I Kept My Prom Dress for 55 Years, Waiting for My High School Love Who Went to Vietnam—When We Finally…

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“Is that so?” Daniel replied.

“There’s nothing here for you.”

“It’s the truth. You have to let her go.”

Her voice climbed, brittle and rehearsed.

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I heard in it every time she had sent him back down these steps into the dark.

“Please,” she pressed. “Don’t make this harder. She wouldn’t want to see you.”

That was the word that moved my feet.

I stepped out from behind him and into the light of the doorway.

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“It’s the truth. You have to let her go.”

“Then ask me yourself, Margaret,” I said.

Her mouth opened.

No sound came out.

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Her hand rose to the doorframe as if the house itself had tilted beneath her.

“Ellen,” she whispered.

“You told him I was married.” My voice did not shake. “You told him that on this porch, and then you told it to him again and again for years. Didn’t you.”

No sound came out.

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Her eyes flicked to Daniel, then back to me.

She was searching for the exit that had always been there before.

This time I stood in it.

“We’re coming inside,” I said, and stepped over the threshold of the house where I was born. “Because you are going to look at me, and you are going to tell me why.”

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I already knew she’d lied.

What I still couldn’t understand was what had ever been worth fifty-five years.

“Because you are going to look at me, and you are going to tell me why.”

Inside the parlor of our childhood home, the room where we once played as girls, Margaret backed away from me.

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Her face had never regained its color.

“Why?” I asked, following her in. “Fifty-five years. Why?”

“I was protecting you,” she stammered. “He might not have come back whole. I couldn’t lose you to him.”