GAINESVILLE, Ga. — A bathroom renovation turned into an emotional reunion when Dana Popham discovered her wedding ring that had been missing for two decades.

Popham had given up hope of ever seeing the ring again after it mysteriously vanished while she was getting ready one morning when her four children were young. But during a June renovation of the family bathroom in her Gainesville, Georgia, home, her persistence and intuition finally paid off.

“I had a sliver of hope that that ring was under the built-in bathroom cabinet,” Popham told Newsweek. “Because the ring vanished, I always held on to some hope that it just might be under there.”

The ring’s disappearance had haunted Popham for years. She remembered dropping it in the bathroom during a hectic morning rush, but despite countless searches, it seemed to have simply disappeared. The family had lived in the same house for decades, raising their four children, and Popham never stopped wondering what had happened to the ring.

Years after the initial loss, Popham and her husband noticed a tiny gap at the bottom of their built-in bathroom cabinet. Armed with a flashlight and determination, she got on her knees to search the space, but still found nothing.

When the couple decided to renovate their bathroom in June, Popham set up a camera — just in case her decades-old theory proved correct. As workers removed the built-in cabinet, there it was: her wedding ring lying against the far wall, covered in 20 years of dust.

The emotional moment was captured on video and shared to Popham’s TikTok account, showing her in tears as she placed the dusty ring back on her finger for the first time in two decades. The video shows her hands shaking as she kisses her husband and tearfully displays the recovered ring.

For Popham, the discovery represented far more than finding a piece of jewelry. In her TikTok post, she wrote: “It’s not about the diamond. It’s about what it represents to me. The sweetness. The life we’ve lived. The family we’ve built. The love that’s still here.”

The timing of the discovery felt particularly meaningful to the couple, who are entering a new chapter as empty nesters. Popham told Newsweek that the emotions hit harder because she was realizing “all the life that had happened with my kids, with my husband, in that home — and that ring was there all the time.”

“Sometimes the most precious things are still right there, just waiting to be found,” she wrote.