I spent many long, hard hours over the first five years of my marriage trying to build a business for my husband and myself. Unbeknown to me, he had been bankrupt twice and had few employable skills, so I established a business using mine. He was to do the selling. After mortgaging, pawning and losing my family home and any possession of value, I was feeling a little jaded. My husband would not go out and look for sales. He made a couple of phone calls a day and that was it.
So with money getting really tight and my husband still unable to get a job, I got another job and we agreed he would continue to work on the business we’d started. Over the next three years I trotted out daily to work and returned home to work nights and weekends on the joint business.
My husband told me how well our business was doing and soon there were two cars, a boat and new house. I was so delighted and proud. Delighted and proud until I discovered, while he was out fishing one day, that all was not what it seemed, to me or the bank! He had been forging my signature on bank loans and overdraft requests, as well as forging the signatures of “witnesses” to my signature. I discovered this when I was searching through the business files looking for an agreement with a client who wanted items replaced.
Worse was yet to come. I also found a stack of printed e-mails that were between my husband and three other women around the country. His business trips were not only for business! Each of these women believed he planned to marry them as soon as he could escape from my wicked clutches. The escape was apparently being delayed because he feared losing all he had invested with his bludging wife!
I was seething. I went to his computer and set the time to three days earlier and the middle of the afternoon, a day and time when I could not possibly have been near the computer. I then forwarded the contents of all his e-mails to his women “business contacts”, children of previous relationships, joint friends … everyone. I calmly then reset the time on the computer, closed it down and left it as it had been.
When he came home, bragging about how he had paid the fine for a friend who was caught with an undersized fish while fishing, I listened, made dinner and gave nothing away. Pleading exhaustion (and I was by that stage), I had an early night and left early for work the next day.
Of course, the e-mails arrived at my work e-mail address too! Pretending that I had only just received them, I was able to leave him. There was nothing to gain; I had already given everything I had ever owned to him. But the satisfaction of having everyone know what he was really like made me feel a little better.
