title: The First Boy I Loved
author: Reavis, Cheryl
description: "I know you love me, Gilly."
  Those words, spoken by Ben Tucker on the last night she ever saw him, have haunted Gillian Warner for decades. Just like the faded box containing his personal effects that she's kept on a shelf and never dared to open.
  His love and that box are all Gillian has left of the man she might have married—if he hadn't died in the Vietnam War. So she's going there herself, accompanied by an unnameable regret and her troubled teenage granddaughter, Mae, who's burdened with a broken heart of her own.
  Undertaking this wrenching pilgrimage, Gillian hopes to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she's become…and wonders what life would've been like if her first love had been her only love.