One Sunday, Oriwia was preparing to cut pattern pieces from material that she had laid out on the table by her front window when she saw three people coming from the morning train. She was making summer frocks for Daphne and Binnie from dress-lengths she’d bought at a sale. The dress she’d made for Daphne was hanging on the door with the hem tacked ready for hand stitching. She’d pinned the paper pattern on floral print for the frock she was about to cut out for Binnie.

Coming towards her house with something on their minds were Aki, Binnie, and she didn’t know who else. Up until then she didn’t even know Aki was in the country. The other, she soon saw, was ‘that son of his’.

The moment she recognised Lani she knew what scene she was looking at. What was before her was a daughter with a ruined career, three years of study and money down the drain, a lifetime of poverty and drudgery ahead of her, disgrace, shame, and their reputation as a family in ruins.

‘So what have you come to tell me?’ she spat out of the flung-open door as they arrived at the end of the path, and without even a greeting. Aki was walking ahead as a kind of shield, as though he thought she might take to them with scissors. No one spoke, only began removing their shoes, Binnie in tears. ‘Why wouldn’t she be crying? And that other one with his eyes scraping the ground in front of him.’

All this happened three years after Oriwia pulled Binnie from Hawai‘i. After many tears, she settled in to begin her university studies. She was living with Aki’s sister, her Aunty Ti.

Binnie’s sister Daphne had graduated from nursing school and was working in Wellington Hospital, where she met ‘the great Dane’, who was visiting this country before taking up a position in a bank in Switzerland. He’d been brought into the hospital following a skiing accident, and by the time he returned to Switzerland Daphne had a ring on her finger. A year and a half later they were married.

‘A girl with some sense, a man with some ambition in life,’ my grandmother said. ‘But then … but then of course … then she left me, after the wedding they left me – which they had to do. Grandson, you all left me to go and be born and live on the other side of the world.’