A year after the Palisades fire, she’s stayed behind, because leaving would abandon her son’s spirit

For more than 330 days, Shelley Sykes has lived inside a greenhouse on her 17-acre Malibu property, bathing with bottled water and relying on friends and utility workers for basic necessities.

There is still no permanent water or power. Permits to rebuild her main house remain stalled. Yet every morning, she wakes up on the land where her son died because leaving, she says, would mean abandoning his spirit.

Sykes lost her son, Rory Sykes, during the Palisades fire that tore through Carbon Canyon...