Lifelong Love — C. Wayne Winkle

An ambitious young man, Roger Hilton hates to lose. Having proven himself in the Army, he comes home to marry his first love. But another boyfriend Rachel had never come back also returns, and Roger finds himself with his ring back. Stinging, he moves away to find a new life for himself.
When he was younger, politics has been his ambition and now he has the opportunity to enter the ring. Swearing off women, he plunges into renovating his life from scratch. But it isn't long before he meets the woman of his dreams. Their attraction is mutual, and Nell Scott becomes the passion in his life...until his political mentor tells him to make a choice: Nell or the election.
Roger marries Nell, and they have thirty-nine happy years together before possibility and calamity arrive in a simultaneous storm, leaving Robert with the same question he grappled with so long ago: his dying wife or national politics.