I sent casseroles, frozen in courier boxes. I sent cards for every holiday.
I waited.
Then, one Tuesday in March, I received a phone call from a woman named Patricia Duval—Renee’s lawyer. Her voice had the careful gentleness people use when they already know they’re about to change everything.
She told me there had been a car accident on the Trans-Canada: a transport truck that crossed the center line on an icy stretch near Antigonish.
Renee and Thomas were gone.
I remember sitting down on the kitchen floor without deciding to. The way grief bypasses the mind entirely and goes straight to the legs. I remember the sound of the refrigerator humming—indifferent and mechanical—while my entire world reorganized itself around an absence.
Three days later, Patricia called again and asked to meet.
Her office in downtown Thunder Bay smelled of paper and weak coffee. She handed me a sealed envelope, written in Renee’s handwriting, and told me the Cape Breton property had been left to me in its entirety.
She also passed me a small brass key on a plain ring, with a piece of masking tape wrapped around it.
On the tape, in Renee’s careful block letters, she’d written: STORAGE ROOM.
