Page 96 of The Couple's Secret
Jackson rocked in his chair, his movements fast and jerky.
“I just…”
Sob.
Cora hadn’t even trusted Bruce Olsen not to run to Tobias and rat her out and Olsen wasn’t a family member. She’d saved up money that could have been used to leave Tobias just to ensure that her secret would be safe.
“I needed…”
Wail.
Even if Jackson shared his suspicions, would someone as cautious as Cora really trust him not to go against his father? At age twelve, he’d witnessed Tobias murder Gabrielle and never said a word, not even as an adult. Not even to his many law enforcement friends.
“I needed…” Jackson keened, “something from her.”
Would someone as careful as Cora trust Tobias’s own son, who’d had ample opportunity to turn him in, to help her murder Tobias and keep it a secret?
Sob.
“I missed her. I missed her so bad. I needed…”
What had Zane told Josie about Jackson’s romantic history? Yes, he was a serial womanizer but among the women he had listed, a pattern had emerged. Jackson frequently dated older women.
“Dad bought her that jewelry.” More keening. His breathing was labored, face deep red. “But it was hers. It was hers.”
Cora wouldn’t have trusted Jackson. After everything she’d been through, trusting men was tantamount to a death sentence.
Unless.
Josie reached across and touched Jackson’s shoulder, whispering for him to calm down, to breathe. Several minutes later, he quieted. Tears still streamed down his face, but his breathing was steadier.
She handed him a clump of tissues. “Jackson,” she said, “how long were you and Cora lovers?”
Fifty-Three
Jackson lifted his chin, his watery blue eyes awash with grief and pain. His shoulders curled in. Everything about his slumped posture radiated defeat. In this moment, he looked not just harmless but pathetic. Pitiful. Yet, he’d had the size and strength to push a soda machine onto his brother. He’d loaded two bodies into a sedan and pushed that sedan into the river by himself. Jackson Wright was a contradiction in many ways, but one thing was crystal clear: he was deeply, irrevocably sick.
Using the tissues to blot his wet cheeks, he whispered, “About seven months. We didn’t mean for it to happen.”
Josie could practically hear Gretchen’s sarcastic remark from the video room. The slogan of adulterers everywhere.
“There was no digital footprint,” she said. “No texts or social media messages.”
Jackson sniffed. “Cora was really strict about that. Everything had to be in person so Dad wouldn’t find out or even suspect. I’d stop at the house to see Zane or pick something up when no one else was home. Sometimes we’d say that Dalton came by and I’d had to head him off. Or I’d go to the diner where it wouldn’t be weird if we were seen talking together.”
It was exactly as the team had theorized, except they’d thought that if Cora had had an affair, it was with Hollis. Dalton Stevens had been right even though the reasons he’d suspected an affair had been related to something else entirely.
“So,” Josie said softly. “You and Cora were going to murder Tobias, convince everyone that he had simply left, like Rachel, and then what? You and Cora could finally be together?”
“Eventually, yeah. We were going to keep hiding it until things blew over. Then I was going to propose to her.”
Josie wondered if they’d ever considered how strange and inappropriate, maybe even suspicious, it would have looked to everyone else in their lives. Jackson ending up with his dad’s older fiancée whose daughter was closer in age to him than her. It didn’t matter.
“She was the love of my life,” Jackson muttered. “I knew I had to put her into the river with him. I hated that but she wouldn’t have wanted me to go to prison. Not over him.”
The urge to ask him if Cora would have wanted him to go to prison for murdering her daughter was strong but Josie suppressed it. She had one more confession she needed to get from him.
“You kept Cora’s jewelry so you could feel close to her,” Josie said.
