Chapter 1: The Funeral

I stared at the cheap casket and wondered how much a person's life was worth.

Mom's funeral had twelve people in attendance, not counting me. Twelve people to say goodbye to a woman who worked three jobs for twenty years, who never missed a PTA meeting when I was little, who stayed up all night when I had pneumonia at fifteen. The mortician kept checking his watch like he had somewhere better to be.

"She was a good woman," said Mrs. Henderson from next door, patting my shoulder with her arthritic hand. "Always helped others, even when she didn't have much herself."

I nodded and tried to smile, but my face felt frozen. Mom had been sick for two years, and I'd used up all my tears months ago. Now I just felt empty, like someone had scooped out my insides and left me hollow.

The service lasted twenty minutes. Father Martinez read some verses, Beth Rodriguez from the hospital said a few words about Mom's kindness, and then it was over. Just like that. Forty-seven years of life reduced to twenty minutes of polite words and awkward shuffling.

Back at Mom's apartment—my apartment now, I guess—I sat on the couch she'd bought at a garage sale five years ago. The springs poked through in three places, but she'd covered them with a blanket and called it "rustic charm." Everything in the place was like that—held together with duct tape and stubborn hope.

I should have been packing her things or calling the landlord, but instead I found myself in her bedroom, sitting on the bed that smelled like her lavender lotion. On the nightstand sat a stack of composition notebooks, the kind you buy at the dollar store. I'd seen Mom writing in them sometimes, late at night when she thought I was asleep.

I opened the top one.

March 15th. Mrs. Chen down the hall mentioned her husband's cough is getting worse. That's the third person on this floor with breathing problems. Started keeping track.

March 20th. Tommy Anderson, age 8, diagnosed with asthma. His mother Lisa is beside herself. We used to play in that creek behind the chemical plant when I was his age. The water was clearer then.

March 25th. Another funeral today. Mr. Peterson, 52, lung cancer. Never smoked a day in his life. That makes six people from our block in the past two years.

My hands shook as I flipped through page after page. Names, dates, symptoms. Mom had been documenting everything—every cough, every diagnosis, every funeral. She'd drawn maps of our neighborhood with X's marking the houses where people got sick. She'd kept newspaper clippings about the chemical plant, about environmental regulations, about cancer rates in industrial towns.

April 2nd. Doctor says my tumors are growing. Asked him about environmental causes. He got uncomfortable, changed the subject. Note: Research connection between chemical exposure and ovarian cancer.

I dropped the notebook like it was on fire. Mom had suspected. She'd known what was happening to her, to all of us, and she'd been investigating it alone. All those late nights I'd thought she was doing crossword puzzles, she'd been building a case.

I picked up the notebook and kept reading.

April 10th. Confronted my supervisor at the diner about the smell coming from the plant. She told me not to rock the boat. 'We need those jobs,' she said. But what good are jobs if we're all dead?

April 15th. Sarah started working double shifts at the diner to help with medical bills. My beautiful girl, throwing away her future to take care of me. The plant is killing me, and it's killing her dreams too.

I closed the notebook and pressed it against my chest. Mom hadn't just been documenting the neighborhood's decline—she'd been preparing evidence. For what, I didn't know, but she'd been building something bigger than herself.

The front door creaked open. "Sarah? You in here?"

Beth Rodriguez stood in the doorway, still wearing her black dress from the funeral. She looked tired, the way everyone in our neighborhood looked tired. Like they were carrying invisible weights on their shoulders.

"Sorry," she said. "The door was unlocked. I wanted to check on you."

"I'm fine," I said automatically, then realized I was clutching my dead mother's notebook like a life preserver. "Actually, no. I'm not fine."

Beth sat down on the edge of the bed. At thirty-five, she looked older, her dark hair streaked with premature gray. She'd been Mom's friend for years, both of them working at the hospital—Mom in housekeeping, Beth as a nurse in the emergency room.

"Your mom was special," Beth said. "Not many people would have kept fighting like she did."

"Fighting?"

Beth looked at the notebook in my hands. "She showed me some of her research. The patterns she was tracking. She was convinced the plant was making everyone sick."

"Was she right?"

Beth was quiet for a long moment. "I see things in the ER. Kids with asthma, adults with mysterious cancers, elderly people with lung problems who never worked a day in a factory. Your mom wasn't the first person to notice."

"But no one talks about it."

"Hard to talk when you need your paycheck," Beth said. "Millbrook Chemical employs half this town. You don't bite the hand that feeds you, even if it's poisoning you while it does."

I opened the notebook to a random page. Mom had written: The truth doesn't care if it's convenient. It just is.

"What if someone did talk about it?" I asked. "What if someone actually tried to do something?"

Beth studied my face. "That's a dangerous question, Sarah. Your mom asked it too."

"And what did you tell her?"

"I told her the same thing I'm telling you—be careful. Men with money don't like being challenged, especially by people like us." She stood up. "But I also told her someone has to speak for the dead."

After Beth left, I sat alone in Mom's room reading through every notebook. Three years of careful documentation, three years of watching our neighbors get sick and die while the chemical plant kept pumping poison into our air and water. Three years of evidence that no one wanted to see.

By midnight, I'd made a decision. Mom had started something, and I was going to finish it.

I didn't know how yet. I was just a twenty-three-year-old waitress with a high school diploma and thirty-seven dollars in my checking account. But I had something more valuable than money or connections—I had the truth.

And sometimes, the truth is enough to start a fire.