Chapter Seven — Beatrice’s Role
The full scope of Beatrice’s involvement in the scheme became clear only gradually, over the following weeks, as I worked with both my own attorney and a forensic accountant to build a complete picture of exactly what had been happening within my own company and household for the better part of a year.
Beatrice, it turned out, had been actively coaching Theodore through the process of building his ownership restructuring case, drawing on her own background as a former paralegal decades earlier to help identify exactly which aspects of my “reduced involvement” would carry the most legal weight in eventually justifying a revised ownership split. Her increasingly hostile treatment of me in our own household, I came to understand, hadn’t been simple mother-in-law friction. It had been a deliberate strategy, intended to make our home environment uncomfortable enough that I might eventually withdraw further from daily involvement in either the household or the company, providing exactly the kind of behavioral evidence Theodore’s legal strategy required.
