His family moved while he was overseas. Letters got lost. Phone numbers changed. By the time he returned, the girl he loved was gone from the town, and nobody could tell him where the Harrisons had moved.
“So he stopped looking?” I asked.
“No,” Tyler replied quietly. “I don’t think he ever did.”
The next morning, I went back to Grandma’s house with the album pressed against my chest. When I showed her the page, she went still in a way I had never seen before. The color left her face, and she touched the caption with two fingers.
“Alden,” she breathed.
“You remember him?”
Her eyes filled.
“I never forgot him.”
She told me about the boy who carried her books without being asked. The boy who walked her home in the rain. The boy who told her she was braver than she believed.
“He said he would find me,” Grandma whispered. “I thought he forgot.”
