Don't Go by L.J. Breedlove (series like harry potter txt) 📕

Ryan frowned. “Brown on the outside, white on the inside?”

“Well, that’s me. I had to learn Spanish in college, would you believe it? My grandparents believed in assimilation. My parents never learned Spanish in the home and neither did I. So, I can pass. Kind of. My Latino clients trust me to represent them, because they think I look white and act white, and God help us, that’s what they want. They look at me and see someone who has made it in a white world. So, they think I can help them. Which is a sad commentary on being Latino today.

“Why am I telling you all this?” he asked rhetorically.

“I’m a journalist,” Ryan said. “People tell me things.”

“Jesus. I’m telling a journalist all this? I thought you were a college student!”

“Yeah, that too. But I’m here as Rafael’s father. That’s all,” Ryan said, soothing him down.

“Right, OK.” Vic was still looking at him like he’d become the enemy.

“So, you represent clients who have to appear before ICE judges, most of them just doing their check-ins,” Ryan prompted. “Like Teresa’s grandfather.”

“Oh good, you do know some of this. Yes, exactly. And that frees up my dad and the older generation to represent the more difficult cases like Teresa’s father. Or Teresa.”

“Why is Teresa’s case so difficult?” Ryan asked. “She was just a baby.”

“In the eyes of ICE, currently, that doesn’t matter. She came here illegally. And with DACA closed to new applications, she’s stuck. Otherwise, I would have hauled you two down to the courthouse, gotten you married, and with a bit of this and that it would all work out.”

Ryan was surprised at the yearning that provoked. “But it’s not that simple?”

“No, being here illegally means she’s ineligible for things like the fiancé visa, and so on. So even if you wanted to marry her,” he looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

“I do,” Ryan said steadily.

“You’re going to have to go Mexico to get married. Have her apply from there for a visa as your wife. OK, even that’s doable. But here’s the thing. She can’t go to Mexico. She doesn’t have a valid US passport to go as a tourist. And she doesn’t have a Mexico passport because she doesn’t have papers establishing her as a Mexican either. The only way she can go to Mexico is if she lets ICE pick her up and deport her. And they could just put her in a camp and hold her. For months. I’ve got clients who have been in a camp for years.”

“Children without a country,” Ryan said softly.

“Exactly. All these kids want is to belong. And no one wants them. I’ve met Teresa. If you weren’t interested, I’d go after her myself. Who wouldn’t want her to be a citizen in their country? And all of the DACA kids — or Dreamers as they call themselves — that I’ve met, are like her.”

“She’s mine,” Ryan said, making that clear.

Vic snorted. “Message received. For what it’s worth she didn’t give me a second glance. She’s made her choice. I hope you’re worth her.”

“I’m not,” Ryan said frankly. “She was smart to leave me. But I’m going to do everything I can to make up for it.”

“OK, OK. So anyway. The Yakima office got a bad feeling about the situation. And they wanted her to run. But taking a child with her is risky, especially one that age, because they chatter and don’t understand the dangers. Then her mother said it wasn’t safe to leave Rafael with her. I’m not sure why. And it may have just been intuition. So, Teresa agrees to run, but only if she can bring Rafael to you first. She has a lot of trust in you, man. So, she does. And we send her on.”

“But you’re worried,” Ryan prompted.

Vic looked at him for a minute. “And so are you.”

“You said you thought it was personal — not just the pendejo who’s trying to steal the company but personal with Teresa,” Ryan said.

Vic smiled at his use of the word pendejo, but only nodded.

“I don’t think the pendejo even knew about Teresa,” Ryan said slowly, putting the story together in his own mind. “I think that’s all coincidence. Here’s what I know.

“In the spring of 2017 when Teresa was still here, she and I took a class from an honors professor named Ian Black.”

Vic jerked a bit at the name but waved him on. Ryan frowned, but he continued the story. “It was about fertility symbols in pre-colonization Mexico or something like that. Teresa was pissed the entire term. She thought he was a sexist prick, both in content, and in how he treated her and the other women in the class. She was right. But she left before the term was over. I wrote my final paper using feminist theory to critique his thesis much to his displeasure. The class is pass/fail, so not much he could do about it.

“What I didn’t know — there was a lot I didn’t know, at the time, including why Teresa left — was that Teresa had filed a formal sexual discrimination complaint against him. But when she didn’t return in the fall, it was dismissed. Still, it was a black mark against him, and he’s not well liked by some in the university administration. He was denied promotion to full professor. He shouldn’t have been able to find out who filed the complaint, but it was a small class, and Teresa had argued with him on a number of occasions. That’s supposed to be valued in the seminars, but....”

Ryan paused. “As a result, he blames her, blames me, and most of all he blames the provost for his failure to move up to full professor. He concocts an elaborate scheme to embarrass the provost and cause him to lose his job — a scheme that involved me dead from an overdose by the way — and to