Chapter Eight — Confronting Theodore
I confronted Theodore three days after that hospital encounter, once my attorney and I had assembled enough documentation to ensure the conversation happened entirely on my terms rather than his. I laid the bank statements, the draft legal memo, and a detailed forensic accounting summary on our kitchen table — the same table where, twenty-six years earlier, we’d once mapped out our very first business plan for Bellwood Developments on the back of a paper napkin.
Theodore’s initial response followed a predictable arc — denial, then minimization, then, once the sheer volume of documentation made denial impossible to sustain, a shift toward blaming me for the affair itself, suggesting my own “emotional withdrawal” from the marriage over the preceding year had driven him toward Adrienne, a framing that conveniently ignored the fact that his own campaign to push me out of the company predated, by several months, any genuine emotional distance between us.
“You built a legal case to steal my half of a company I helped build from nothing,” I told him, “using money you embezzled from that same company, with the help of the woman you were sleeping with. There’s no version of this where you get to make that my fault.”
