Off the Record
オフレコで
For several days, Sarah searched for someone who had worked at the plant.
At last, a employee agreed to meet her in a quiet cafe.
The man was in his sixties and looked nervous and tired.
"I will talk," he said, "but you must never print my name."
Sarah promised to keep his identity completely secret.
An , she knew, still had to be checked carefully.
The man admitted that the factory had been dumping for years.
"We had poured chemicals into the river long before I left," he said.
The had entered the water quietly, mostly late at night.
He explained that the managers had hidden the true test results.
"By the time I understood, the damage had already begun," he said.
He claimed that several workers had complained but had been ignored.
Sarah listened carefully and wrote every word in her notebook.
She reminded herself that one story alone was not enough .
The man said that he had felt about it for a long time.
"I stayed silent because I needed the job," he admitted sadly.
Many workers, he said, had faced the same difficult choice.
Sarah felt sympathy, yet she still needed solid documents.
A single voice could be wrong, exaggerated, or even dishonest.
"Is there any paper that proves this?" she asked him gently.
The man thought for a while and slowly nodded his head.
"The old permits," he whispered, "they are kept in the town office."
Sarah thanked him and stepped out into the cold evening air.
For the first time, the small story felt dangerously large.