Joy Brown, a college freshman makes a remarkable discovery on the first day of class. A chivalrous young men with a deep, baritone voice that sends shivers up her spine, and prickles her skin. His sapphire eyes caused her heart to flutter like butterfly wings, her palms to sweat, and her mouth to forget how to form words. In time, their relationship grew into a love so overwhelming they could not live without each other. That is, untill Uncle Sam stepped in and sent the handsome heart throb half a world away to a place called Viet Nam. Six months after entering the service his letters suddenly stopped. Joy waited and worried for a year, and when no word came and his best friend was always at hand with a comforting word, a picnic to lighten her spirits, and eventually, a profession of love and marriage proposal. Believing the love of her life would never return, she married a man she could never give her whole heart.

In Aug. 1964 an explosion while walking through a rice paddy in the sweltering jungles of Viet Name, mortally wounded her Irish over, Shawn. Given up for dead, the medical staff were shocked when after three months in a coma, he awoke, with only one complication. He had no memory of who he was, where he was from, or anything about his life prior to entering the military. Three more months of learning how to walk, talk, feed and dress himself followed before returning to the Army's last known address for him. There he found no wife, only a woman's parents who told him their daughter had tricked him into marrying her but she was off living a raucous life of drugs, sex and alcohol. A face was always before him while in a coma, but it didn't match any of the pictures he saw in his 'wife's' parents' home. Who was the mystery woman who had given him the motivation to fight for his life until he won it back from the edge of the grave.

Finding no one and nowhere he belonged, he began roaming the country working odd jobs. One fateful night at a casino in Vegas, he has a nondescript conversation with a waitress, and suddenly his memory returns with reading her name on her badge—Joy. He hitchhikes back to the town where his "wife" lived and hunted for Joy, but he didn't remember her last name. His memory cleared enough to remember a childhood friend named Craig. He found his way to Craig's childhood home and lo and behold, when he knocks on the door in the middle of the day, who opens the door but the woman whose face kept him alive when he should have died. It was Joy! But she was now the wife of his former best friend, and a mother.

Unable to ignore that uncontrollable animal magnetism that always ignited whenever they were near each other, they rekindled their love that afternoon while her infant daughter slept. Her pseudo marriage was not the same having discovered the love of her life was still alive.

Jealousy can eat at a man like a cancer. Knowing his nemesis was still alive, he refused his wife's pleas for a divorce. He would not set her free to be with his former friend, when he had wanted her since Shawn first introduced them. Finally, jealousy eroded reasoning, and on a dark, stormy night, after drinking himself senseless, he was killed in a tragic automobile accident.

Eventually he could divorce his phantom wife who was living the high life in parts unknown, and marry the love of his life. The two lovebirds could be together at last. For over four decades they loved and lived, raised three daughters, worked at careers they loved, and died hand in hand. The only way they could have accepted Death at all.