Finally. Finally, her idiot husband had let her and the attorney Jennifer had hired for him in. Jennifer leaned forward, pressing her head to the Plexiglas that separated them. This was horrifying.
She’d been patted down like a common criminal before she’d been allowed in to see Wallace. Nothing she hadn’t expected. This was not the first time she’d ever been to this prison, though it was the first time she’d been allowed in to see Wallace.
Her nephew, her sweet boy Ray, had spent eighteen months here. He’d gotten too rough with a girl when they’d both been too drunk to know any better. Too young. It had spiraled out of control.
Never would she have thought she would see Wallace here. He’d been her hero for so long when she’d been a young woman. She’d adored this man.
“I…I need something from you, Jenny.”
Betrayal had been a real eye-opener. Now, she saw him for exactly what he was.
Flawed. Drastically and horribly flawed. He looked horrible. He wasn’t sleeping. His eyes were red-rimmed and wild. She didn’t think he’d even combed his hair. “What?”
“I’ve kept journals. Every day since I graduated medical school. I’ve kept a record of everything that has happened every single day. I need…I need those journals, Jennifer. They tell too many things…things we don’t want getting out. Things…things that will hurt Reggie far too much. I can’t live with myself if that happens. I can’t.”
“Everything?” Jennifer’s mind flashed back. He didn’t even know what everything was. What everything she had done was.
Fifteen years and three or four months give or take. To Miranda, Carrington’s personal assistant. They’d met her at the Carringtons’ dinner party.
Miranda—Jennifer had always held a special hatred for Miranda. That bitch. That whore.
Miranda had been what had destroyed the happiness they had in Philadelphia.
Miranda hadn’t been his first mistress. Jennifer wasn’t foolish enough to believe that. No, he had been screwing around on her at least a decade before that.
Miranda had been the one he’d thought he’d killed. Jennifer had found the woman still breathing on the floor of their vacation cabin. Where Wallace had left the girl. In a cabin Jennifer had bought for him to visit when he needed time to get his thoughts together occasionally. It was hard, him being a surgeon. Emotionally. He’d needed the quiet of the cabin to think.
Bullshit. He’d been using it as his love nest for years.
Jennifer had handled things herself. Her fingers curled, imagining the feel of the shovel still in her hand. The handle had been gnarled and old. She’d had four splinters the next morning. Plus, blisters; horrible blisters that she’d told Wallace she’d earned riding her bicycle the next day.
Even though he should have known. She hadn’t ridden a bicycle in twenty years.
He had believed her. He had wanted to believe her.
She’d buried Miranda in the woods three hundred feet away from the cabin where Reggie had been conceived. The woman had still been breathing, but it had only been a matter of time. Wallace had cracked her head open and nearly strangled the bitch before running from what he had done.
Jennifer had hastened the inevitable and protected her family while she was doing it. She’d taken care of things; the way she had for Wallace since…forever.
Jennifer had never been back to that cabin. She’d had Kyle start it on fire ten years ago, on her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.
She had killed for this man in front of her. Now he had ruined everything. “Everything, Wallace? Oh, Wally, you always have been an idiot. What am I looking for exactly?”
They both know she’d do it, find what he needed. Protect them all. Damn it, even underneath all of that, maybe she did still love him. Somehow.
She always had been a fool where Wallace Reginald Henedy II was concerned.
He’d said it was for Reggie.
That was all it would take to have her doing his bidding.
He shook his head. “Maroon notebooks. There are at least two dozen in the back of the filing cabinet in my offices. Both Barratt County and Finley Creek Gen. Get them. Promise me that you will not read them. You have to find them, Jenny. You have to. Find them and burn them. All.”
“Why did you do it? Shoot that girl? Did it have something to do with Carrington’s daughter? Tell me.”
He shook his head. “Izzie. She looks like Elizabeth would have. Did you know that? Big dark eyes.”
“Elizabeth’s been dead for twenty-six years. That girl has nothing to do with our daughter.”
He stared at her with torture-filled eyes.
Her heart broke for him all over again. Like it had twenty-six years ago when he’d realized that even though he saved lives every day, he hadn’t been able to save the one that had mattered the most.