She asked for the curtains to be drawn before she began. Even at 11 o’clock on a grey November morning, the light coming through the bay window of the little bungalow in Mahone Bay felt too bright, too exposing. Margaret Sullivan – Maggie to the few people still allowed to call her that – sat in the same floral armchair she has occupied every day since 3 October 2018, the day the world learned that her grandchildren, Lilly, 6, and Jack, 4, had vanished from a blueberry field in Blockhouse, Nova Scotia, while their mother turned her back for less than four minutes.

For seven years she has said almost nothing in public. No tear-streaked appeals. No angry letters to the press. Not a single interview. She watched the documentaries, the Netflix series, the true-crime podcasts, the TikTok “theories” – all of them dramatising, speculating, monetising the two small lives that simply ceased to exist one crisp autumn afternoon – and she stayed silent.

Until yesterday.

At 9:47 a.m. on Tuesday, Margaret Sullivan opened her front door to two RCMP cold-case detectives and a woman she had never met before: me. She had one condition: that every word she spoke be printed exactly as she said it, no matter how inconvenient, no matter whom it implicated. Then she began to talk, and the quiet, orderly narrative that Canada has clung to for seven years started to crack like thin ice.

“I always knew the story you were told wasn’t the whole story,” she said, voice trembling but steady. “I’m tired of carrying it alone.”

What Margaret Sullivan revealed over the next three hours and fourteen minutes does not solve the mystery of what happened to Lilly and Jack. But it drags a cold shadow across the official timeline, exposes moments the original investigation overlooked, and raises the chilling possibility that someone, somewhere, has known far more than they ever admitted.

The morning that everything changed – again

The official record states that on Wednesday 3 October 2018, Rebecca Sullivan, 32, took her children to the abandoned berry field off Cornwall Road to pick the last of the wild blueberries before the frost. She parked her blue Subaru at 2:11 p.m., unbuckled the children, and walked fifty-seven paces into the field. She turned away to take a photograph of the view across the oaks. When she turned back, forty-three seconds later, Lilly and Jack were gone. No screams. No footprints leading away. No sign of a struggle. Just two empty red pails lying on their sides.

That is the version the world knows.

Margaret Sullivan now says that version is missing a crucial twenty-three minutes.

“Becca never told the police about the silver car,” she says, folding and unfolding a crumpled tissue. “She was terrified they would think she was hysterical. Or worse – that they would blame her.”

According to Margaret, Rebecca arrived at her mother-in-law’s house at 12:47 that afternoon, agitated and flushed. She had been driving aimlessly for almost half an hour after noticing a silver sedan – possibly a Toyota Camry, late model, tinted windows – following her from the Lunenburg Tim Hortons all the way along Route 103. Twice she pulled over to let it pass. Twice it slowed and waited. When she turned into Margaret’s driveway, the car crawled past, then reversed and stopped directly opposite the house for nearly two minutes before driving away.

Rebecca begged Margaret not to mention it to the police. “She said if she brought up a mysterious car and there was no proof, they’d say she was making it up to deflect blame. She was already convinced the town thought she was a bad mother.”

Margaret honoured that promise. For seven years.

The phone call nobody logged

At 1:19 p.m. – fifty-two minutes before Rebecca and the children reached the berry field – Margaret’s landline rang. She still has the itemised bill. The caller ID displayed only “Private Number.” A man’s voice, calm, local accent, asked, “Is this the Sullivan residence on Oakland Road?” When Margaret confirmed, he said, “Tell Rebecca the kids will be just fine where they’re going.” Then he hung up.

Margaret says she stood frozen with the receiver in her hand for a full minute before the dial tone began. She immediately called Rebecca’s mobile. It went to voicemail. Panicked, she dialled again and again until Rebecca finally answered at 1:27, already en route to the berry field to “clear her head.” Margaret pleaded with her to come straight to the house. Rebecca promised she would – after a quick stop to let the children run off some energy.

Margaret never told the original investigators about the call. “I was afraid they’d say I imagined it because I was grieving,” she whispers. “Or that I was trying to create a kidnapping scenario to protect my daughter-in-law. I’ve punished myself every single day since.”

The detail that makes investigators’ blood run cold

Perhaps the most disturbing revelation concerns something Rebecca mentioned only once, in the frantic hours after the disappearance, then never repeated.

While the search dogs and the helicopters circled overhead that first night, Rebecca suddenly remembered that Jack’s left shoe – a tiny light-up Spider-Man sneaker – had been missing its lights for two days. Jack had been distraught. That morning, Rebecca told Margaret, she had found the shoe on the kitchen table with brand-new lights freshly glued in place.

She had assumed her husband, Christopher Sullivan – at sea on a fishing trawler hundreds of kilometres away – had fixed it before leaving. Except Christopher swore in his police interview that he never touched the shoe.

Someone else had been inside the Sullivan house in the forty-eight hours before the children vanished, close enough to notice a four-year-old’s broken toy and caring enough to repair it.

“Who does that?” Margaret asks, voice cracking for the first time. “Who breaks into a house just to fix a child’s shoe… and then takes the children?”

A grandmother’s private terror

Margaret reaches into a drawer and produces a small stack of greeting cards, each one postmarked from different towns in the Maritimes, each one arriving on Lilly’s birthday and Jack’s birthday every year since 2018. No return address. No signature. Only a single pressed violet inside and, on the blank inner page, the same four words written in neat childish printing:

We are okay Nana.

The handwriting has been analysed twice – once privately, once by the RCMP. Both times the conclusion was inconclusive but “consistent with that of a young girl aged 8–12.” Lilly would be thirteen now. Jack eleven.

Margaret has never shown the cards to Rebecca. “She would shatter,” she says simply.

Where the investigation goes from here

Within hours of our interview, the RCMP Major Crime Unit announced it is reopening the Sullivan file under the codename Operation Violet. Detectives have seized Margaret’s phone records, the greeting cards, and the Spider-Man sneaker (still in an evidence box in cold storage). Forensic teams are re-examining CCTV from the Lunenburg Tim Hortons and every service station along Rebecca’s route that day. The silver sedan has been given urgent priority.

Detective Sergeant Amanda LeBlanc, the new lead investigator, told reporters outside the bungalow yesterday afternoon: “Mrs Sullivan’s courage in coming forward after carrying this weight alone for seven years cannot be overstated. We are treating every piece of information she has provided as potentially pivotal.”

The question that now haunts Nova Scotia

For seven years the disappearance of Lilly and Jack Sullivan has been classified as a “non-familial abduction with limited evidence.” The prevailing theory – painful but statistically sound – has been that the children wandered off and succumbed to exposure or drowning in one of the hundreds of unmarked mine shafts that honeycomb the Blockhouse hills.

Margaret Sullivan’s words have blown that theory apart.

Someone was watching the family. Someone knew their routines. Someone may have been inside their home. Someone, possibly, wanted the children alive.

And someone, all this time, may have been sending a grandmother the cruellest kind of hope.

As dusk settled over Mahone Bay last night, Margaret stood at her window watching the media vans on the lawn. She touched the glass with fingers that have not stopped trembling since Tuesday morning.

“If they’re still out there,” she said, so quietly I almost missed it, “tell them Nana never stopped waiting. And tell whoever has them… the silence is over now.”

Somewhere in the darkening province, a violet is waiting to be pressed between pages that will never again be blank.

And for the first time in seven long years, the people of Nova Scotia are daring to believe that the story of Lilly and Jack Sullivan might not, after all, be over.