From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Clause 2: "No one is to be told that this arrangement is not real. This includes grandparents, cousins, apprentices, and Tang Rui."

The livestream was Zhaoyu's idea, which should have been warning enough.

"It's called A Day With Us," he said, on Monday morning, in the doorway of the Su Ji kitchen, with a tripod under one arm and a ring light under the other and an expression of radiant purpose. "Thirty minutes. Live. Every couple in the contest does one, from their own street, on the committee's channel. People at home watch, and they leave comments, and they press a small red heart, and the hearts are counted. It is the first time Yunxi has ever been on the internet on purpose."

"Who is going to film us?" said Wenxi, from behind a mound of dough.

"I am."

"You?"

"I volunteered. I have a good eye. I have also, if I may say so, been following this story from the very beginning." He set the tripod down with a flourish. "I know your angles."

Grandma Su, at the stove, did not turn round. Her shoulders were shaking very slightly.

* * *

Wenxi had expected to be afraid of the camera. She had not expected to be afraid of the spreadsheet.

It was open on Zhaoyu's phone, propped against the sugar jar, and he consulted it every few minutes with the air of a surgeon checking a chart. It had acquired, since she last saw it, a number of new tabs. One was labelled Hands. One was labelled Looks. One, with a small flame emoji, was labelled Incidents, and beneath it, in a neat tidy list, ran every public event of the last six weeks: the roof, the bridge, the flour, the arm, the coat.

"What is that?" she said, pointing.

"A projection." He swiped. A graph appeared, with a rising line. "I have been tracking audience sentiment based on the photographs. This is the probability that a random viewer believes you are a genuine couple. As you can see, it has gone from forty percent at the banquet to eighty-one this week. If you smile at the camera for more than four seconds, it goes to eighty-six."

"That is not a real number."

"All numbers are real. Some are just early." He tapped the screen. "The only risk is the live comments. People can ask questions, and sometimes the questions are hard. I recommend that you stay close to the truth."

"That is what I always do," said Wenxi.

"No," said Zhaoyu kindly, with an enormous and perfectly innocent smile. "You really don't."

She looked at him. He looked back, and for a moment something flickered in his bright face that was not mischief at all. Then it was gone, and he had picked up the ring light and begun to adjust it, whistling.

They went live at ten.

The little red dot came on. A number in the corner of the screen said 14, then 31, then 90. Wenxi, standing at the counter with her sleeves rolled and a tray of sesame buns in her hands, felt her smile settle into place like a mask. It was the old one, the bright one, with the dimple.

"Good morning, everyone," she said. "Welcome to Su Ji. I'm Wenxi."

"And I," said Chengyan, from the doorway, "am not sure why we are doing this."

The numbers rose.

They were a good double act. She had not known it until she watched it afterwards, but they had a rhythm, a trick of passing the ball back and forth, she talking and he cutting in with a flat, dry, devastating remark that made the little hearts rise like bubbles. She showed the camera the old wooden moulds. He explained how the wood was cut. She made a dumpling. He criticised the way she held it. The comment feed scrolled up the side of the screen in a fast green blur, and most of it was hearts and the word AWW.

Then Zhaoyu, behind the camera, put on a very serious voice.

"A question from the audience," he said. "From a viewer called Peach Girl. She wants to know how you two met."

There was a silence of about a second and a half.

"We grew up next door," said Wenxi.

"That isn't how you met," said Zhaoyu. "That is where you lived. Peach Girl wants to know the moment."

"There wasn't a moment."

"There is always a moment," said Zhaoyu, and took a small step closer with the camera, and she saw, in the light of the ring, that his eyes were quite steady. "I take notes. I notice these things."

Her smile held. It was an effort. She was aware of her own hands, closed round the edges of the tray, and of the little red dot, and of a whole hidden audience of strangers holding its breath.

"I think," said Wenxi, "that I'll let him tell it."

* * *

Chengyan had not meant to tell it.

He had meant to say something short, a joke or a dry remark, and move the conversation on to the price of rice. He had said, in the car on the way to Su Ji that morning, in his own head, a number of things he would not say. He had a list. The first item was the strip of paper.

He did not know why he was thinking of it. Perhaps it was the willow. It had been in the corner of the camera's eye all morning, through the open back door, a green smudge at the end of the alley, and every time he looked at it his chest did something strange.

"The willow," he said.

"The willow," said Zhaoyu encouragingly.

"By Liu Bridge. We cut our heights into it. Every birthday, with a knife." He stopped. He could feel the little glass eye on him. He could feel her, at the edge of his vision, quite still, with the tray in her hands. "Mine on the left, hers on the right. We argued about it every year. She said she was standing flat. She was on her toes."

"I was not."

"She was," said Chengyan, to the camera. "Always. By about a finger."

The comments flew. A hundred and thirty people were watching. He heard Wenxi make a small, indignant sound, and felt, unbelievably, his own mouth begin to curve.

"The bark grows," he said. "That is the thing about a tree. It heals over. So when I was eleven I wrote them all down. On a piece of paper. Every year. I thought, if the tree is going to cover them up, someone has to keep a record. Somewhere that doesn't grow."

He had not meant to say that. It had simply come out, in his flat, steady voice, like a man reading a measurement.

"Do you still have it?" said Zhaoyu softly, from behind the lens.

He did not answer at once. He looked at the willow, at the end of the alley, a green thing moving in a bright wind. He had last seen the strip on the eve of her leaving. He had gone looking for it, the morning after, in the drawer under his bench where he always kept it, and found it gone. He had never asked. He had told himself that it had been lost, or thrown away, or taken by someone, and that he was a grown man and should not mind a piece of red paper.

"I know the numbers," said Chengyan. "All of them."

He heard her breath catch.

It was only a small sound. It would not have carried beyond the microphone. But he turned his head, and saw that she had set the tray down on the counter, quite slowly, and that her right hand had gone to the pocket of her cardigan and was pressed flat against it, as though she were holding something in.

She was looking at him. Her face, in the clean white glare of the ring light, was very pale, and her eyes were very bright. She was not smiling at all.

"Heart count," said Zhaoyu, in a small voice, "is going up."

"Turn it off," said Chengyan.

"I can't turn it off. We're live."

"Then talk about something else."

"I would love to," said Zhaoyu, "but there's a comment." He cleared his throat. "From a user called Plum Wine. It says, have you kissed yet?"

The whole kitchen froze.

"No," said Wenxi and Chengyan, in perfect unison.

The comment feed exploded. It went up the side of the screen in a column of laughing faces. Someone typed LIAR in capitals. Someone else typed ALMOST, with seven exclamation marks, and a third, helpfully, posted a link to the photograph from Sun Mei's studio, which had somehow already found its way onto the committee's page.

"I should check the oven," said Wenxi.

"The oven is fine," said Zhaoyu.

"I think there is a smell."

"There is no smell. It is a lovely oven."

"I am going to bake," said Wenxi, to the camera, quite firmly, with a smile that could have cut glass, "a batch of osmanthus cakes. Live. For the next twenty minutes. And you are all going to watch me do it, and I am going to talk about nothing but flour."

She did.

She talked about flour for twenty-two minutes. She was brilliant. She was so brilliant that the number in the corner climbed to two hundred and ten, and the comments changed, by degrees, from questions about kissing to questions about butter. She demonstrated the folding. She explained the difference between rice flour and wheat flour, and why a dough forgave you if you left it alone. Beside her, Chengyan stood with his arms folded and his back against the dresser and said nothing at all. But whenever she reached for something, a bowl or a spoon or a cloth, it was there already, in his hand, held out.

She did not look at him once. He watched her not look.

* * *

Tang Rui came in at the twenty-fifth minute, with an umbrella she did not need and a basket she did not explain.

Wenxi saw it before anyone, because she was facing the door. It was a strange thing to watch. The little woman in the green silk jacket stepped over the threshold with her fringe bright and her chin up, quick and sharp and amused, in the manner of a bird entering a room it has already decided to rule. She said, "Don't mind me," in the cheerful voice she kept for the tea house. She set the basket on a chair. She turned to look at the camera.

And Zhaoyu, who was in the middle of saying, "And now we return to our scheduled flour, with a short remark about the humidity," stopped.

It was the most complete stop she had ever seen. His mouth stayed open. The camera tilted, a few degrees, toward the ceiling. His whole easy, boneless body, which had been draped over the tripod like a coat over a chair, went rigid from the neck down, and a slow tide of colour rose from his collar to the roots of his hair.

"Hello, Zhaoyu," said Tang Rui.

"Hello," said Zhaoyu.

"You have your hair in your eyes."

"I do. I do, yes. It is a, it is an artistic choice." He pushed it back. It fell forward again. He pushed it again, with more force, and knocked the ring light, which swung wildly and cast a long white beam across the kitchen. "We are, we were just, there is a comment."

"I can see that."

"It says, " He peered at the screen, with enormous concentration. His voice was high and strange. "It says, who is the lady in the green jacket. Someone has, I don't know. Typed. About you."

"How kind," said Tang Rui.

"I think," said Zhaoyu, "that I should, I might, the weather. Is nice. For June."

Tang Rui looked at him for a long moment. She tilted her head. Her eyes, bright and shrewd and just slightly softer than usual, travelled slowly down the length of the tripod, along his tall awkward frame, and back up to his scarlet face. Wenxi, at the counter with a lump of dough in her hands, saw the corner of her mouth move.

It was such a small thing. It might have been the light. But the look on Tang Rui's face, for the space of a heartbeat, was the look of a woman who has been handed a very strange present and does not yet know what to do with it, and is not entirely displeased.

"I brought the receipts," she said briskly. "For the committee. Don't let me interrupt."

She put a folder on the table. She left. She did not look back. And Zhaoyu stood in the middle of the kitchen with a camera in his hand and a red dot blinking on the screen, and an expression of the purest bewilderment, like a man who has walked into a glass door and found it was a window.

"What just happened?" said Wenxi, after a moment.

"Nothing," said Zhaoyu faintly. "Nothing at all. I'm going to take a note."

He took out his phone. He opened the spreadsheet. He looked at it for a long time. Then, very slowly, as though it might go off, he created a new tab, and typed one word at the top.

Wenxi, who had been standing near enough to see, did not say anything. She thought that she would let the new tab alone.

* * *

The broadcast ended at half past ten, on a note of such perfect and ordinary happiness that she thought for a moment it must have been staged.

They had a final minute. Zhaoyu raised his hand and counted down, and the numbers in the corner climbed to two hundred and forty, and the comments rushed past like sparrows, and he said, "Any last words?"

"Thank you for coming," said Wenxi. "And, please, if you're ever in Yunxi, come and eat something."

She smiled at the lens, the real one this time, crooked and warm. Then she glanced sideways at the man beside her, out of habit, out of a sort of curiosity, to see what he would say.

Chengyan was not looking at the camera.

He was looking at her. He stood with his hands loose at his sides and his face quite open, in the plain morning light from the window, and when he spoke it was in the low even voice in which he said everything that mattered.

"She makes the best cakes in the whole river country," said Chengyan. "I'd like everyone to know. She doesn't think so. But she does."

There was a silence.

"That wasn't in the script," said Zhaoyu, very softly.

"There wasn't a script," said Chengyan.

The red dot went out.

She stayed up late that night, in the little room under the rabbit, with her laptop on her knees and a cup of cold tea beside her.

It was a stupid thing to do. She knew it was stupid. The committee had put the recording up at six, and by nine it had been watched four thousand times. She had made herself a rule, at supper, that she would not look at it. She had broken it at ten past nine. She had broken it again at half past ten. And now it was midnight, and she was watching, for the fifth time, the final fifteen seconds.

She watched the camera swing. She watched herself turn her head. She watched the small, startled, uncontrolled expression cross her own face as she saw him looking at her, and the way her mouth went soft and her hand went to her pocket.

She watched him say it.

She made the best cakes in the whole river country. She doesn't think so. But she does.

Her heart was going very fast. She pressed the heel of her hand against it, to keep it quiet. She felt like a woman standing on a platform with a train coming, a big, bright, unstoppable one, and no idea which way to run.

She pulled the strip of red paper out from under her pillow. She laid it across her knees. Age seven. CY: Taller. SW: Because of his hair.

"I know the numbers," she whispered. "All of them."

He had kept a copy, she thought. Or he had kept the whole thing in his head, a metre of arguments, for eight years. Either way, he had stood in front of three hundred strangers and said it aloud, as plainly as the price of rice. And he had not known that the original lay in her pocket, warm with her own hand, and had lain there ever since the night she came home.

The laptop was still playing. It had gone on to the next recording, someone else's livestream, a stout man with a tray of chestnuts. She did not hear it.

She thought, I should tell him.

She thought of Clause Seven, and Clause Five, and the long list of true things she was not saying. She thought of the email in the grey font, and the box with the spatula, and the nine days of fine. There was only one thing in the whole of the world that she could think of that was harder than telling a man you had kept his paper for eight years. It was telling him why.

She turned the laptop off.

She folded the red strip along its old creases. Then, with a kind of shaky decision, she put it back in her pocket, not under the pillow, because it seemed to her that a thing like that ought to be near the part of her that was beating, and she lay down in the dark and listened to a nightjar in the willow.

It was a long time before she slept. And the very last thing she thought, with her hand flat against the paper and her cheek on the cool linen, was that for the first time in eight years she had stopped hearing the question. It had been going round and round in her head since she stepped off the train, like a dog chasing its tail. Why did you leave?

Now it had changed.

Now it was, quite simply, how can I stay.