A Familiar Name
見覚えのある名前
The town office was quiet, and dust covered the old wooden shelves.
A brought Sarah a heavy box of permits from the basement.
Most of the documents were more than twenty years old.
Sarah searched for any permit that mentioned the Coleman plant.
After an hour, she found a yellowed form from a summer long ago.
The permit had allowed the factory to water into the river.
At the bottom, an had signed the by hand.
Sarah stared at the , and her heart suddenly went cold.
The name written there was David Vance, her own late father.
Her father had signed the permit many years before he died.
David Vance had worked as a town during those years.
1998 was the year when he had approved the factory's request.
Sarah had always remembered her father as an man.
He had taught her to tell the truth, whatever the cost.
Now his own name sat at the centre of the story.
Had her father known that the water tests were false?
Or had someone tricked him into signing a harmless-looking form?
The office where he had once worked felt suddenly .
Sarah remembered the days when he had come home tired and silent.
As a child, she had never understood those long, heavy silences.
The story was no longer only about a factory and a river.
It had quietly become a story about her own family.
Sarah carefully copied the permit and closed the dusty box.
There was only one person left who might know the truth.