When my Hawaiian family spoke of new roads, they were talking in general terms about roads to accommodate high-cost housing and the expansion of private beachfront properties along the coast. Homes for the wealthy. Planning was advancing. Road construction would see Ela’s people removed from the remainder of their land.

I’d heard this talked about for many years. Every so often there would be activity, meetings and visits by various authorities. Men with instruments would signal to each other from beach to hillside. When they’d gone there’d be silence for many months, as though it had all been forgotten. This silence was the void, but a void is never truly that. A void is always a hatchery.

We took Ela to the hospital. It was a lonely, haunted and frightening place where treatment caused suffering, so we brought her home again. I helped my mother-in-law go up the mountain to collect leaves, roots, flowers and a variety of barks for making medicines and poultices. These had a good effect on Ela. Pain lessened. She put on weight. But one day my mother-in-law said, ‘We’re taking her to Lili.’ We were living in town by then.

The roads were near completion and grand houses continued to be built. Knowing what was to come, many people had already left the land. That meant that there were not enough young people to work the gardens and catch fish. Some moved into public housing in large suburbs where they had to buy disagreeable food and pay rent, but the only work they were able to get was poorly paid.

Ela, my mother-in-law and I took a run-down beach house just outside Honolulu. It had boards missing, some broken windows, a leaky roof and was due for demolition. But it had plenty of rooms and some space around it. Other places we had looked at were crowded in on all sides, and expensive. We couldn’t see ourselves in any of them. Chappy helped us patch the house before leaving his apartment to come and live with us.

My father-in-law, who had refused to move from the land, was living in his beach shelter under threat of being arrested. Every so often, while I was at work, Ela and her mother would go and visit him – now trespassers on their own territories – taking food and bringing home fish. They found him dead there one day. That same night, we carried him up the mountain tracks in his old canoe and placed him in the cave of secrets.