Aidan glanced over at her and appeared to be wrestling with something. “I don’t work because I have to,” he finally said.

“You don’t?”

“Remember when I said Sarah’s grandmother left her some money?”

She nodded.

“Did I mention it was five million dollars?”

Clare choked. “No, you didn’t say that.”

“We didn’t know what to do with that kind of money, so we used some to buy a place in Boston and the land in Vermont. Sarah’s dad invested the rest of it for us. After she died, I tried to give it back to her parents, but since they’d gotten plenty themselves from her grandmother, they wouldn’t take it.”

Clare cradled his hand between both of hers.

“Besides, her grandmother always liked me, and her parents insisted she’d want me to have the money. After everything happened, I didn’t care about anything, let alone money. I had all but forgotten about it until about a year later when her father came to see me. He said it had grown to more than seven million, and I needed to do something with it or lose a big chunk to taxes.”

“Is that when you built the house?”

“Yeah. I also paid off my parents’ mortgage and gave them and each of my siblings two hundred and fifty thousand. I paid off all the debt for my father’s business, which still left me with almost five million. So I gave two million to breast cancer research and invested the rest. It’s grown again to something like five and a half million, but I never touch it. I live on what I make with my business, but knowing it’s there gives me the freedom to do whatever I want.”

“You have all that money, and yet you still work twelve hours a day,” Clare said, amazed.

“What the hell else was I going to do? I couldn’t just sit around and think about how screwed up my life was. I had to find a purpose, and my business gave me that. It got a little out of hand in the last couple of years, and right around the time we met, I decided to scale back on the new construction part. It just wasn’t fun anymore. It was too hectic.”

She smiled. “I remember. Whenever I think of the first time we met, I’ll picture cell phones and a pager.”

“I do not miss them.”

“You helped me to see I don’t want that kind of life anymore, either. That’s why I’m not going back to real estate.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“I’m not sure yet, but I have a few things I’m considering.” She leaned over to kiss him.

“What was that for?”