LAC MÉGANTIC, QUE. — Ginette Cameron can’t help it: no matter how unlikely it seems, no matter what the police tell her, she can’t let go of the hope that her daughter is alive.

Her daughter, Geneviève Breton, a singer with “an angel’s voice,” has been missing since the Lac-Megantic train explosion.

Her daughter who had worked since she was a girl to appear on a certain TV show that eventually made her a local celebrity.

The “resilient and ambitious” young woman of 28 with glowing, golden hair.

Breton, who went to school in Sherbrooke, Que., was home for the summer, staying at her parents’ house in tiny rural Stornoway, Que., up the road from Lac-Megantic. On Friday night, she was working at the jewelry store across the street from Musi-Café and went to the popular nightspot to hang out with friends when she got off work around 9:30 p.m.

Around two in the morning, with no word from her daughter, Cameron started to get nervous. Breton usually texted her mother if she was going to be out late, or if she was staying overnight with friends in Lac-Megantic.

Cameron went to the living room, which looks out on to the road, and watched for her daughter. No cars came up the driveway.

Around 3:30 a.m., Breton’s boyfriend called the house to say there had been a terrible explosion in Lac-Megantic. Musi-Café had been completely destroyed.

The rest of the night and morning were filled trying to learn Breton’s whereabouts.

The next day, horribly, the family got a false lead: someone told Breton’s brother that she had been found.

When that turned out not to be true, “we went crazy,” Cameron said.

On Monday, police came to the house to collect DNA. They took a toothbrush, a hair brush, and pair of earrings. They left a harsh admonition: “Madame, that’s it. No hope. They’re all gone.”

Cameron didn’t listen. The same day, she drove to her daughter’s apartment in Sherbrooke, hoping to find her there “with friends, having fun.”

Part of Cameron knew it was hopeless. Sure enough, her daughter was not there.

Normally filled with Breton’s voice, the family’s large house is now eerily quiet.

“She was always singing,” Cameron said.

Breton had been cultivating her voice since the age of 14, entering local talent contests and often placing second or third.

Whenever she lost, she would threaten to quit singing for good. Then she would see another competition online and sign up again.

“She was almost at the top, but the door was not open yet,” said Cameron.

Then, in 2008, she got a huge break — an appearance on Star Académie, the Quebec equivalent of American Idol. She sang Mariah Carey’s “Hero.”

Her parents were in the audience. When the show’s host asked her what made her more nervous, singing in front of millions of people or singing in front of her parents, she said her parents: “They’re the people I least want to disappoint.”

As Cameron’s hope drains away, it is being replaced with anger at the train company, Montreal, Maine, and Atlantic Railway Inc., whose oil freight rolled downhill into Lac-Megantic for reasons that are still unclear. (It appears that firefighters may have turned off its emergency brake while putting out a fire on the train earlier in the night.)

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“I can’t believe they won’t take the whole blame,” Cameron said of the company. “They tried to put the responsibility on the Nantes (Que.) fire department.”

For now, despite all the good reasons not to, Cameron is holding out hope.

“Every time I hear the phone ring or somebody come up to the house, I think it’s her,” she said.

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