Dollar Bill With Late Wife’s Signature Returns To Widow Five Years After He Accidentally Spent It

Six years ago, Peter Bilello and his wife, Grace, each signed a dollar bill. Peter kept both bills in his wallet and had planned to keep them forever, but a year later, he accidentally spent the two dollar bills.

“By mistake I went shopping. I don’t know where I used the two dollars. I came home and told my wife ‘Grace, I made a big mistake today… I’m never going to see [the dollar bills again].”

Grace and Peter Bilello married when Peter was 35-years-old and Grace was 23, a little over a month after they had initially met after visiting his mother in Italy.

“My mother, she knew this girl,” Bilello, now 86-years-old, told ABC News. “And my mother says, ‘Why don’t you get married.’… She don’t know me, I don’t know her.”

In 2001, eight years before the pair would sign the dollar bills, Grace was diagnosed with cancer. After an operation and undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, Grace Bilello was declared cancer free. It was in 2009 that Peter, a loving a devoted husband, came up with the idea for each of them to sign a dollar bill. Then, in 2014, after 13 years as a cancer survivor, tragedy struck the Bilello family, and Grace passed away just after the two celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

“I was close with my wife. Anything she said, I would take care. Doctors, hospitals. I was with my wife all the time. And it made a lot of difference… for sick people to have support of the family. I was very supportive of my wife, that’s why she lasted 13 years.”

Bilello never forgot those dollar bills, though, and kept an eye out for them every time he went shopping. Five years passed since he had originally spent the dollar bills, and Peter was losing hope about ever seeing them again.

But after a recent outing with his 14-year-old granddaughter Ashley, the impossible happened. Peter was given three dollar bills as change, and one of them bore the unmistakable signature of his late wife.

“I said, ‘Oh my god, Ashley, look.’ We started to cry. We were so happy to get the dollar back. I never thought I’d get that dollar back. I told my granddaughter, we’re going to go straight to the cemetery, and tell nonna [grandmother in Italian], my wife, that we got the dollar back. I showed the dollar to my wife and said, ‘Grace, look, I got your dollar back.”

Peter credits his wife with getting the dollar back, believing it had to be a miracle for that dollar bill to find him again after five years.

“It’s a miracle to get it back after 5 years. Who knows how many million people got that dollar in their hands.”

As for the dollar bill that bears his signature, Peter Bilello says he is now hopeful that one day it’ll find its way back to him as well.

[Photo Credits: Header — Yahoo! News, Body — ABC News]