Something in my voice must have changed because Dewey finally sighed. “I can’t give you his address, Ruth Ellen. But I can call him.” Ten minutes later, my phone rang again. Dewey sounded stunned. “His name is James Cole.” My knees nearly gave out. Jimmy agreed to meet me at the pawnshop the following morning. When he walked through the door with a cane and gray beard, I recognized his eyes before anything else.

Jimmy told me he had never run away with another girl. On July 14, 1982, he had followed me toward the river because my mother had already told him I wanted nothing more to do with him. He watched from a distance as I threw the locket from the riverbank. After I left, he climbed down among the rocks and found it lodged near the shore. The next morning, while driving to my house to confront me, he was badly injured in a collision. The hospital wristband inside the locket was his.

His family moved him to St. Louis for months of rehabilitation. Jimmy wrote repeatedly. Every letter came back, sometimes with handwritten notes supposedly from me saying to stop contacting me. Decades later, after my mother died, Jimmy received a box she had left with an old family friend. Inside were his unopened letters and several messages I had written to him that she had intercepted.

We sat inside that pawnshop for nearly two hours comparing forty-four years of missing history. Neither of us pretended we could simply become sixteen again. We had marriages, children, losses, and entire lives between us. But before leaving, Jimmy pushed the locket across the counter. “I never should’ve pawned it,” he said. I closed my hand around it. My mother’s lie had stolen our choice once. Whatever happened next, neither of us intended to let someone else choose for us again.