At lunchtime on May 4, 1945, Virginia Christoffersen wrote a letter to her husband, Rolf, who was serving in World War II, overseas with the Norwegian Navy.

“Are you as lonesome for me as I am for you?” she wrote.

She posted the letter, but it never reached him. It made its way back to her, marked “Return to Sender.”

Decades later, a family moved into the Christoffersens old house in New Jersey and began to renovate the attic. They found the letter that Virginia had written all those years ago. It seems that the letter was dropped by someone walking up the attic stairs, where it slipped through the cracks.

Through Facebook, the Christoffersens were located quickly, in California. Virginia died six years ago, after many years of marriage, but Rolf’s daughter read him the letter his wife had written as a young woman to her “favorite pin-up boy.” All her other love letters were lost when the family moved, the children told the Detroit Free Press—this one that slipped between the cracks is the only one left, now.