I would like to start by thanking Hotprof1973 for reading the story and sharing several insightful suggestions to make the story better. I would also like to thank SBrooks103x for correcting the grammar in the story. There was a great deal more correcting than I expected. I would also like to thank dragonmann72 for reading and commenting on the story as well.

Warning: If you’re one of those depraved human beings who takes unnatural, debased and vile liberties of themselves, I refuse to provide fodder for such degenerate behavior. Just kidding. Well, except for the fact that there is no sex in the story.

Now to the story.

The Early Years

It’s been 6 years now since I lost half. Actually, 96% would be more accurate.

It was March of 2013. My company had survived the Great Recession by the skin of its teeth, but the flank attack from my soon to be ex-wife ended up being too much for Octavian Orlov Inc. That was the name of the company I built from scratch that longer exists. By the way, I’m Daniel Orlov. Octavian became part of the name because I happen to be a huge history buff. I also thought Double O sounded pretty good as an acronym.

My parents immigrated to the US from Eastern Europe before the fall of the Soviet Union. I was seven at the time, my brother was five, and my mom was pregnant with my sister. My parents came to the US on a travel visa with less than $5,000 to try to give my siblings and me more opportunities and a chance at a better life. They didn’t speak the language, had no family or friends here, but that didn’t discourage them. They felt their backs were against the wall, and took a huge risk and moved to the US. They burned all their bridges to their past and relative safety. I come from a family of risk takers.

We had many years of financial struggle and deprivation. Several years with no birthday or Christmas gifts. Every morning I saw my parents get up and go to work and my dad would come back late at night and my mom mid-afternoon. Back home they were both well-educated with relatively privileged jobs. My father was a civil engineer and my mom a doctor. Their degrees and certifications had no value here, so they gladly took any job they could get to keep us going.

It wasn’t completely true that we received no gifts. The first Christmas my brother and I got a candy bar each. I will never forget that, probably till the day I die. I was heartbroken. We were that poor.

The other thing I won’t forget was the shame of being poor and different. The town we grew up in had two junior high schools and one high school. So, the poorer kids were mixed in the same classes with what at the time seemed like rich kids to me. Realistically they were likely middle and upper middle class at best, with a few kids that came from what I would today consider more privileged families. I still remember the other kids making fun of my siblings and me for initially wearing weird clothes (East European) and then hand-me-downs picked up from the Goodwill store.

I was ashamed of where I lived, in that little cramped apartment, so I never asked any of the kids over and never went over to their homes, worrying that I would then have to reciprocate. I dreaded the, “what did you do over your vacation,” questions after summer and Christmas breaks. I didn’t have the stories of where we travelled, and the cool things we saw and did to share with the class like all the other kids seemed to have.

Even though I was a very good student and loved going to school and learning, when I was fifteen, I left school to help support my struggling family. By the time I was 17 I had established my first business and I was making more than the combined incomes of both my parents. From that point forward I was the primary provider for my family.

By 22 I had started Octavian Orlov. By 25 I was married, and had my first child on the way. By then I had already finished paying for my brother’s college education. He graduated with honors with a degree in mechanical engineering. I had also just started paying for my sister’s higher education. That would take 7 years until she received her JD from a top 20 rated law school.

I met Andrea when she came to work for me. She was 18 years old, just out of high school, with not much of an employment history outside of part time jobs. She had a similar immigrant, financially struggling background, except it was just her and her mother. Her father, a heavy drinker, had abandoned them when she was just six years old.

She had struggled to get any meaningful employment, and was working as a hostess at a diner for minimum wage when she applied at Double O. She wasn’t really that qualified for the position when I hired her, but I empathized with her background and story, and wanted to give her the opportunity to improve her situation. She was bright and hard-working and she did very well at her position until she stopped working when she got pregnant with our son David.

I did get ahead of myself there with that last sentence, didn’t I? Yes, we dated, fell in love, and got married. I wasn’t rich, but I was doing well by then. However, I did have a lot of financial obligations as well. My father had become disabled and I was providing all of my parents’ income outside of my dad’s disability insurance. I was still paying for my sister’s college education when Andrea got pregnant. With essentially three households to support, a fledgling, fairly new business that required me to pour as much of the profits back into it as I could, we weren’t on easy street. However, we were doing well, especially for our age and humble backgrounds.

Fast forward ten years to the beginning of 2013. My company was now well-established. In almost every meaningful way we had achieved the American Dream. Double O had survived through the first five years when more than 80% of businesses fail, and it had survived through the Great Recession when a lot of my competitors did not. In early January my CFO and I had estimated that the company was conservatively worth $50 million. A week later, I found out that Andrea was cheating on me.

At the time of my discovery of Andrea’s cheating I was finally starting to feel like I had made it. Coming from a background of deprivation and being self-conscious about feeling less than the people I grew up around, I was starting to finally feel secure and that I belonged. I had a beautiful wife that I adored, two wonderful kids that I loved more than life itself (we had our daughter Sophia two years after David), parents who were very proud of me and well taken care of, and two siblings who were well-established and doing well for themselves. We had come a long way from that tiny one-bedroom apartment we all shared on Euclid St.

Declaration Of War

Towards the end of the prior year I started feeling that something was off with Andrea. She had always been there for me and the kids, but lately she seemed distracted. I was watching the kids more and more on weekends by myself, which I didn’t mind because any free time from work I tried to spend with my family. So, when she would tell me she needed time to herself and wanted to go out, I didn’t question her and was happy to hang back and be with the kids to give Andrea some time to herself. I realized too late that was part of the problem.

So, I hired a PI firm, and by middle of January they had the report ready. His name was Tom Jefferies. He owns a small and pricey restaurant a few miles from my house. Andrea and I used to go there with the kids fairly regularly, but hadn’t been there for several months now. Since Andrea made most of our reservations and chose where we ate, I could guess why we stopped going there. I had actually met the asshole several times when he played host and came around and checked in with the customers. I remember thinking that he was a really good-looking guy, smooth and a charmer. I guess charming enough to charm Andrea out of her panties and into his bed.

They also worked out at the same gym, and apparently these days they work out together regularly. Rich bored housewife with the kids now in school getting involved with a dickhead with a flexible schedule who is able to come and go as he pleases. We had a housekeeper that took care of the house and the cooking, so Andrea had plenty of time on her hands as well. With the kids in school, for the last few years Andrea has been taking classes here and there at the local community college. I had thought that she had plenty to keep her busy. Apparently, she needed more distractions.

They had video and audio tapes confirming everything. As I read the report, I was feeling both numb and nauseated. Just when I was thinking that things couldn’t get worse, they did. While she and her lover were sitting at a restaurant (not his own), the two detectives sitting at the table next to them were able to record a conversation that would come to play a major role over what was to happen both in the near and long term. Andrea wasn’t just having a casual meaningless affair. She was planning on leaving me, taking half of everything I had built, and moving her lover in with her and the kids.

All the time I was suspicious that Andrea might be having an affair, for some reason I had never considered that she may want to leave me for her lover. When I first realized that the report was confirming my suspicions, I still hadn’t considered that this was the end of my family. I guess I had taken it for granted that Andrea and I were forever.

Maybe at the time my mind was “shell-shocked” so that I was still assuming that the family and life that I loved so much would continue into the future. While the revelation was only a few minutes old, not only had I not considered yet that I would leave Andrea, but for whatever reason my mind still hadn’t considered the possibility that Andrea would want to leave me either. I was thinking that it would be tough going for a while, but I would confront Andrea with her affair, and she would immediately stop seeing the other man. We would find a way to continue together as a couple and as a family.

But reading the transcript of that conversation in the restaurant I realized that this wasn’t merely a side activity for Andrea that she would be able to easily turn her back on and come back to me apologetic and contrite. It seems she wanted to be on a new team, and I was no longer in her plans for the future.

They had a great deal they went over in that conversation. Apparently, their private times behind closed doors were too precious and were reserved for fucking. The planning and scheming needed to be done in between when they were taking breaks. This lunch seemed to be one of those breaks.

Besides Andrea planning on leaving me and taking the kids, she and her lover were planning on forcing me to either sell the company so she could get her share of its worth or that I would take out a loan to buy her out. Andrea assured dickhead that I would never want to lose the company so I would simply take out a loan to pay her off. He agreed that would be the quickest and cleanest way anyway.

Dickhead reminded her not to forget half of our personal assets, alimony and child support. It seems that Tom Jefferies had found his retirement plan, and Andrea was it. Me, I was merely the sucker that was going to fund their future, but found myself excluded from the party itself.

The conversation went into an area that I had to read several times to fully understand what they were discussing. Essentially the gist of that part of their conversation was that a divorce attorney that Tom had found would convince a judge during initial filing of the divorce that I was very likely to move assets of the company overseas so all the company accounts needed to be frozen.

That there was a high risk for me to do that because Double O did business internationally and the company had international checking accounts that held funds in the local currencies that both received revenues from overseas sales, as well as, made payments to overseas vendors and suppliers in their own currencies. It was more advantageous to keep the funds in the local currency instead of paying double the exchange rate costs of converting into US dollars, and then back into the local currency.

Finding out this information was a gold mine. I still had time to stop this action. Even before finishing the report I called to make an appointment with Sam Darling, my business attorney. He was able to give me an appointment straight away. I thanked the PI’s, told them to stay on the case, and increase all efforts to get me as much of their conversations as possible.

The PI’s told me they cannot bug their private conversations, especially ones between my wife and her attorneys. They wouldn’t risk their license for me. They were able to record this conversation because it was made in a public setting, and it could be argued that anyone close by could overhear it.

The lead private investigator, however, told me I could always bug my wife’s phone and listen in to the conversations on my own without their involvement. He told me what app to use and how to do it. I thanked them and left the office to make my appointment with my attorney.

Andrea wasn’t just cheating and planning on leaving me. She was planning on declaring war against me. She was planning on destroying and taking away from me everything I had built, and everything I held dear.

First Things First

I had learned a long time ago to break down what needed to be done into smaller, more manageable parts, and handle the most important and urgent first. And the most important was stopping their freezing of the company assets. The dummies didn’t realize that if they succeeded in getting the judge to approve the freezing of the company accounts there would be no business to divide. Double O would be out of business.

I had suppliers, vendors, employees, and other bills to pay. More than 90% of the revenues went to pay expenses. The company needed constant cash flow to stay afloat. That’s what you get when a bored housewife with no business background, and an idiot who had obviously spent more time in a kitchen than a boardroom put their minds together. My hope was that at least their (yes, I thought of it as “them” and not “her” at this point) attorney wasn’t that stupid.

I raced to Sam’s law firm, and obviously he had given instructions to the receptionist, because she immediately led me to his office. I gave him a quick run-down of everything I had learned that morning. He looked up from the notes he was taking and cut me off.

“Let me go see if either Bob or George are busy. They’re both divorce attorneys and I think we need one in this conversation.”

With that he left and came back with George. After brief introductions George sat down and Sam relayed the information to him, with my correcting or adding a point here and there.

As Sam was continuing to relay the information to George, my mind went back to playing out all the different possible outcomes for my marriage and my company. Coming to a decision I cut Sam off mid-sentence.

“Never mind, let them do it.”

Both turned to me with a surprised look on their faces and Sam asked me, “Let them do what?”

“Whatever they want to do. Let them do it.”

With that I stood up and shook their hands. With both still wondering what just happened I told them, “Sorry to waste your time guys. I have a couple of very important phone calls I need to make. Sam, I’m going to send you a check for a few hundred thousand as a retainer, just in case I end up needing it. I hope that I won’t, but want to have some cash out of the company just in case.

“Sam I’ll keep in touch. George, nice to meet you, but I don’t think I need you just quite yet. If anything changes, I’ll be in touch.”

Being a fan of military history, I thought of it in terms of a military moving supplies over several locations in case the main supply depot got compromised. The $300,000 I ended up sending Sam as a retainer was in case Andrea ended up going through with declaring war and I needed to defend myself.

With that I left their office to go back to my own. The first phone call I made was to Alec Panas.

Taking Risks And Playing Ostrich

Most of my life I had been a risk taker and for the most part believed in the general goodness of people. I was about to test the goodness of two people, and I was going to take a couple of major risks. First, I was going to take the chance that with all of our history and everything we meant to one another my wife was going to come to her senses soon and come back to me. The second was I was going to roll the dice on Alex Panas.

The best way to describe Alex was to say that he was a hustler. Even though he wasn’t formally educated, he was extremely intelligent. He had a similar background as myself in that he came from an immigrant family, and had left school early to help support them. Part of what he did now, amongst other things, was a “get it done guy” for wealthy people.

I was introduced to him at a party a couple of years back by John Dalton, a very wealthy retired businessman. John thought the world of Alex, and he introduced me with the same pride a father introduces a favorite child.

John mentioned that he thought Alex was going places and that he was a go getter who got things done for people like John and I. But he assured me that Alex was more than that and that one day he would be more successful than he was. High praise from someone like John, but at the time I didn’t see how I could make much use of Alex, even though I took an immediate liking to him. He was friendly, sharp, and very charismatic. I remember thinking at the time that not only can Alex sell ice to Eskimos, but that he probably could convince them to make it for him first.

I had run into Alex again last year at an industry convention in Vegas. He had a booth manned by himself and several hot models. I guess like everyone else the beautiful women in the tight revealing dresses got my attention and I went to see what they were about. I found out he was an independent contractor working with a competitor of mine to attract large clients to him for a commission payout.

A few months after the convention, in October, Alex contacted me with a proposal to do for Double O what he was doing for my competitor. He told me that the competitor he was working with owed him more than a million in commission payout and they were trying to lowball him on their agreement. Apparently, Alex had been a lot more successful than they had anticipated and they were trying to renegotiate their agreement after the fact. It was very short sighted of them knowing how successful Alex had been in attracting large buyers for them.

At the convention he had invited me to a party he was throwing at one of the suites at the hotel. There were several beautiful women there mingling with several of the invited guests. All the guests were men from my industry.

He introduced me to one of the girls and then walked away. Now knowing what my wife had been up to I wish I had attempted to seduce her, if seducing was actually even necessary. Instead, after spending about ten minutes talking with her, I ended up mingling with some of the other guests, and eventually left fairly early in the evening.

I didn’t take Alex up on his offer last October. Over our few interactions I felt that I had gotten to know him quite well and there was a lot to like and admire. However, there were also some things that concerned me. It was obvious to see he was extremely bright, thought outside the box, had the energy of 10 men and was an extremely talented salesman. On the other hand, I worried a bit about how he may have been acquiring his clients. I didn’t know anything for sure, but I was a bit leery about involving my company with him and then have it end up blowing up in my face.

I called Alex and he agreed to come in at ten in the morning the next day. The next person I called was John Dalton. John was in his 70’s, had been a very successful businessman that I had been lucky enough to make friends with, and he had more money than god. In addition, he was someone that seemed to really have a liking for Alex, and had become a sort of mentor for him. I had a great deal to discuss with John as well.

At slightly passed 7 pm I walked into my house with the full intention of playing ostrich. The only chance we had was for my wife to recognize the mistake she was making and come back to me by her on volition.

Andrea acknowledged my coming home, but it was a hurried acknowledgment from the kitchen that the dinner will be ready in a few minutes. Now that I knew what to look for, I realized that she was physically there, but at least when it came to me, she was merely going through the motions. I wondered if there still was any hope for us or was I just being naïvely optimistic at this point?

Playing The Fiddle While Double O Burned

Well, bet number one didn’t come through. On Wednesday February the 13^th I got served at the office. The timing was interesting. Over the last month I had been trying to woo my wife back, to at best a lukewarm response from her. I guess she found the idea of spending another Valentine’s day with me repulsive. She must have had conflicting dinner dates the following evening. Obviously, I’m the date that she was cancelling.

I looked through the papers and sure enough the order by the judge to freeze all of Double O’s accounts was part of the package. The order mentioned that in 30 days there would be a hearing before the judge where that freeze could be lifted and other matters discussed. In addition, I was to provide to the other side a long list of financial documents they requested.

Interestingly, they didn’t seem to have put any freezes on any of our personal accounts. I guess with Andrea having access to all those accounts they didn’t feel they needed to do that. Well, now I knew two things for sure. One, that I had truly lost my wife. And second, that they had hired an incompetent divorce attorney with more gumption than business know-how.

The fire has been lit and it was time to watch Double O burn. I called a meeting for my in-house general counsel, my COO and CFO. So far, they were unaware about my marital problems or the financial measures my wife and her lover were planning on taking against me. It was time to bring them up to speed.

I explained everything to my top executives. John, the attorney, asked to see the paperwork. My CFO declared we cannot survive 30 days without access to the accounts. That no one would extend us any credit either under these circumstances. That we had already sent payroll checks out by mail and authorized electronic payments to the employees that wished to be paid that way. That the funds would be taken out of Double O’s checking account the following day to be received by the employees on the 15^th. That we had also issued payments to suppliers that will end up bouncing, and that there were many more payments to be paid to suppliers and vendors over the next 30 days.

My COO mentioned that maybe we can explain the situation to the employees and they would accept an IOU until we came out of this mess. That we needed to explain the situation to the suppliers and hope that they will continue to supply us in the interim.

My general council chimed in that we need to try to get an emergency hearing in court to get a judge to put a “stay” on the injunction to freeze Double O’s accounts.

I listened to all three and told them I need to think about what to do. I told the CFO that I will try to get some funds to pay off the checks we have outstanding, but that me may need to lay off the employees temporarily until hopefully this mess is taken care of.

I asked my attorney how long did he think it would take to get an emergency hearing. That seemed to deflate him a bit, but he said likely at least a couple of weeks, if not longer. So, I said almost the same as the automatic hearing then. To which he agreed. I made the point that it would be important to have the hearing in front of the same judge who had made the initial ruling, and he may not be the one we were assigned for the emergency hearing if he was not available. That may throw a wrench in the whole thing and delay things even further. He agreed that may well be a possibility.

Then I turned to the COO and told him that we may need to shut down operations until this mess is behind us, but to give me some time to think things through and I will let him know. The COO told me that if we can’t supply to our customers they’re going to go to our competitors. We have to keep the supplies going somehow. I told him that I knew that. Then to their surprise, I abruptly called an end to the meeting and told them that we would reconvene again the next morning.

All was for naught. I had already decided to let Double O burn if my wife lit the match. However, I needed to go through the motions of looking like I was trying to save a company I had no intention of saving.

I didn’t go home that night. I simply sent Andrea a text saying that I won’t be coming home and to please take care of the kids and let them know I was especially busy and won’t be able to see them for a week or two. She only responded back with an “ok”. We both knew what was happening. There was nothing more to be said at this point.

The kids meant the world to me and I knew Andrea will take good care of them. That I wasn’t worried about. I had a fire that needed an accelerant thrown on top, while at the same time it appeared that I was putting it out. I was going to be really busy over the next month or two being an arsonist while playing the firefighter. Keeping myself busy and focused was helping suppress the deep dark emotions wanting to burst out. Feelings of betrayal, profound sadness, anger, and loss. There would be time for that later.

Over the next twenty days we laid off the employees, we contacted our suppliers and customers to let them know of the situation and that we had every intention of staying in business and to be patient with us. Many told us that they will try, but that they needed their supplies delivered to them. We were simply one cog in the whole chain and if we didn’t deliver our product then their own workers would be sitting idle. They couldn’t deliver to their own buyers, and meet their own deadlines.

My wife, her lover, and the imbecile they hired had caused many companies to scramble to deal with the mess they had created. Three people that have never produced anything of any real value in their lives are causing the producers and builders in our society to scramble around to put out the fire that they had started. While I wanted to appear to everyone that I was one of those scrambling to put out the fire as well, I was actually doing my best to make sure everything burnt down in time.

Double O had been experiencing a quick growth over the last 10 years, and while I generously put money into our personal accounts for my wife to spend on the home, the kids and herself, and to give to my parents, I was reinvesting most of the profits back into the business itself. So, most of the money was in the company. That probably played a big role in my wife’s and her team’s reasoning into putting a freeze on the company assets.

Interestingly, my wife had taken only about $50,000 out of our Chase savings account, but she had left the rest untouched in the checking and saving accounts. She also hadn’t touched anything in the mutual funds either. It seems her attorney didn’t want it to look like she was acting in bad faith. There was nearly two million between all the accounts. I took everything out except for $100,000 and used the funds to pay the employees, and pay the employees’ health insurance premiums, and as much of the rest of the company’s obligations as I could.

A businessman always keeps access to lines of credit that he may need to tap into. I had a personal line of credit at the bank for $1 million, and I had a home equity credit line for another $750,000 available against the house. I requested those funds and used them to pay as much of the rest of the bills as I could. After all a conscientious businessman always pays his debts. I knew making these partial payments is not going to get them to supply us in the future on credit. They have all made it clear that they needed to be paid first before supplying us again in the future.

I wasn’t throwing money into the fire hoping to put it out. I guess I wasn’t really playing the fiddle while Double O burned. I was throwing everything of value we owned into the fire to make sure everything burnt with it. While I had no intention of saving Double O I needed witnesses to testify that I did everything I could to keep the company afloat.

Twenty-two days after I was served with the divorce papers, I decided it was now time to hire a divorce attorney. After all I was too busy trying to save my company. I went through the yellow pages and went down the list of divorce attorneys, checking each name online on the American Bar Association website to see how old each one was and what law school they graduated from. When I found one who had graduated just two years earlier and who had gone to a small local law school that was barely accredited, I realized I had found my man. He had only one thing to accomplish, and hopefully he wouldn’t mess that up. But even if he did it would still serve my purpose.