Everyone got married in the 1950s, then started to produce the soon-to-be-famous baby boom. For Americans who had survived the Great Depression and World War II, prosperous married life was a triumph. The unwed were objects of pity, scorn, even suspicion. Women over twenty-three were consider old maids.

But Eva Eldridge— who’d left the farm for a job in a wartime shipyard where she made a hasty and disastrous marriage—finds herself left out. Now in her thirties and marginally employed, she is the perfect target for handsome Vick, who promises everything: storybook romance, marital respectability, and the lively social life Eva loves. When he disappears not long after their honeymoon, she is devastated.

Refusing to believe her adoring husband has abandoned her, Eva sets about tracking down a man who, she now believes, was more damaged by wartime trauma than she knew. But instead of a wounded hero, she finds a long string of women much like herself—hard-working, intelligent women who had loved and married Vick and now had no idea where—or even who—he was.

Drawing on a trove of some eight hundred letters and papers, Diane Simmons tells the story of Eva’s poignant struggle to get her dream husband back, as well as the stories of the women who had stood at the altar with Vick before and after her. Eva’s remarkable life illuminates women’s struggle for happiness at a time of social change, when marriage—and the perfect husband—meant everything.