silt. He tucked the wristband inside as proof, then sat with the package for days, afraid I would send it back unopened too. That morning he lost his nerve, pawned it for thirty-eight dollars, and by afternoon he was begging Walt to undo it.

I did not forgive my mother, but I finally understood her. She believed a boy with a broken future would ruin me, and she never looked back. I told Danny I would have waited. He told me he would have come back sooner. Then I clasped the locket around my neck, and he asked if he could still buy me a cherry soda. Walt handed me the little white toaster for free the next week, and I took it home.