If fate had any sort of hand in their reunion, it might have begun in 2017, the year that Higgs’s second husband, James, with whom she’d been married for 18 years, died following a heart attack. That same year, a knee injury forced Marier to retire. At about the same time, Marier’s brother, with whom he was living, was diagnosed with dementia. Unable to cover the rent for both of them, Marier moved into the Ottawa Mission, where he says he largely kept to himself.
