Pāhonoa te oro

She stayed. While his mother's survival was still uncertain, Clara Adeyemi — the woman whose shop he had just spent twenty minutes systematically dismantling — had been sitting in a hospital waiting room, monitoring for rejection, going nowhere. The file slips from Ki-hwan's hands. He does not pick it up. He sits down in the chair beside his mother's bed — the chair he has sat in every evening for eleven days, watching her breathe — and he looks at the photograph still open on the floor, and