At age 93, WWII veteran Norwood Thomas still remembers the day he met Joyce Durrant by the Thames in 1944.

“I was out with a friend, and being young, we had our eyes out for young ladies,” Thomas told ABC News. “We were on a bridge crossing the Thames when we looked down and saw these two fine, young ladies. We went down, paddled around the Thames in rowboats for a bit, later got some drink and food and Joyce and I just clicked.”

Though the pair dated for only a few months, Thomas remembers how deeply he fell in love with her.

“I think I fell in love with the way that she smiled,” the widower said. “I’d always look at her and think, ‘My God, that is one, sweet girl.'”

Their summer romance came to an abrupt end when Thomas was shipped out to participate in the historic D-Day invasion. After the war, he returned to the United States and continued to send Durrant love letters. In a Nicholas Sparks-style twist, their communication ended after Thomas asked Durrant to marry him and she refused.

Devastated, Thomas stopped writing to Durrant and eventually fell in love again and married another woman, with whom he would have two children. In the 1990s (another Nicholas Sparks twist!), an article about a British nurse named Joyce dying in a plane crash led Thomas to believe that Durrant was killed. It seemed that these star-crossed lovers would never have a chance to reunite, but Thomas still kept her in his thoughts all the same.

Durrant did not perish in a plane crash–she had actually moved to Australia and had her own family. She found Thomas again after she saw her son on the computer and asked him, “Can you find people on that thing?”

A few Google searches and email exchanges later, Thomas and Durrant came face-to-face via Skype.

“Can you see me?” Thomas asked Durrant, staring at the computer screen. When Durrant laughed and responded that she hadn’t figured out how to get her computer to show his face, Thomas replied, “Well I’ll tell you I’m smiling.”

According to the Virginia-Pilot, Thomas asked Durrant why she rejected him all those years ago.

“You broke my heart,” he admitted.

“Blame that on miscommunication,” she responded.

Durrant explained that she has misunderstood Thomas’ original proposal back in the 1940s. His letter made it sound like Thomas had already married another woman and that he was offering to leave his wife for her. Not wanting to ruin his life or break up his family, Durrant rejected the proposal altogether.

Thomas cannot travel to Australia to visit because he is suffering from pancreatic cancer. Even so, the pair planned to have many more Skype calls to make up for lost time.

Here’s a brief clip of their reunion: