From Grandma Su's recipe book, page two: "A kitchen forgives a late riser. It never forgives a cold oven."

The first thing Wenxi heard when she woke was water.

It came from somewhere above and to the left, a small, patient sound, tink, and then a pause long enough for her to start to hope it had stopped, and then tink again. She lay with her eyes shut and counted. Four seconds between drops. It had been four seconds last night, too, when she had finally crept upstairs and crawled under the quilt with her shoes still on.

She opened her eyes.

The ceiling of her old bedroom had a stain on it the shape of a rabbit, brown at the edges and paler in the middle, and it had not been there when she left. Beneath it, on the floorboards, sat a red enamel basin with a white rim, and in the basin, a thin and cheerful ring of ripples spread outward from the centre every four seconds, on the dot.

Outside the window the sky was still the grey-blue of very early morning. The room smelled of damp plaster and old cotton and, faintly, through the floorboards, of something warm and yeasty that her body recognised before her mind did. Her stomach turned over in welcome.

The narrow bed. The quilt with its faded peonies. The shelf along the wall, still crowded with the sketchbooks she had filled at fourteen and fifteen, cakes with impossible towers, cakes shaped like pagodas, cakes with sugar-paste dragons curling up the sides. Someone had been dusting them. Someone had been dusting them for eight years, in a room nobody slept in.

She rolled onto her back and looked at the rabbit.

Then, all at once, last night arrived: the courtyard, the moon, the tarpaulin, the dark straight line of his shoulders against the sky. Don't stand there. She pulled the quilt over her face and lay in the cotton-smelling dark and tried to remember whether she had said anything at all after that, or whether she had simply stood there like a stone and then gone inside.

She had gone inside. She was fairly sure she had said goodnight to the jasmine.

"Get up," she told herself through the quilt. "You have a shop. You have a plan. You can die of embarrassment later, on a schedule."

The bucket went tink.

She got up.

The kitchen light was already on when she came down the stairs, a warm yellow wedge across the passage floor. She stopped in the doorway and simply looked.

Grandma Su stood at the big work table with her back to the door, a small, straight figure in a blue apron and a hairnet, her white hair tucked up neatly beneath it. The table was an old thing of dark wood, its surface scarred with seventy years of knives and rolling pins, and Grandma's forearms moved over a mound of dough on it in a slow, rhythmic fold. Push. Turn. Fold. The sound was soft and muffled, like someone breathing in their sleep. Steam rose from a tall bamboo basket on the stove. The window above the sink was fogged along the edges, and behind it the sky was only just beginning to pale.

"You're up early," Grandma said, without turning around.

Wenxi's throat did something complicated. "Grandma."

"Sleep badly? You always did, just like your mother. Go and wash your face. There's hot water in the flask." Push. Turn. Fold. "Your eyes are puffy."

That was it. That was the entire greeting. Eight years since Wenxi had last slept under this roof for more than a night, and Grandma was speaking to her as if she had come back from the morning market with a bag of onions.

She had prepared for this on the train. She had prepared speeches. There had been a version where she explained everything with brisk good humour, and a version where she cried a little and was held, and a version, the most carefully built of all, where she said she had simply taken a long holiday and wasn't it lovely to be home. She had polished every one of them against the dark window for an hour. And now none of them fitted into the shape of this kitchen.

"I'll wash," she heard herself say.

"Good girl."

She went to the sink, filled the basin with water that was almost too hot, and bent over it with the steam rising into her face. When she straightened up, the little bamboo steamer on the stove had been moved aside, a bowl had appeared at the corner of the table, and Grandma was already ladling something into it.

It was congee, thick and creamy, the rice cooked down to silk. A pale salted duck egg, split open, was set in the centre like a small sun, and on the side, in a tiny dish, lay three curls of pickled radish. It was the breakfast she had eaten every morning from the age of five. She sat down on the stool in front of it without really deciding to, and the first spoonful was so warm and so utterly, unbearably familiar that she had to put the spoon down for a moment and look at the wall.

Grandma sat across from her with her own bowl, and ate, and talked.

She talked about the weather, which had been miserable. She talked about the price of bamboo shoots, which was a scandal, and about Auntie Zhou from the vegetable stall, who had married off her third son and was insufferable about it. She talked about the new boat steps by the east dock and the pigeon that had taken up residence in the bell tower and had to be spoken to firmly. She did not ask why Wenxi had come. She did not ask how long she was staying, or whether work was well, or why a girl who had a proper job in a proper city would arrive on the last train of the night with one suitcase and a face like a sheet of paper.

Wenxi ate, and listened, and felt something in her loosen. It was an enormous relief. It was a relief so large that she nearly cried into the egg.

And then, on the heels of the relief, came something else, something thin and cold that slid in beneath it. Too easy, said a small voice at the back of her mind. Nobody's that incurious. Not Grandma. Grandma, who could tell from the way you stirred your tea whether you had quarrelled with your friend.

"Grandma," she said, carefully. "Aren't you going to ask me why I..."

"Eat first."

Grandma did not look up from her bowl. Her voice was perfectly mild.

"Questions are cold things," she said. "They should wait until the congee has finished being hot. Besides." A small, dry pause. "If a person wants to tell you something, they'll tell you. And if they don't, they'll tell you later, and it will taste better."

Wenxi opened her mouth, closed it again, and ate her egg.

After breakfast, while Grandma went to put the first trays of dough to rise, Wenxi took a mug of tea and went to inspect the shop.

She told herself it was a practical thing. A tour of the premises, the way she would have walked through a client's kitchen before quoting for a wedding: front to back, count the equipment, note the faults. It was a way of putting something between herself and the feeling of being home. Be professional, she told herself, and pushed open the door to the front room.

It was worse than she had feared.

The glass display case, the same one she had pressed her nose against as a child, had a crack running diagonally across the left pane, held together with a long strip of yellowed tape. The sliding door stuck. The shelves of wooden moulds above it were dusty, the carved faces of fish and peonies and lucky coins gone dull. The little stove corner where they brewed tea for customers had a kettle with a dent in it, and the floor tiles by the door were lifted and worn to a dip in the middle, from seventy years of feet.

She went through to the bake room. The oven was an old, brick-faced beast that Grandfather had built before she was born, and beside it stood a cheaper electric one with a cracked door seal and a hand-written note taped to the front: Hold shut with chair. She lifted the chair away, opened the door, and a thin ribbon of heat escaped from the seam in the glass. The thermostat dial had been rubbed smooth by decades of thumbs, and none of the markings were legible any more.

It was not a bakery in need of a coat of paint. It was a bakery being held together by affection and string.

The ledger lay on the counter, where Grandma kept it, a fat green book with a broken spine. Wenxi should not have opened it. She opened it. The columns were in Grandma's small, upright handwriting, in black ink for the sales and red ink for the costs, and the first thing she noticed was how much red there was. Red for flour, red for sugar, red for the electricity bill, and red, circled twice, beside a note that read roof, estimate, and then a number that made her mouth go dry.

The second thing she noticed was the price list pinned to the wall above the till.

Qingtuan, three yuan each. Mung bean cakes, four. Osmanthus rice cakes, five. She looked at the sheet, and at the ledger, and did the sum in her head the way she had done a thousand quotes for a thousand clients, ingredient by ingredient, hour by hour, and the answer arrived so quickly and so cleanly that she felt slightly sick.

Grandma was selling everything at the price she had set ten years ago. The cost of flour had doubled. The cost of everything had doubled. The shop had been quietly, patiently, cheerfully losing money for years, because nobody on Sixth Alley should have to pay more than they used to for a sweet bun.

"Oh, Grandma," Wenxi whispered, to the empty room.

There was a number in her head now, one with a great many zeros, and it sat on her chest like a bag of flour. She had a very good salary in her savings account, or had had. She had a degree, and seven years of experience, and a head full of what would have been very expensive ideas. And she had nothing to show for any of it that would put a roof on this house.

The bell over the door rang at seven sharp.

She had expected a trickle. Instead the shop filled up like a bath. Auntie Zhou of the vegetable stall came in first, with her round face and her string bag, and stopped dead on the threshold. "Xi Xi!" she cried. "Little Xi! Look at you!" Within ten seconds Wenxi's cheeks had been pinched, her shoulders squeezed, and her hands clasped in two enormous warm ones, while Auntie Zhou examined her at arm's length like a tomato at market.

"Thin," she pronounced. "Far too thin. They don't feed you in that city, do they? Hui, she's thin!"

"I'm eating fine," said Wenxi.

After Auntie Zhou came old Mr. Qian, with his songbird in its cage and his stick, who patted her hand and told her she had her grandfather's chin. After him came the two Wei sisters from the tailor's shop, who were exactly as identical as they had been twenty years ago and still finished each other's sentences. Then a young father with a baby in a sling, who she did not know but who clearly knew her. Then the man from the hardware store. Then a group of schoolchildren, who bought three qingtuan each with coins from their pockets and stared at her with enormous solemn eyes.

"Xi Xi's back," they said, one after another, as if reporting it to a roll call. "Su Ji's Xi Xi is back."

"How's the big city?" asked Mr. Qian.

"Wonderful!" said Wenxi, with the full dimple. "Busy, of course. Always something going on. But it's so nice to slow down for a bit."

"A bit?" said one of the Wei sisters.

"Just a visit," said Wenxi. "I'm helping out."

"A good girl, a good girl," said the other Wei sister, and patted her arm, and bought six mung bean cakes.

By nine o'clock the muscles around her mouth ached as if she had been holding a heavy tray there. She smiled at a woman asking about her career. She smiled at a man asking whether she had a boyfriend. She smiled at the baby, who looked back at her with perfect infant honesty and then burped. Everyone was kind. Everyone was so kind that she began to feel as though she were being slowly smothered under a warm blanket.

"The Gu boy fixed our shutter last week, you know," Auntie Zhou remarked, as she counted out coins for a bag of rice cakes. "Wouldn't take a cent. That one's a rare sort. Ah, but you'd know that, wouldn't you? The two of you used to be thick as thieves."

Wenxi's smile did not move. Her fingers, on the counter, pressed flat.

"We were children," she said lightly. "It's been so long."

"Mm," said Auntie Zhou, in exactly the voice Uncle Ma had used, and took her change and left.

The rush thinned out around ten. Wenxi sagged against the counter, wiped her hands on a cloth, and let her face go slack for the first time all morning. In the back, Grandma was humming under her breath, some old opera tune she had hummed for as long as Wenxi could remember. The ovens ticked. A fly bumped against the window.

She was trying to work out where, in the middle of all this, she was supposed to start, when Grandma came through from the kitchen carrying a small cardboard box.

It was a plain white one, the kind Su Ji had always used, with the shop's name stamped on the lid in red ink. Grandma set it carefully on the counter, tied it with a loop of red string, and fussed with the bow until it sat just right. Through the gap in the lid, Wenxi caught a glimpse of pale green. Qingtuan, still faintly steaming.

"Take this next door, would you?" Grandma said.

The cloth stopped in Wenxi's hands.

"Next door," she said.

"Mm."

"To the workshop."

"Is there another next door?"

Wenxi set the cloth down very carefully. "Grandma, I've got a lot to do. I haven't even looked at the stock yet. And the oven needs, um, someone to look at the oven. And the front window." She cast around desperately. "Zhaoyu could take it. Lin Zhaoyu. He's always about at this time of the morning, isn't he? He could drop it off."

"Zhaoyu's gone to the timber yard."

"Then, I mean, my hands are sticky."

"You've just washed them."

"I could... post it?"

Grandma gave her a long, steady look over the top of her glasses. It was a look Wenxi remembered intimately, from the time she had tried to claim that the missing sugar had gone to a mouse. There was no heat in it, no accusation. It only waited, as the whole of Grandma's patient face waited, until the excuse collapsed under its own weight.

"Xi Xi," Grandma said, and her voice was perfectly kind. "Who said it was for you?"

Wenxi blinked.

"I didn't ask you to take it for yourself. I made it for the Gu house. Old Mr. Gu's knee has been playing him up since the rains, and A-Yan hasn't sat down to a proper meal in a week. He eats standing up over that work table like a horse." She patted the lid. "Somebody has to put a bite of something warm in front of him. And it's on your way."

"It is not on my way," said Wenxi weakly. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Then it's on your way to nowhere. Same thing."

There was a small, bright gleam at the back of Grandma's eyes. It was there for only a moment, a faint, mischievous flicker, like a light left on in a back room, and then it was gone again behind the patient mild face. But Wenxi had seen it, and the cold thin voice at the back of her mind spoke up once more.

"Grandma," she said slowly. "Did you... know I was coming?"

"I know the roof leaks," said Grandma, "and the girl is thin, and the tea is going cold. Go on, now. It's getting cold, too."

She pushed the box across the counter with one finger, turned, and went back into the kitchen, humming. A moment later the humming resolved into a tune. It was, Wenxi realised with a jolt, a wedding song.

The door of the Gu Family Workshop stood at the end of the alley, not thirty paces from the door of Su Ji.

It was a wide, double door of dark wood, scarred and polished by years of hands, with a brass handle worn to a bright curve and a plain board above it bearing the name in black characters. A smell came from behind it: fresh pine shavings, linseed oil, the sweet resinous dust of cut cedar. Somewhere inside, a plane was moving along a length of wood with a long, even, whispering stroke. Shhk. Shhk. Shhk. It was the most peaceful sound in the world, and it was the sound of her entire childhood, and she stood on the threshold with a box of still-warm dumplings in her hands and felt as if she were about to step off a cliff.

She raised her fist to knock.

She lowered it.

It was only a door. It was a door she had run through ten thousand times without knocking, a door she had once slammed in a rage at the age of nine because he had told her that her rabbit cake looked like a potato. It was a door with a man behind it who had said eleven words to her last night and none of them had been hello.

She counted to ten. Then she counted to ten again. She adjusted the string on the box. She fixed a bit of hair behind her ear, and told herself that she was a grown woman with a degree and a portfolio and a recipe for a three-tier lavender cake that had once won a regional award, and that she was not afraid of a carpenter.

Shhk, went the plane. Shhk. Shhk.

Her hand rose to the door and stopped an inch from the wood, trembling very slightly, like a leaf deciding whether to fall.

Inside, the plane went quiet.