Acts of Reconciliation

Tom is the guy's name. Today he says of the breakup: "I was just terrified of that level of commitment. I had come from a family that had kind of a bad marriage."

He reconsiders.

"Ninety percent of it was me just being a very lame guy. A child in a man's body. Just a guy with a lot to learn."

He visited her a month later. He had gone to a nondenominational seminary in those silent intervening years, studied to become a priest and all the while "worked with a lot of trauma victims, a lot of people who were recovering from some pretty hard stuff, rape victims."

"I dealt a lot in the language of forgiveness," he adds.

Tom had kept the first ring all that time. "I couldn't get rid of it. It was that weird kind of remote possibility sense that maybe if I ever get my act together . . . ."

He gave it to her, and a second one. He bent down on one knee in the old-fashioned way and asked the question. Not of nuptials, not at first. There was a more pressing matter.

"I said, 'Laura, do you forgive me?' And she said, 'Yes.' And getting married was almost the denouement, the anticlimax."

Today Tom Hinson and Laura Waters Hinson live in the District, where several documentary companies are based and where he pastors at two Anglican churches. Laura graduated from American last year, and the Student Oscar got her thinking about moving to Los Angeles. "It depends on what Laura wants to do in her career," says the man who gave and took away and gave again.

"Our marriage," she says, "is built on forgiveness."