Pāhonoa te oro

Every night for six years, I slept above that box. Every night. My back on the mat, my husband breathing beside me, my children settled in the next room — and underneath all of it, underneath the mat, underneath the weight of my whole life, that box. I knew it was there. I always knew. My husband Tobenna was not a man who begged. Eight years I had known this man. In all of that time I had never once seen him lower himself to begging. Not with his family. Not with me, in any of our hardest mo