“Are they right?”

“I plead the fifth.”

It was her turn to smile. “So what’s the deal with this company of yours?”

He took his time answering, but eventually, out it came. “I never anticipated having anything to do with the company. That’s the problem. My uncle’s name was Dougal, hit a mother-lode lottery when he was twenty-five. He was only married a couple of years when his wife got cancer, pancreatic, which is one of the wrong kinds, the kind where there’s just not a lot of hope. Anyway, he was nuts about her, and that’s how it all started-he was supposed to be an engineer, but when she died, he poured everything into a research lab, determined to find a cure. Didn’t know shoes from shinnola when he first started.”

“But he learned?”

“He more than learned. He spent his life at it, and like I said, Connollys seem to have that particularly stubborn gene. The first really great drug he patented over twelve years ago. By then he was almost broke, but that brought in a new flood of money. He wasn’t interested in living high. He wanted the infusion for the research. The two areas he never stopped targeting were pancreatic and ovarian. Just when the lab had come up with an outright miracle drug, he fell ill. And right after that, the guys came through with an even more incredible breakthrough.”

“For one of the biggies he cared especially about? Pancreatic or ovarian?” It was a relief when she could step away from those eyes, that skin, the feel of him. She piled the first-aid supplies back in the box and whirled around, happy to talk-but with a little distance between them. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t find dinner chores to work with by then.

“Pancreatic. Two new drugs had passed FDA by then, and a brand-new one-the best, a true miracle drug-was a pinch away from the last clinical trials.