A Firefighter Sold His Beloved Car to Pay for His Wedding — Then His Wife Gave Him a Special Surprise (Exclusive)

“He is a person that does everything for everyone else all the time and never expects anything in return," Laleh Vahedian tells PEOPLE about her husband

• In a TikTok posted on Aug. 19, Laleh Vahedian said that her then-boyfriend Cole Eberson urged her to quit a job that was making her miserable, saying he would financially support the both of them
• When the couple got engaged two years later and found out that their small wedding would be expensive, Eberson sold his Jeep Wrangler to pay for it
• Without her husband's knowledge, Vahedian had been raising money through TikTok so she could buy him his dream pickup truck

A TikTok video in which an Arizona woman revealed a secret that she kept from her husband not only went viral but also helped raise money for a special surprise gift for him. 

In an Aug. 19 TikTok, Phoenix-based wedding photographer Laleh Vahedian, 26, said that she had been lying to her husband, Cole Eberson, 25, a firefighter, for the past four years. 

“I was working as a barista at a well-known coffee shop chain,” Vahedian said in the clip, “and it honestly sucked the life out of me. I was coming home every day and crying.”

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“My [then boyfriend] just got into the fire department,” she added, “so he had a pretty stable job. He saw how much I was struggling [when] I was working at the coffee shop. I was also trying to pursue photography.”

Finally, says Vahedian, Eberson told her that she should quit the barista job to follow her dream as a photographer full-time, and offered to financially support the both of them. 

"He believed in me," Vahedian said in the clip, adding, "I credit my entire success to him."

Two years ago, the couple got engaged. They couldn’t afford to pay for a small wedding as it turned out to be too expensive, and Vahedian was still struggling to make money full-time as a photographer. To make their wedding dreams come true, Eberson sold his beloved car that he had since he was 16 years old to cover the cost of their nuptials.

Vahedian told her TikTok followers in the clip that she is saving money so that she can purchase a new car for her husband as a way to repay him for encouraging her to quit the job that was making her miserable.

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“My goal is on our five-year anniversary that I can buy him a new car,” she said.

It turned out she didn’t need five years to reach that goal. As Vahendian tells PEOPLE, she was able to raise the money in just two months since posting that TikTok – which had accumulated more than 2.5 million views as of Thursday, Nov. 21.

“He's loving his [new] car,” she says. "I think he's still in disbelief because it had just happened so quickly and he didn't really have to do anything for it, and he feels like that he needs to pay me back somehow. And I'm like, 'Dude, no.' That's the whole point.' ”

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Vahedian says she was in a serious car accident in 2020, just months after she and Eberson began dating. After she recovered, Vahedian needed a new job, which led her to the barista gig at the coffee place. Eberson, who at the time became a firefighter, saw her unhappiness with her job where she worked for seven months and told her to chase her photography dreams instead. 

“I just started crying,” Vahedian recalls of her boyfriend’s gesture. “I said [to him], ‘No. That's too much on you.’ He basically said, 'I have a steady job now. It might not be much, but we will be okay.' ”

Following their engagement two years later, Eberson sold his special car — a 2001 Jeep Wrangler —  to pay for the wedding; the two got married in October 2023.

“He's like, 'I've already made up my mind. I want to do this for us,’ " Vahedian recalls him saying, despite her protests.

From the very moment he offered to support her decision to quit the job, Vahedian knew she was going to do something special for Eberson.

"I also knew that he has always wanted a truck,” she says. “He is a person that does everything for everyone else all the time and never expects anything in return.”

Vahedian says that she started creating and posting TikTok videos while monetizing them based on the number of views. The returns started out small.

“One day I decided to make a video about the fact that I have been making money on TikTok and trying to save for this lie that I've been telling,” she tells PEOPLE. “I just posted it on just a random day during the week. Within a day, it had about a million views.”

Eberson never knew what his wife was planning — he didn’t even have a social media account, which helped Vahedian maintain the secret with her TikTok followers.

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“It was about at the end of September. I had made enough where it was really easy for me to make the monthly payments [for a car],” she says.

One morning in mid-October of this year, while scouring Facebook marketplace to sell her old cameras to contribute to the fund, Vahedian came across an ad for a 2020 Toyota Tacoma posted by a car salesman in Peoria, Arizona.

To her, the pickup truck looked like her husband’s dream vehicle. After contacting the dealer on the phone, she finally told Eberson about what she had been doing. 

“He asked if I was pulling a prank on him,” Vahedian says. “I was sobbing and telling him, and he's like, ‘Is this a joke?’ And I'm like, ‘No, it's not a joke!’ We were there [at the dealership] by 2:00 p.m. because it was over an hour away, and we walked out of there with the keys in hand a couple hours later."

Since acquiring his new pickup truck, Eberson has been driving it around with his firefighter buddies, according to Vahedian. “He doesn't let me open my door. He has to open the door for me. He's like, ‘You get the princess treatment.’ And I'm like, ‘Okay, I'm here for it,' " she says.

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Vahedian says she has since made enough money from her photography business that the couple were able to make a down payment on their house. She’s also eyeing her own dream car — a 2024 Volkswagen Atlas —  but she’s happy where she is now.

“Social media is crazy,” she says. “It can really make dreams happen. I'm just so grateful.”

The experience has also sparked Eberson’s interest in social media after he previously ignored it. “He is now willing to be in TikToks with me,” says Vahedian, “and that's not something that I ever thought would happen. He is willing to be on camera now. It's so funny to see the fact that he is just a very private person.”

“He is just so grateful for everyone that's supported us,” she continues. “I've shown him all the videos and he's always asking. ‘How's the video doing now? How many views do you have now?’ He probably won't tell me that he's invested, but I know he's invested now.”