How one quietly humming machine, wheeled into a small Nova Scotia interview room on a freezing November night, took seven years of carefully constructed grief, seven years of candle-lit vigils and whispered prayers and national heartbreak, and in the space of ninety heart-stopping seconds snapped every certainty like a frozen branch, leaving grown detectives gasping, a mother collapsing to the floor in a heap of navy wool and uncontrollable sobs, a father roaring his wife’s name as if the sound alone could drag the truth back out of her, a neighbour’s reassuring smile finally cracking into something ancient and predatory, and a grandmother, tiny and ramrod-straight in a chair that looked far too large for her fragile frame, staring at the polygraph needles drawing perfect, unwavering lines of truth while the rest of the world around her tilted violently, irrevocably, into terrifying new possibility: that Lilly and Jack Sullivan, the little girl with the gap-toothed grin and the boy who loved nothing more than light-up Spider-Man shoes, did not wander off into the woods to die after all, but were carried away by hands that had been close enough to watch them, close enough to fix a broken toy in the dead of night, close enough to know exactly when their mother would turn her back for forty-three fateful seconds to take a photograph of autumn oaks, and that those hands, whatever their motive, whatever dark bargain or desperate act of love or cold calculation had driven them, might, against every grim statistic and every sleepless night the province has endured since 3 October 2018, still be holding two living, breathing children who have grown seven whole years older in secret while Canada mourned them as ghosts.

That was the moment the room went cold, so cold that even the seasoned RCMP polygraph examiner from Ottawa, a man who has stared down murderers and terrorists without flinching, would later admit his fingers felt numb on the print-out, so cold that the observation window fogged with the collective held breath of an entire Major Crime Unit, so cold that when Rebecca Sullivan’s charts finally spilled from the machine showing deception on the questions no parent should ever have to answer, the sound she made was not a scream but a low, keening animal keen that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than lungs, deeper than memory, as if the very marrow of her bones had recognised the truth before her mind could, and in that instant every comforting narrative the country had built to survive the unbearable (the lost children, the tragic accident, the cruel indifference of wilderness) shattered into a thousand glittering pieces, leaving only the raw, jagged edge of something far worse: the possibility that the person who had stood at the centre of every search, every appeal, every tear-streaked television plea, might have been the architect of the vanishing all along, or at the very least the keeper of a secret so corrosive it had eaten her alive for seven long years while the rest of us looked the other way.

And in the deafening silence that followed, while Rebecca was gently, then not so gently, helped to the floor by two female officers who themselves were crying without knowing why, while Christopher Sullivan in the next room began to pound on the one-way glass hard enough to spider-web it, while Darren Rhodenizer, the helpful neighbour who had found the empty pails and organised the search parties and laid flowers at the little wooden cross every Sunday without fail, watched his own charts betray him with spikes so violent the needles nearly tore the paper and requested a lawyer in a voice that no longer sounded calm at all, while Margaret Sullivan, the grandmother who had carried the weight of mysterious birthday violets and repaired shoes and a stranger’s voice on the telephone saying “the kids will be just fine where they’re going” for seven torturous years, sat perfectly still and let the machine confirm what her heart had never stopped believing (that her grandchildren were alive, that someone had taken them on purpose, that the story was not over), the temperature in that small provincial detachment dropped so low that the coffee in abandoned mugs formed a skin of ice, and every person present understood, with the sudden clarity of a lightning strike, that the hunt for Lilly and Jack had not ended in 2018 after all; it had only been sleeping, coiled and waiting, and tonight, with the quiet whirr of a polygraph and the inescapable truth of trembling needles, it had opened its eyes again, hungrier and more dangerous than ever before.