WESTFIELD, N.J.—A love letter lost in the walls of a New Jersey home reached a Second World War veteran 72 years after it was written.

Melissa Fahy and her father found the letter in a gap under the stairs while renovating her Westfield home.

The letter, postmarked May 1945, was written by a woman named Virginia to her husband, Rolf Christoffersen. Her husband was a sailor at the time in the Norwegian navy; she was pregnant with his baby and clearly missed him deeply.

“I still have a few minutes on my lunch hour and I was dreaming about you so I thought I’d write a little love letter to my favourite pin-up boy. Are you as lonesome for me as I am for you?”

She continued to tell him about the baby, noting she was “getting awfully big” but was happy and proud to be carrying the baby of “the person I love most in the world.”

“I love you Rolf, as I love the warm sun,” Virginia Christoffersen wrote. “That is what you are to my life, the sun about which everything else revolves for me.”

Fahy told WNBC-TV in New York that she could not believe the love and admiration Virginia had for her husband. “It was really sweet to see that long-distance love,” she said.

She decided to find the Christoffersens and deliver the letter, turning to a Facebook page for help. Facebook users located the couple’s son in California hours after Fahy’s post.

The son read the letter to his 96-year-old father. Virginia died six years ago this weekend.

“In a way, I guess it’s his wife coming back and making her memory alive again,” Fahy said.