I believed them for four years.
My name is Margaret Ouellet. I’m 64 years old, a retired French immersion teacher from Thunder Bay, Ontario. My days had settled into a quiet rhythm—morning walks along the Lake Superior shoreline, tending my herb garden, and the occasional video call with friends from the school where I’d spent thirty-one years of my life. I thought the biggest chapters of my story were already written.
I was wrong.
My daughter, Renee, was an environmental toxicologist at a university in Halifax. Brilliant, fiercely principled—the kind of woman who wrote letters to city councils and actually expected replies.
She married Thomas Bozlet when she was thirty-two, a quiet, thoughtful man who worked in community health outreach for Indigenous communities across Cape Breton Island.
Together they bought an old property off the Cabot Trail, a wide-windowed place that overlooked the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Every time I asked to visit, Renee would laugh softly and say, “Not yet, Mom. The mold remediation is taking forever. You’d be miserable.”
So I waited.
