A newly engaged woman got the surprise of her life when a man found her engagement ring on a Costa Rican beach and went above and beyond to return it to her one month after she lost it.

It all started on December 11, when Doug Cotty, 29, and his fiancée Michele Arias, 30, were enjoying their vacation on a Costa Rican beach. Doug had put the ring in his tank top to keep it safe, but he had taken off the top to apply sunscreen and hung it on a branch.

The ring was very important to the couple, as it was a custom-made piece built around a one-carat diamond that had been in his mother’s family for generations. That’s why Doug and Michele were devastated when they realized later that the ring had fallen out of his tank top onto the beach somewhere. Though they spent hours searching for the ring, they could not find it.

The couple took to Facebook to plea with the public to help them find the ring, and one month later, Michele was stunned to receive a Facebook message from an American living in Costa Rica that simply read, “I just found your ring!!!!!!”

“Complete and utter shock, and disbelief,” Michele said of the moment she read the message. “I was like, Are you sure? Like, you really did? I cannot believe this. He said: “I’ll send you a picture. I’m not very good with the phone, so I’m gonna send a picture when I get back home.'”

“I waited maybe another 15 minutes or so and he sent me a picture, and I was like — I mean, honestly, I was like, Holy s**t. He found it. Then I immediately texted Doug, and he said the same thing,” she recalled. “I thought it was a prank at first. I’m like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait! Who sent you this?? Who sent you this photo??’ Just thinking maybe someone Photo shopped it or something. Like, ‘Oooooo, I have it! Send me a reward!’ But no, this was real.”

The ring was found by David Harris, who enjoys helping beachgoers find their missing items with his metal detector. On January 9, he headed to the location that Michele had described in her Facebook post to look for it.

“I probably had searched for 20 minutes, maximum,” he said. “I picked up several Costa Rican coins, and of course a lot of beer caps and nails and stuff — which, on a metal detector, is a really dull thud kind of a noise. Then I got this really high-pitched ping. And I thought, This might not be her ring, but this is damn sure somebody’s property. Something that’s valuable. When I looked down in there, the sun was up and was shining, and the ring was sitting still in some sand, but it was sitting straight up and down. And that center stone was just like a beacon.”

Within days, Michele had her ring back!

“I thought I was gonna cry when I got it back, because when I think about it, I keep thinking about when we lost it, and so of course that brings up a lot of emotions,” she said. “I’m just happy. We approached it with some humor after we got over the initial hump of dealing with the loss, and it had become a funny story to tell about losing it. But now it’s an awesome story because of all the good stuff that’s happened, and all the luck that we have clearly fallen into.”

The couple tried to send David $500 as a thank you, but he refused to accept it, saying, “I appreciate that, but I don’t sell people’s own property to them.”