I sit up from his lap and rotate so I’m facing him. “Why would I be mad? What is it?”
“I’ve been talking with my money guys and I think I want to donate to the center. Give it a big dose of funding, no strings attached. I tried to do it a month ago, but legal told me with my foundation, there were so many workarounds it would be too hard to do at that time. They kept putting me off, kept telling me it really needed to be done under the foundation’s name for legal purposes and what not. I finally just went to my money guys and took it out of my own funds. It’s simpler that way anyway.”
My heart pounds. “Taysom, no.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t do that. I won’t accept it.”
“Well, good thing it’s not for you. It’s for the center.”
“Taysom, you can’t. That’s too generous.”
“How do you know how much it is? It could be a hundred dollars.”
I give him side-eye. “I know it’s more than that. You can’t just swoop in with your money and save the center. It doesn’t work like that.”
“I have enough,” he says quietly, his gaze on me. “I want to.”
“I know you do.” I wriggle closer to him, place my arms around his neck and kiss him. “I love that you want to, but what if we did it a different way?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been dreaming about crowd sourcing. Like, literally having dreams about a bunch of people donating.”
“Like an online fundraiser type of thing?”
I nod but get up off the couch. Miley is meowing in the kitchen, wandering around in her fluted, flirty little top like she’s on a cat runway. I pull open the fridge and grab her can of food. “Can you believe she’s on a full cat food diet now?”
“No more smelly milk replacer.”
“Thank heavens for that,” I say. I fill her little dish with the food and Taysom freshens her water bowl. “But yeah, I’ve been talking with Willa about setting up a fundraiser,” I say. “Crowd source the heck out of this. And if the center can’t accept it or it’s not enough to reopen, the funds would go directly to the department, and they can hold it for them for when it does reopen.”
Ifit reopens, my short-circuiting brain tells me.
“Well, what are we waiting for? The clock is ticking. The center’s closing on your last day of work, right?”
I breathe out a stiff breath, nerves threatening to take over. I nod. “I should have done it sooner. Willa was excited about the idea, but I just haven’t done it.”
Taysom’s already got his laptop pulled up. “I can go in and set this up right now.”
“And we could make a video on your channel? To try to get the word out?”
“Absolutely.” Within minutes, he’s gotten all the information filled out. I download photos of the center from the university’s webpage, and Willa even talks me through a short write up over the phone to put at the top.
“That’s incredible,” I say, looking at the finished fundraising page. “It’s…it’s actually happening.”
Taysom smiles. “Before I make this go live, I have something to request of you.”
“What?”
“That on the video, you’ll share your story. About your DDH.”
I blink. “Um, okay. Sure.”
“I don’t just mean a cursory look at it. Not just a sentence or two about it, but do you think you could describe what it’s really been like for you? All these years with this condition?”
“Taysom, you make it sound like it’s life threatening or something. A lot of people have it way worse than me.”
