When she opened it, she could only stare. It was a cell phone. His phone.
“You’re...giving me your phone?”
He made a face. “Well, no. Sorry—I need that part back. Your present is on the phone.”
He leaned over her and pushed a few buttons to unlock the device and then held out the screen to her. She didn’t know what she was supposed to be looking at.
“We can change the name and the icon and everything. This is just a prototype. I’ve still got quite a bit of work to do but the bones are there and they’re solid.”
She looked at the screen and then back at him, feeling stupid. “I don’t... I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
He pointed at the phone. “This is your app. Trent’s big idea. The productivity app he wanted to sell to Caine Tech.”
She stared at him as a little trickle of nerves started at the base of her spine and worked up. Something was happening here, something so big she couldn’t manage to wrap her mind around it. Trent’s app?
“But...he never did anything. It never went beyond the initial concept and, maybe, I don’t know, a few lines of code from his programmer friend.”
“Cory Dykstra. I know. I’ve been in touch with him. He sent me everything he had, which wasn’t much but was at least enough to get me started.”
She felt as if she were swimming through some of Pop’s hot cocoa, thick and sweet and totally impenetrable. She was completely exhausted and had awakened feeling so very sad, despite the wonder and the miracle of the holiday. Perhaps that explained why she couldn’t seem to make her brain work well enough to figure out what on earth was going on here.
“It was actually a really great idea,” Aidan went on, when she didn’t respond. “Your late husband was right. Three years ago, I’m not sure we would have been able to pull it off with the limitations of existing technology at the time. I understand why my team didn’t bite on the idea, but conditions right now are perfect. I think when this hits, it’s going to hit big. After the holidays, I’ll fast track my best development team on it to work out the bugs of what I’ve come up with so far, but I can see us taking it to market by summer and being at full throttle this time next year. Eventually I see this becoming one of those apps everybody has to own.”
“Okay, stop!” she finally burst out. “What are you talking about? This isn’t even a thing, Aidan. It was just a...a vague idea.”
“It’s a thing now. This is what I’ve been working on the last few days. It’s raw, sure, but we can work with raw, right?”
She thought of him holed up in his office while his family was here, of the food he didn’t eat and his hair standing up and the frenzied dance of his fingers on the keyboard.
“Why?”
He was starting to look perplexed, as if he couldn’t quite figure out why she wasn’t more excited about it. “What do you mean, why?”
“Why did you do all this?”
He shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “It’s what I do.”
He glanced at Maddie who wasn’t paying them any attention. “After you told me about Trent, I was curious. I tracked down the minutes from the meeting Trent had with Caine Tech and the report my guys did about the idea. It intrigued me enough to search for Cory Dykstra to see if he had pursued it. He had basically back-burnered what he had done, hadn’t touched it in years, since Trent was the man with the vision behind the idea. He was happy to send me all he had and after that, it was just a matter of playing around with the idea and tweaking a few things here and there. Like I said, I could tell at once we were onto something.”
He pulled an envelope from his pocket and handed it to her. “You’re going to want to open this now.”
She stared at him and then, with hands that shook, she opened the envelope. A single piece of paper slipped out onto her lap and she knew in an instant it was a check.
She stared down at it and the staggering number blurred in front of her eyes.
“What is this?”
“It’s your initial payment from Caine Tech for rights to the idea. I know it’s not much for now, mostly because we still have a lot of work to do to bring it to market. There will be an additional revenue stream down the line, I promise, with in-app purchases and possibly some subsidiary rights. You’re going to want to get some good intellectual property attorneys on your side. I can put you in touch with some reputable ones. Cory will, of course, get a cut for his initial work.”
He might as well have run her down with his car again. Somehow her lungs couldn’t draw enough oxygen and she felt light-headed and shaky and stupid.
“And for the record, this isn’t just me,” he was saying. “I vetted it past my inner circle at the company and everyone is really excited.”
He reached for her hand and held it in both of his. “It’s not a ball gown or those glass slippers I know you had your eye on. But it’s freedom, El. You can do whatever you want now. You can buy that bed-and-breakfast you were talking about or put it away for Maddie’s future medical bills or just chuck everything and move to Hawaii and surf for the rest of your life, if you want.”
Aidan looked drawn and exhausted but brimming with excitement at being able to give her the gift of choice. She was stunned. Completely overwhelmed. No one, in all her life, had ever done such a thing for her and the magnitude of it awed and humbled her.
It wasn’t the amount on the check that overwhelmed her—though that was certainly life-changing. No, she thought of standing outside his office in the night, watching his excitement and eagerness and energy. All of that had been for her, because he wanted her to feel like she had options. Possibilities. He had taken the bare bones of an idea and literally worked day and night on her behalf to turn it into a reality.
Oh, she loved this man.
He was brilliant and driven, yes, but also generous, kind, loving.
And he needed her, she suddenly realized. As much as he had craved having his family around him this Christmas after his brain tumor taught him what truly mattered, he needed her and Maddie to tug him away from the computer sometimes. To make him laugh, to watch sparkly boat parades, to help him live.
He needed her and he loved her, too.
She knew it with sharp, stunning clarity. She looked at the phone on her lap again. If he didn’t care about her, he never would have gone to so much effort for her.
She would likely have to deal with these bursts of wild creativity sometimes, where he worked night and day on something that filled him with passion. She could accept that, as long as he, in turn, took time to pause and breathe and embrace the world around him with her and Maddie.
He squeezed her fingers. “Say something,” he said, looking nervous all over again.
She couldn’t seem to get any words out so she did the only thing she could manage.
She burst into tears.
* * *
OKAY, HE HADN’T expected that. As Eliza started to sob, Aidan switched instantly from wired, edgy, caffeine-fueled energy straight into panic mode.
“It’s a good thing, El. I promise. A really good thing.”
Instead of calming her, that only made her sob louder and he sat there like an idiot, not knowing what to do. In desperation he finally pulled her onto his lap, just as he would Maddie. “Don’t cry, sweetheart. Please don’t cry. I’m sorry. Whatever I did, I’m sorry.”
Why wouldn’t she say anything? She only kept looking at the check and then at him and then sobbing all over again.
Maddie, drawn by the commotion, marched over with