From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Clause 7: "The Parties shall not raise or inquire into the events of the preceding eight years."

The task was called Walk in Their Shoes, and Tang Rui announced it with the particular glow of a woman who has invented a new way to make other people suffer.

"One day," she said, pinning the notice to the board outside the tea house. "Each of you does the other's work, in public, in front of visitors. She builds. He bakes. The judges will be scoring for humility, for teamwork, and for, I quote the committee, the willingness to be bad at something in front of strangers."

"We are already very good at that," said Wenxi.

"You are the best in the contest," said Tang Rui warmly. "That is why you are being given a harder test."

They drew lots for the order. Chengyan lost, which meant that he would go first, and on Wednesday morning at eight o'clock he stood in the front room of Su Ji in a borrowed white apron, with his sleeves pushed to the elbow and the expression of a man about to be operated on.

But it was Wenxi who went first, in the end, because the visitors came early, and the workshop was nearer the dock.

* * *

She had imagined a lathe. She had imagined, in a vague and rather noble way, a long clean plank and a gleaming blade and a pale curl of wood rising from it like smoke. She had not imagined the noise.

The Gu Family Workshop was loud. It was loud in a dozen different pitches at once: the whine of the electric sander, the ringing tap of Zhaoyu's mallet on a chisel, the rasp of a saw in the back room, and under it all the deep, slow, patient breathing of old Mr. Gu's radio, which played opera at the volume of a man who had been going deaf for twenty years and saw no reason to apologise. Sawdust hung in the sunbeams. The air tasted of resin. Twenty visitors from the county had crowded in at the door with their cameras, and were gazing about them with the reverent faces of people in a cathedral.

"Right," said Chengyan.

He had put a plank on the bench. It was a length of pale pine, about the size of her forearm, clamped at both ends. Beside it lay a hand plane, a small old one with a worn beechwood body and a blade that had been sharpened so many times it had gone narrow as a finger.

"This is a smoothing plane," he said. "It takes off a very thin layer. You push it along the grain, with even pressure, and the wood comes away in a ribbon. It's not difficult."

"Then why are you saying it like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like a doctor," said Wenxi, "before he says it won't hurt."

The visitors laughed. She picked up the plane. It was heavier than it looked, and warm from the sun, and the wood of the handle had been polished by so many hands that it fitted her palm like a stone from a stream. She set it on the plank, planted her feet, and pushed.

It skipped. The blade bit in, caught, juddered, and went sideways with a noise like a cat being stepped on. A long ragged splinter leapt off the board and landed in the hair of the retired customs officer, who had come back for a second tour and was standing at the front.

"Wonderful," he said, picking it out. "A souvenir."

"Again," said Chengyan.

She did it again. The second board came out with a trench down the middle. The third, she gripped so hard that the plane dug in and stopped dead, and she stood there with her arms locked and her face scarlet, and the whole workshop could hear Zhaoyu in the corner breathing through his nose.

"It's too eager," said Chengyan.

She went still.

He had said it quietly. He had said it as he might have commented on the weather, and she did not think anyone else had caught it over the radio. But it landed in her like a dropped coin, bright and ringing, and she remembered a kitchen, and a piece of sunken cake in his palm.

"Don't you dare use that against me," she said, very low.

"It's a technical term."

"It's a, "

"Let me show you."

He stepped behind her.

She had known he would. It was the only way to teach it, and she had watched Mr. Gu show Zhaoyu the same grip in this same spot a hundred times, a tall figure leaning over a smaller one, a patient hand over a clumsy one. She had told herself she was prepared. She stood very straight, with the plane in both fists, and fixed her eyes on the grain of the pine.

His chest settled against her back.

It was not quite a touch. It was the warmth of him, the sheer solid heat of a large man standing close in a cold room, and a faint pressure through her thin cotton blouse as he leaned forward. His breath moved the hair above her ear. His right arm came round her, past her shoulder, and his hand closed over her hand on the plane.

"Loosen," said Chengyan, in her ear.

"I am loose."

"You're holding it like it owes you money."

She made herself open her fingers. His palm covered the back of her hand, rough and broad and dry, and with his other hand he took her left wrist and turned it, so gently that she hardly felt him do it, until the heel of her palm rested on the front knob of the plane.

"Weight forward," he said. "Don't push. Lean. The tool is doing the work. You are only telling it where to go."

He moved her arm.

The blade slid. It went along the board with a long soft whisper, shhhk, like a breath let out, and a curl of pale wood rose in front of the mouth of the plane, thin as paper and perfectly whole, and curled over, and dropped.

Nobody said anything. In the silence she heard the opera on the radio swell and break into a high, sweet cry.

"Again," said Chengyan.

He moved her arm again. Shhhk. Another ribbon. She felt it through her whole body, the way the resistance of the wood gave way under a steady pressure, the faint hum that ran up the handle into her wrist. She felt the slow rise and fall of his chest behind her. She became aware of her own breathing, which had fallen into step with his without her consent.

She tried to keep her voice ordinary.

"Is this how you teach Zhaoyu?"

"No. I shout at Zhaoyu."

"I heard that," said Zhaoyu, from the corner, and was not heard by anyone.

The third ribbon was longer than the others. It came off the board in one unbroken spiral, twelve inches, fifteen, curling over her wrist and onto the floor, and she heard a murmur go up from the visitors, and the click of cameras. His hand was still over hers. He had not taken it away. She did not know when he had stopped guiding and begun only to hold.

She said, without turning her head, "You can let go."

"I know."

Neither of them moved.

The sun had shifted through the high window and lay across the bench in a gold bar, and in it the wood curls glowed like shavings of honey. His thumb lay along the edge of her hand. She could feel its pulse. It was going rather fast, for a man who was only demonstrating a plane.

"That's very good, dear," said Mei Lanying, who had arrived without anyone noticing and was sitting on an upturned crate by the door with a flask of tea. "A natural. She has the shoulders for it."

Chengyan let go as if she had burned him.

* * *

He had been wrong about the dough.

He had thought it would be like clay, or putty, or the plaster he had once spread on a ceiling: a thing that did what you told it, if you were firm enough. He had imagined himself standing at the long scarred table in the kitchen of Su Ji with his hands buried to the wrist and the bread rising obediently under his fingers.

Instead the dough had stuck to him.

It had begun with the fingers. Then the wrists. By the end of the first ten minutes it had made its way up both forearms, into the hair on the backs of his hands, and onto his sleeves, where it dried in grey crusts that cracked when he moved. A string of it hung from his elbow. There was a patch of it on his chin, where he had rubbed it with his knuckle, and a gobbet on his left eyebrow that he did not know about.

"Fold," said Grandma Su.

"I am folding."

"You are strangling it. Fold, turn, push. Like a man putting a baby to sleep."

"I have never put a baby to sleep."

"You will," said Grandma serenely, and turned away to the stove with her shoulders shaking.

The visitors had a view of the table through the open door of the shop, and they had come in a pack, with their phones out. He could hear them. He could hear a child say, in a clear carrying voice, "Mama, the big man is losing," and a woman reply, "Hush, he's trying."

He was trying. He folded. He turned. He pushed with the heel of his hand, as he had been shown, and the dough sighed and slumped back and glued itself to the board. He added flour. He added too much. A white cloud rose, and he sneezed, and the sneeze sent a fresh spray of dough across the table and onto the bridge of Grandma's glasses.

She took them off. She wiped them on her apron. She looked at him with an expression of the most heartfelt benevolence, and then she put one hand over her mouth, and her whole small body began to shake. She laughed without a sound, silently, helplessly, leaning on the dresser, with tears running down her face, for what felt like a quarter of an hour.

"I am sorry," said Chengyan, with dignity.

"Don't be," gasped Grandma. "Oh, A-Yan. Don't be. I have not enjoyed myself so much since your grandmother put a frog in the minister's hat."

He looked at his hands. They were white to the elbow. A new sort of feeling stole over him, slowly, like warmth coming back into a numb limb, and he realised that it was not humiliation at all. It was something stranger. He was standing in the kitchen where he had eaten supper every night of his childhood, with dough in his eyebrow, and the old woman who had fed him was laughing till she cried, and he was not afraid of anything.

He went back to the dough.

He did not make the bread rise. That was a thing that happened, he gathered, by itself, in the dark, while one was not looking. But by noon he had a heap of small hand-shaped pieces on the tray, and one in the middle that was his own work: a round, lumpy, off-centre little bun, with a pinch of the dough drawn up at the top into something that was either a flower or a bruise.

He set it down. He looked at it. It leaned.

"It's got character," said a voice at his shoulder.

She had come in from the workshop with sawdust in her hair. She stood at the table in a stiff blue apron, with her cuffs rolled and a long pale curl of pine still caught in her ponytail like a ribbon, and she was looking at the bun with her head on one side.

"It leans," said Chengyan.

"It leans with confidence." She picked it up. She turned it over in her palm, solemn as a jeweller, and sniffed it. Then she bit it, in the middle, and chewed.

He watched her. He could not help it. He watched her eyes close, and her jaw work, and the slow, thoughtful movement of her throat. The bun had been steamed too long. It was dense and damp and the crust had split. It was, he knew, not good.

She swallowed. She opened her eyes, and they were very bright.

"It's the best one I've ever eaten," said Wenxi.

"That's not true."

"It is. It's lumpy and wet and it tastes of flour and effort. It's wonderful."

"You've eaten your own grandmother's cooking for twenty-six years."

"And I'm telling you," said Wenxi, "that you've beaten it." She finished the bun, licked a crumb from her thumb, and fixed him with a stern look that did not quite hold. "Don't argue. It's my professional opinion."

He wanted to argue. He found that he could not remember how.

* * *

They sat on the bench in front of the shop for the photographs.

It was the committee's idea. The visitors had gone through both trades, one after the other, and now a young man with a very large camera wanted a picture of the two of them side by side, in the sun, in their borrowed aprons, with the evidence of the day still upon them. They sat on the long bleached bench beneath the window, a decent foot apart. Then the young man said, "Closer," and they moved six inches. Then he said, "Closer," and they stopped moving at all, because there was no room.

Her shoulder pressed against his arm. His knee pressed against hers. She was covered, from the crown to the ankles, with a fine pale film of sawdust, and he was covered with flour, and between them, where the two met, a drift of the two had settled along the line of the bench like snow against a wall.

"You smell of cedar," said Wenxi, to the camera.

"You smell of buns."

"That's lovely. Don't move," said the young man.

They did not move. A fly landed on the end of her nose. She did not flinch. He saw her cross her eyes at it, very slightly, in a way that was meant only for him, and felt a laugh begin in his chest, and put it down with an effort.

The shutter clicked a dozen times. When it was over, the young man thanked them, and went away with the visitors, and the bench was left empty in the sun with the two of them still on it.

Neither stood up.

The afternoon had gone soft and slow. From the kitchen came the clink of Grandma stacking trays. From the workshop came the faint thin scrape of Zhaoyu, who had been left in charge, and was pretending to sweep. The canal glimmered at the end of the alley. A cat rolled on the warm stone.

"Can I tell you something?" said Wenxi.

He turned his head.

She was not looking at him. She was looking at her hands, which lay open in her lap, covered in pale gold dust. A long curl of pine had come down out of her hair and hung against her cheek.

"It isn't a clause," she said. "It's not about the, you know. It's small. It's a trade secret."

"Go on."

"I like the workshop better than the bakery."

He waited.

"The smell," she said. "When I was little I used to go in and out of your door all day, and I'd stand in the middle of the floor with my eyes shut and just breathe. Pine and oil and that warm sweet thing, the cedar. It was so quiet. I mean, it was loud. But it was a quiet kind of loud. And at Su Ji it was always, the oven, you know. Heat, and rush, and the clock. Everything had to be ready. I used to love your side of the wall because nothing had to be ready. You were just making a thing, and it would be done when it was done." She stopped. A tiny smile pulled at her mouth. "I've never told anyone. I think it's treason."

"It's not treason."

"It's a betrayal of my entire family."

"Your grandmother knows," said Chengyan.

"She does not."

"She knows everything." He picked a curl of pine out of her hair, quite gently, and held it up to the light. "She told me once that you were the only child she ever knew who fell asleep on a bag of sawdust and woke up happy."

She laughed, but it was a shaky one. She turned her face away.

He sat there with the curl of wood between his fingers. It was not a clause. The Agreement had never spoken about trade secrets, or smells, or the shape of a girl asleep on a sack in the corner of a workshop. It had nothing to say about any of it. He thought of the seventh article, with its heavy black underscore, and its ban on the eight years, and for the first time it struck him as a curious sort of fence, one built with great care around an empty field.

He had not known he was going to speak.

"I like the smell of baking better," said Chengyan.

She went still.

"Than wood?" she said, after a moment.

"Than wood."

"You're a carpenter."

"I know." His voice was rough. He kept his eyes on the wall of the shop, the whitewash and the old brown beams. "I've been a carpenter since I could hold a chisel. I'll be one till I die. But when the wind comes down the alley in the morning and I smell it, sugar and rice and that, that toasted thing your grandmother does, I stop. Wherever I am. I put down what I'm holding." He paused. "I have done it for years. I never knew why."

The cat on the cobbles got up, stretched, and walked away.

He heard her breathe in. It was a small unsteady sound, as if she had been about to say something and had thought better of it. He did not look round. He did not dare. The sun lay warm across his knees, and the flour on his sleeves had begun to flake and drift away, and somewhere in the shop a clock struck three.

He thought, she will say a thing now, and I will not know what to do with it.

She did not say anything. Her hand moved, quite slowly, along the bench between them, and came to rest an inch from his on the grey old plank, palm down, not touching. Fine gold dust lay over her knuckles, and over his.

They sat there for a long time with the two hands lying side by side, and the bench between them warm as bread, and neither of them said a word.

* * *

Wenxi did not go home that evening. She went to the bridge, and sat on the parapet, and watched the water.

She was still covered in sawdust. She had meant to wash. But the thought of going back to the kitchen, and the bright inquisitive eyes of Grandma, and the little dry hum that would begin as soon as she crossed the door, was more than she could bear. So she sat with her chin on her knees and the evening light on the canal, and she turned a curl of pine over and over in her fingers, the one he had taken out of her hair, which he had handed back to her, without a word, as she got up from the bench.

I like the smell of baking better, he had said.

It did not mean anything. It was a remark about a kitchen. It was a thing a man said to be kind, on a warm afternoon, to a woman who had made a confession of her own. She told herself so firmly, three times, in the voice she used on difficult customers.

But a man who put down what he was holding. A man who stopped, wherever he was, and stood still in the wind.

She thought of him at twenty-one, at his bench, with the door open. She thought of the morning air coming down the alley, smelling of sugar, from a kitchen where a girl had once stood on a stool to reach the table. And then, for eight years, from the same kitchen, only an old woman and an opera tune, and the faint warm smell of rice, and no girl at all.

He had been stopping. For eight years, whenever the wind came, he had put down his tools and stood quite still.

She pressed the curl of pine against her mouth. It smelled of resin and sun. She sat there while the swallows came over, and the lamps lit one by one along the canal, and the first star came out over the willow, and she did not take the red strip from her pocket, because she did not trust what she would do with it.

But her hand, she found, was lying flat against it all the same.