Part 4 of 6
Richard stared at him.
“You are making a business decision based on a domestic misunderstanding?”
“No,” Theodore said. “I am declining a business relationship because character problems always show up somewhere in the books. I simply had the misfortune of seeing yours in person.”
Evelyn found her voice.
“This is absurd. Claire is emotional. She is upset. She has always taken things too personally.”
Theodore’s eyes shifted to her then, and it was the first time in years I had seen Evelyn Whitmore look smaller than the room she occupied.
“Madam,” he said, “you spoke cruelly to my granddaughter in her own home. I heard you from the doorway. I assure you, I have all the context I require.”
Richard tried to speak again, but the words stuck.
Then he did what men like him always do when their own authority fails: he reached for someone beneath him.
He called Andrew.
I heard only Richard’s side of the conversation at first.
“Come back. Now.”
Then lower, harsher.
“No, I don’t care about the meeting. Get here.”
Andrew arrived a little over an hour later.
I watched his car come up the drive from the front window and felt something almost like pity, because I knew he had no idea the life he thought he was returning to was already over.
Before he came in, Theodore asked if we could speak privately.
He took me into the sunroom, where the late afternoon light made the glass walls look brittle.
For a long moment, he simply looked at me.
“You look like your mother,” he said.
No one had said that to me in years.
My throat tightened instantly.
He apologized then, not elegantly and not enough to erase anything, but without excuses.
He told me he had loved my mother badly, with control instead of trust.
He told me he had tried to fix his mistakes with money because money had always obeyed him when people did not.
He said he understood why I had rejected him after the funeral.
“I deserved that,” he said.
“But when your assistant gave me your name this morning, I was not willing to fail another woman in this family the same way.”
I did not forgive him in that room.
But I believed him.
Andrew entered the house still loosening his tie, saw Theodore through the study doors, and stopped cold.
He knew exactly who he was.
Everyone in his father’s world did.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Richard started talking too fast.
Evelyn interrupted.
Theodore said nothing.
Finally, Andrew looked at me.
“Claire?”
“I filed for divorce this morning,” I said.
His face changed in stages: confusion, embarrassment, anger, then calculation.
It was that last one that hurt most.
“Can we talk alone?” he asked.
We went to the library.
He closed the door, dragged a hand through his hair, and stared at me as if I had destroyed something personal rather than escaped something unbearable.
“You called Theodore Aldridge?” he said.
I almost laughed at the order of his concern.
Not, Are you all right?
Not, How long have you felt this way?
That was the moment, more than any other, when I understood the marriage was not merely broken.
It had been hollow for a long time.
Part 4 of 6