From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Clause 5: "No real feelings shall be developed, expressed, or acted upon by either Party."

The dinner was held on a terrace over the water, at a restaurant called the Water Pavilion, and Wenxi arrived at it twenty minutes early because she had not been able to stand in her own bedroom a moment longer.

She had tried on four things. Tang Rui had lent her a fifth. It hung now in a paper bag from the crook of her arm, forgotten, because in the end she had worn the plain persimmon-coloured dress that Grandma had put out on the bed without a word, folded in tissue, with a sprig of dried osmanthus laid across it like a note. It was a soft, simple, round-necked thing, with sleeves to the elbow and a skirt that moved when she did. It was the colour of the last light on a roof. She had looked in the mirror and thought, that is not a person who has been practising a smile for ten weeks, and had been so startled that she had put on lipstick without noticing.

Now she stood at the rail of the terrace in the soft blue evening and watched the canal go by.

The Water Pavilion was the grandest place in Yunxi, which was to say that it had tablecloths. Its terrace jutted out over the water on thick black piles, and the lamps along its rail were small brass ones with frosted glass, each throwing a warm gold circle on the planks. A dozen tables stood in the open air. Most of them were already full. The task was a simple one: each couple was to dine in public, for visitors and judges, and be scored on what Madam Gao had called, with a faint gleam, natural chemistry. A dozen small cards had been set out on the cloths. Hers read, in Tang Rui's slanted hand, SU AND GU. WATER SIDE. TABLE SEVEN.

Table seven was at the very end, beside the rail. She did not sit. She was not certain her knees would hold.

Across the terrace, at a table beside the stairs, sat Dr. Pan Yue and Xu Jing, the dentist and the cellist, deep in conversation. The cello lay in its case at her feet. He was holding her hand across the cloth in a manner of such complete and unself-conscious tenderness that Wenxi had to look away. Two tables from them, in a pool of lamplight, Fang Dehai was tucking his napkin into his collar, and Mei Lanying, in a plum-coloured jacket, was looking at the menu through a pair of glasses on a chain. She glanced up. She did not wave. She merely inclined her head a quarter of an inch, in the manner of a queen acknowledging a subject, and went back to the menu.

Wenxi turned back to the water. A heron stood on the far bank, a grey pillar in the dusk.

She was not thinking of the dinner. She was thinking of a window on a stair, and a bar of sun, and a hand closing round hers. She had been thinking of it for two days. She had made dough with it, and swept the shop with it, and lain awake under the rabbit with it spread over her like a quilt. And with it, every time, came the same thought, calm as a stone dropping into a well.

I have to tell him.

* * *

Chengyan saw her from the bridge.

He had stopped at the crest of the arch without meaning to. The sun had gone down behind the roofs, and the whole canal below had turned the colour of pewter, with the lamps of the Water Pavilion reflected in it in long wavering ribbons. He could see the terrace laid out like a stage. He could see the tablecloths and the brass lamps and the little knots of diners, and at the far end, beside the rail, a single figure in orange, standing quite alone with her face to the water.

He stood there for what might have been a minute.

It was a ridiculous thing. He had seen her every day for a month. He had seen her in an apron, in a raincoat, in flour to the eyebrows and upside down in a drift of canvas. He had seen her cry with laughter on a roof in the rain. But he had not seen her look like this, still, in a plain dress, in the blue light, with her hair down on one shoulder and the lamplight finding the line of her neck, and something went through him, slow and total, like a tide coming in over a flat shore.

He had a speech. He had spent the afternoon composing it, in the workshop, among the shavings, while Zhaoyu pretended not to listen. The speech began, Good evening, and went on to mention the weather. He had it by heart.

He went down the steps, crossed the road, walked up the wooden stair and out onto the terrace, and arrived at table seven with his mouth open and not one word in it.

She turned.

He thought, very clearly, I have forgotten how to speak.

"Hello," said Wenxi.

"Mm," said Chengyan.

He heard it come out of him, that wretched syllable, like a nail out of a plank. He saw the corner of her mouth quiver. She put her hand over it, quickly, and turned her face towards the rail.

"I know," she said, through her fingers. "I know. You had a speech."

"It was about the weather."

"It's a lovely evening."

"That was the first line," said Chengyan, and sat down.

The waiter came with a pot of tea and a plate of cold sesame noodles. The lamps hissed gently. At the next table a baby was being sung to, in a thin sweet drone, and the heron on the far bank unfolded its wings and settled again. They talked, at first, about nothing. About the roof, which was done, and the slate, which was a very good grey. About Zhaoyu's spreadsheet, which had reached a fourth tab. About the festival, which was in nine days, and the hat that Tang Rui had made Wenxi promise to wear, which she described, with her hands, as roughly the size of a tray.

He listened. He ate his noodles with great care. He had never been in a restaurant with tablecloths, and he did not know what to do with the second fork.

"Use the outside one," said Wenxi, kindly.

"It's the same fork."

"It's a different fork. It's for fish."

"There is no fish."

"There will be," said Wenxi, and the first dish arrived, and it was fish.

They laughed. It was an easy, quiet laugh, and it seemed to him that something in the evening eased by a notch, like a belt let out. He told her about the mould, which was now on the wall of Su Ji beside the old ones, in a place of honour, between the fish and the lotus. She told him that Grandma had touched it every morning with the tips of her fingers, going past, without saying why. He told her that his grandfather had asked to see it, and had run his thumb along the willow for a long time, and said, "The plait is good. You did not rush it." And she told him, looking at her plate, that she had gone into the shop on the night he gave it to her, and sat down in the dark, and cried for no reason she could name.

"I'm sorry," she said, at once. "That's not what I meant to say."

"It's all right."

"It's not part of the, it isn't a thing we agreed."

"We agreed to tell the truth," said Chengyan. "Or as near as we could."

She looked up.

In the lamplight her face was very pale and very clear. She had stopped eating. Her hands were folded on the cloth, and he saw that they were not quite still. A moth had come to the nearest lamp and was battering itself softly against the glass, and the light caught it and threw its shadow, enormous, wavering, across the table between them.

"Can I say something?" said Wenxi. "Something real?"

"Yes."

She drew a breath.

* * *

"I'm afraid," said Wenxi, "that I'm not as good as people think."

It came out smaller than she had planned. She had meant to say it lightly, as a thing one tosses across a table. Instead it fell between them like a coin, and lay there, and she felt it ring.

"Everyone thinks I'm a success," she said. "They say it all the time. The girl who went away and made something of herself. The bright one. They say it to my grandmother, in front of me, and she says, yes, she is, and I smile, and it's like standing on a very thin piece of ice, with everyone saying, what a lovely solid floor." She laughed, shakily. "I'm good at looking as if I know what I'm doing. I've been good at it since I was about fourteen. I think it's the only thing I've ever really been good at. If I look like I'm fine, nobody checks."

He was very still.

"And I keep thinking," she said, "that one day somebody will check. And there'll be nothing underneath. And the thing they liked, the person they liked, it'll turn out to have been the smile. And they'll look at the rest of me and think, oh. Is that all?"

She stopped. She had not looked at him once. She had been looking at the moth. Now, with an effort that she felt in her chest, she turned her head, and found that he was looking at her with an expression she had never seen on his face. It was not pity. It was something far more careful, as though she had said a word in a language he had thought he had forgotten.

"I would check," said Chengyan.

"What?"

"If it were me. I would check. I'd look under the smile." His voice was low and slow, and he spoke with a kind of grave surprise, like a man discovering the weight of a tool in his own hand. "I've been looking under it since the day you came back. I haven't found a floor. I've found a, " He stopped. He rubbed his neck, once, hard, and let his hand fall. "I've found that you're not afraid of the thing you think you're afraid of. You're afraid of being seen. That's different. That I can tell you about."

"Can you?"

"A bit." He pushed his plate aside. He laid his hands flat on the cloth, as he did at his bench before he cut. "There's a joint, in my trade. A mortise and tenon. You cut a hole in one piece of wood. You cut a tongue on the other. They fit together and they hold for two hundred years, and you don't need a nail."

"I know the joint."

"It's the best one we have. But it needs both. You can cut the hole perfectly, and it's a good hole. And you leave it open, and you wait for the other piece. And if the other piece never comes, the hole stays there. Open. And people walk past it and think, there's something wrong with that wood. There's an empty place." He was looking at his hands. "But it isn't empty. It's cut to a shape. It's waiting for something that's exactly that size. That's not the same as empty. It's only harder to explain to someone who wants to know why you haven't filled it."

The moth battered against the glass. Somewhere, very far off, a boat horn sounded.

"Eight years," said Chengyan, very quietly, and then stopped dead.

"Chengyan."

"I'm sorry."

"No, "

"That's Clause Seven."

"I know it is," said Wenxi. Her voice shook. "I don't care."

He looked up.

They stared at each other across the white cloth. Between them the candle in its glass guttered and righted itself. She heard her own breath, shallow and quick, and his, slow and deep and held, and she knew with a cold clear certainty that neither of them had said anything they had meant to say. They had said every word of it. The mortise and the tenon and the open hole, and I'm afraid of being seen, and I would check. They had walked, in the space of four minutes, straight through the middle of the fifth clause, and out the other side, and now they were standing in a place the Agreement had never mapped.

"That was real," said Wenxi. It came out as a whisper.

"Yes."

"Both of ours."

"Yes."

"Clause Five," she said.

"I know."

"No real feelings shall be, "

"Developed, expressed, or acted upon," said Chengyan, in the flat voice of a man reading out a sentence. "I know. I wrote it."

"I wrote it down."

"I said it." He lifted his hand and let it fall. "I think I'm in breach."

"I think we both are."

There was a pause, enormous and bright. It was the kind of silence in which one hears the grain of a room: the creak of the pilings, the clink of a spoon, a woman three tables off saying, "Oh, but he is lovely." She felt a smile begin. It would not be held. It was a trembling, helpless, hurting thing, and she put her fingers over it, and saw that he was doing the same.

"We should," she said. "Perhaps we should say something funny."

"Something funny."

"For the judges."

"There is a judge behind that screen," said Chengyan, "who is writing this down."

"Is there?"

"Madam Gao. She has been writing since the noodles."

"What does she write?"

"I think she is writing, they are in love," said Chengyan, "and underlining it."

She tried to laugh. It did not come. She tried again, with a joke about the second fork, and the words dried in her mouth. He said something about the fish, and stopped halfway. They sat there, two grown people at a table with a candle between them, each trying with great determination to be amusing, and neither could find the first word.

"The tea is very good," said Wenxi.

"It's excellent."

"It's from the hills."

"Yes."

A cough sounded behind them.

The waiter stood at the table with a tray and an expression of enormous tact. He set down two small bowls of sweet osmanthus jelly, in which a single gold flower floated like a lost button. He said, in a murmur, "With the compliments of the lady in the plum jacket," and withdrew.

Wenxi looked across the terrace.

Mei Lanying was not looking at them. She was deeply engaged in a conversation with her husband about the proper way to eat a prawn. But a fold of her napkin had been laid, carefully, across the arm of her chair in the shape of a small neat heart.

* * *

She went home alone, by the long way, with the paper bag from Tang Rui still swinging from her arm.

The night had come down thick and warm. The canal shone under the stars. At the door of the Water Pavilion he had said, "Goodnight," and she had said, "Goodnight," and he had stood on the step with his hands in his pockets as though there were a last thing to say that he had not found, and then he had turned and gone up the road toward the workshop with that hesitating heel-first step that she would have known at the bottom of the canal.

She did not go to bed. She went up to the little room and sat at the desk where she had done twelve years of homework, and lit the lamp.

In the top drawer, under the pencil stubs, lay the fair copy of the Agreement. She had made it herself, on the Mill's flour forms, in her best legal hand, on the night of the signing, and he had one and she had one, and hers was creased from being folded and unfolded in the pocket of her cardigan. She spread it out under the lamp.

CLAUSE 5. NO REAL FEELINGS SHALL BE DEVELOPED, EXPRESSED, OR ACTED UPON BY EITHER PARTY.

She had underlined it twice. She had been very proud of the neat black strokes. She had written them, she remembered now, in a quick sharp hand, with her face stretched in a smile, while a man in the lamplight across the table had said it should be a clause, so that nobody gets, so that it's clear.

She took a pencil.

She drew a line through the first word. It was a thin grey stroke, quite straight. She looked at it. It did not look like anything. She drew another through the second, and another through the third, and when she had struck out all of it, the whole careful clause lay there in the lamplight under a row of little lines like a sentence behind bars.

She sat there. The moth she had brought home on her sleeve was bumbling about the lamp.

Then she took the pencil and wrote the clause out again underneath, in her round uphill hand, exactly as it had been. NO REAL FEELINGS. She looked at it. It was a sentence. It was perfectly clear. She could not for the life of her think what it meant.

She crossed it out.

She wrote it a third time. She crossed it out again. She did it, in a kind of slow dream, until the page was a grey thicket and the pencil was down to a stub, and she was not crying, though her face was wet, and her hand kept moving without her. Beneath her ribs, against the cardigan that hung on the chair, she could feel the shape of a strip of red paper that had been folded, and unfolded, and folded again, for eight years.

"I have to tell him," she said aloud.

The rabbit on the ceiling made no reply.

"Tomorrow," said Wenxi, to the lamp, and the moth, and the ruined clause. "In the morning. When I'm still honest."

She put out the light. She lay down in her clothes on top of the peony quilt, with the paper still in her hand, and listened to the old house settle round her in the dark. It was a long time before she slept. Through the thin wall, from the other side of the plaster, she heard a sound she knew: the slow, patient, rhythmic scrape of a plane going along a board, back and forth, back and forth, in a workshop where a lamp had been lit at midnight and nobody had put it out.