Chapter 2: The Meeting

Two weeks after the funeral, I finally worked up the courage to call Beth.

"I want to do something," I told her over the phone. "About what Mom discovered. About the plant."

There was a long pause. "Sarah, honey, I know you're grieving, but—"

"This isn't about grief," I interrupted, though we both knew that wasn't entirely true. "This is about justice."

Another pause. "Meet me at Murphy's Diner tonight. Eight o'clock. Back booth."

I'd never been to Murphy's after my shift at Romano's ended. It was the kind of place where truckers stopped for coffee and pie, where the fluorescent lights buzzed and the vinyl seats had duct tape over the tears. Beth was already there when I arrived, nursing a cup of coffee that looked like it had been sitting there for hours.

"You sure about this?" she asked before I even sat down.

"No," I admitted. "But I'm sure about doing nothing being wrong."

Beth smiled, the first genuine smile I'd seen from her since Mom's funeral. "Your mother would be proud. Terrified, but proud." She pulled out a manila folder from her purse. "I've been keeping my own records."

The folder contained medical charts, death certificates, and newspaper clippings. Beth had been more systematic than Mom, tracking not just illnesses but also the plant's discharge reports, environmental violations, and legal settlements that never made the local news.

"Thirty percent higher cancer rate than the state average," Beth said, pointing to a handwritten chart. "Forty percent higher rate of respiratory illness. Birth defects, developmental delays, autoimmune disorders—all elevated."

"How is this not front-page news?"

"Because the newspaper gets advertising money from the plant. Because the mayor's brother-in-law is their head of PR. Because half the town council has relatives who work there." Beth's voice was bitter. "Everyone knows, Sarah. But knowing and acting are different things."

A waitress appeared at our table—young, maybe nineteen, with bright green hair and multiple ear piercings. She looked like she'd stepped out of a different world than our gray industrial town.

"More coffee?" she asked, then noticed our spread of papers. "Whoa, what's all this?"

"Research project," Beth said quickly.

The girl—her name tag read "GRACE"—didn't buy it. "Research into what? Because if this is about the chemical plant, I'm totally interested."

Beth and I exchanged looks. "Why?" I asked.

Grace slid into the booth without being invited. "Because I'm writing my senior thesis on environmental justice, and this place is like a case study in corporate negligence. Also, my grandmother lived here for sixty years before she died of lung cancer last spring. Never smoked, never worked around chemicals, but somehow her lungs were destroyed."

"You're in college?" Beth asked.

"State university, but I grew up here. Been documenting stuff for months." Grace pulled out her phone and showed us photos—the chemical plant's discharge pipes, the yellow foam that sometimes appeared in Mill Creek, dead fish floating near the factory's outflow.

"Why haven't you done anything with this?" I asked.

Grace's enthusiasm dimmed. "Because I'm nineteen and nobody listens to college kids. Especially college kids with green hair who ask uncomfortable questions."

We sat in silence for a moment, three women from different generations, all carrying pieces of the same terrible truth.

"What if we put our information together?" I asked. "What if we tried to get people to listen?"

"How?" Beth asked. "The local government won't touch this. The state doesn't care about small towns. The federal EPA is buried in paperwork."

"We start with the families," I said, thinking of Mom's notebooks. "We show them they're not alone. We help them understand what's happening."

Grace nodded eagerly. "I know some people at the university who could help analyze the data, make it more official."

"And I know other healthcare workers who've noticed patterns," Beth added slowly. "Maybe it's time we started talking to each other."

That's how it started—not with grand speeches or political manifestos, but with three women in a diner booth, sharing information and anger in equal measure. Grace wrote down her phone number on a napkin. Beth promised to reach out to her contacts at the hospital. I said I'd start going through Mom's neighborhood maps, identifying families who might be willing to talk.

"We need to be careful," Beth warned as we prepared to leave. "The plant has lawyers, PR people, connections we can't even imagine. They're not going to appreciate what we're doing."

"Good," I said, surprising myself with the venom in my voice. "I don't appreciate what they've been doing either."

Grace grinned. "This is going to be amazing. Finally, someone's fighting back."

Walking home that night, I felt something I hadn't experienced since before Mom got sick—hope. Not the desperate kind that keeps you up at night praying for miracles, but the solid kind built on purpose and possibility.

The chemical plant's smokestacks rose against the night sky like monuments to greed, their red warning lights blinking in the darkness. For twenty-three years, I'd seen those lights every night and never questioned them. They were just part of the landscape, as permanent and unchangeable as the mountains.

But now they looked different. Now they looked like targets.

I pulled out my phone and called the number Grace had written on the napkin.

"Grace? It's Sarah. I've been thinking about what you said, about documenting everything. How would you feel about organizing a meeting? Getting some of the affected families together?"

"Seriously? That would be incredible. When?"

"Soon," I said, looking up at those blinking red lights. "Before anyone else dies."