The Wrong Mr. Darcy - Evelyn Lozada

CHAPTER 1

There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well.

—Pride and Prejudice

Hara Isari turned off the engine and sat, not moving, her heart beating with the tick-tick-tick of the cooling engine. She’d been immersed in a Jane Austen audiobook for the past hour, hanging out with her favorite characters, but now it was time to ease back into her own reality.

The familiar line of old firs at the edge of the parking lot were monstrously huge and fiercely beautiful, their limbs pronounced against a light gray sky, swaying in the winds of fall. Try as they might, however, the trees could not entirely camouflage the buildings just beyond the greenery. Or the crumbling, twenty-five-foot-tall stone walls that held in her father.

Touching her forehead to the steering wheel, Hara’s long, wavy hair lay heavily across her back and her glasses pressed into the bridge of her nose. The resulting hint of pain flickered a warning: more pain to come. Or was it a metaphor for the moment?

She sat up and shook off the drama queen moment. Hara liked to find reasons to be happy, not emo. Visiting Thomas Isari challenged the twenty-two-year-old’s equanimity sometimes, but not today, not when she had such exciting news to share.

She climbed out of the driver’s seat and straightened slowly, pushing her eyeglasses into place. Then, the young woman turned to face the Oregon State Penitentiary.

She’d been coming to the prison for ten years, first by bus when she was in middle school, then by car as soon as she could get her license. Her mother refused to come with her, to see the man who’d ruined the reputation of their family. “I’m a black woman married to a Japanese guy who’s now a felon. Does he know what they say about me? About us? You can tell your father to kiss my ass.”

Even Hara’s Grandma Isari, now addled by Alzheimer’s and living in a home, had not made the short trip to see her son. Grandpa Isari never had the chance; seated on a hard bench behind his son in the courtroom during the sentencing, he’d grasped at his chest and keeled forward, dead of a massive heartattack.

Harsh way to escape reality, but maybe it was for the best, Hara thought sadly, as she tromped across the vast field of parking lot cement. Her grandparents had met as children, behind razor-topped fences in a World War II Japanese internment camp, ten miles from the small Oregon hospital they’d been born in. The image of their adult child behind bars, sleeping on a thin mattress in a five-by-ten cell with no window, permanently traumatized them.

No one but Hara visited Thomas Isari. The man who’d wiped the gravel and blood off her dimpled knees when she fell off her bike, the man who’d taught her to swim with the current in the river behind their farmhouse. The man who’d lifted her to dunk the basketball into their garage hoop, again and again. The man who’d run the family apple orchard and taken care of his aging parents. And the man who was the reason the FBI flooded into their small town. The man who’d operated an extensive, illegal sports betting operation that, when he was caught, ended several professional athletes’ careers. Ended their family.

Now he sat in a cell, leaving her mom to run the farm. Thanks, Daddy.

Solo traveling to and from the prison did provide time to listen to books, Hara reasoned … but, damn, did she hate going in alone. Between the hillbilly guard who tried to cop a feel during pat downs, and the visiting room full of sex-deprived prisoners and their wives and girlfriends who dripped sour helplessness, Hara grew up learning to keep her shoulders back, exude confidence without arrogance, and use witty banter to distract anyone trying to give her shit. She’d also learned to size people up very quickly, and keep her distance if she didn’t like them. First impressions could save a lot of trouble.

If her father could take it day in and day out, she could take it for an hour every few weeks. She wasn’t about to abandon him just because of a few jerk bags.

Her sneakers squeaked on the industrial tile as her long legs carried her through the metal detectors and down the never-ending hall, halogen lights buzzing overhead and the tang of urine and bleach stinging her nostrils. She stopped for the armed corrections officers at multiple checkpoints

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