The Love Necklace

Two weeks before he left, a boy carved a heart out of cedar and put it in a girl's hands. The knife had slipped while he was working. He left the scar in the grain instead of starting over. Then he gave her four words: Until next summer. He never came back. Eleanor kept the necklace anyway. She wore it to the camp gate every June, and then to a desk at the town office, and then - because she could not stand being the only person it had ever meant anything to - she began to lend it out.
To a girl at camp who was too frightened to say what she felt. To a friend who had decided that kind of thing happened to other people. To a widow who needed something to hold at a graveside. Oakhaven started calling it the love necklace, and the rule never changed: you wear it until you don't need it anymore, and then you give it back. Twenty-one years later, a small-town story goes out on the regional wire.
In a motel room, a pastor just home from the mission field sees a flaw in a piece of wood - a flaw he put there himself. He comes home not knowing her name. She has no idea who is preaching on Sunday. The Love Necklace is a standalone Christian romance about the long faithfulness of ordinary people, and about what a promise costs the one who keeps it. Closed door, no profanity.