From Grandma Su's recipe book, page three: "Dough can tell when you are angry. It will not rise for you until you stop."

Gu Chengyan heard the footsteps before he heard the knock, and he did not look up.

He knew them. That was the trouble. In a town of three thousand people, he could have named any of them by their tread on the bluestone: Auntie Zhou's heavy flat-footed stride, old Qian's stick tapping a beat behind his feet, Zhaoyu's careless scuffle that always sounded like he was late for something that did not exist. But this one was light and quick and had a small hitch in the left step, the way it had since she was eleven and had jumped off the willow bridge for a dare and landed badly. The hitch had not gone away. He found that he had been listening for it, on and off, for eight years.

He ran the plane along the cedar plank in front of him. Shhk. A long pale curl rose and fell away from the blade. His hands knew this work so well that they went on without him, steady as a clock, while the rest of him stood very still inside his own skin and waited for the knock.

It did not come.

The footsteps had stopped at the door. For a long time there was nothing but the sound of his own plane and a tiny rustle of paper from outside. Then he heard her breathe in, the way a person breathes in before diving into cold water, and he put the plane down on the bench, and his hand, against his will, wiped itself on his apron.

"It's open," he said.

The door swung inward, and the morning light came in with her.

He had seen her last night, of course. He had seen her in the courtyard, in the moonlight, with her hair coming down and a look on her face like a person who had walked into a glass door. He had said something stupid about the roof. He had spent the whole of the rest of the night on the ridge pole with a hammer, driving nails into wood that did not need them, because it was better than going home and lying awake and looking at the wall that was shared with her kitchen.

In daylight it was worse. She was thinner than he remembered. Her hair was tied low, the way she wore it when she was working, and there was a smudge of flour on one cheekbone that she had not noticed. She wore a pale blue cardigan with the sleeves pushed up, and held in both hands, against her stomach like a shield, a white cardboard box tied with red string.

She was smiling. It was a very good smile. It had the dimple in it and everything. It was the smile of someone who had decided in advance exactly how this was going to go, and the only thing wrong with it was that it did not reach her eyes at all.

"Good morning," said Su Wenxi. "I brought breakfast!"

"Mm."

"Well. Grandma did. I'm only the delivery girl. It's qingtuan, the green ones, with red bean, and she said it's for your grandfather's knee, which I think is medically dubious, but I'm not going to argue, because you know what she's like. She'd win. Anyway. Here." She held out the box. "They're best warm. Or, well, they were best warm. Fifteen minutes ago."

She had been talking very fast. She always talked fast when she was nervous; she used to recite entire plots of television dramas to him in the dark when she was afraid of thunder. He took the box. Their fingers did not touch. He was careful about that.

"Thanks," he said.

There was a pause.

"That's it?" said Wenxi. "Thanks? I did a whole speech."

"It was a good speech."

"It was a very good speech. I'd worked on it." She laughed, a small bright thing like a coin dropped on a plate. "Eight years, and all I get is a thank-you and a, what was that, a grunt?"

"I didn't grunt."

"You said, 'mm.'"

"That's a word."

"It is absolutely not a word," said Wenxi, and for one second the old thing flickered between them, the easy bickering of two children arguing over whose turn it was to hold the ladder, and his chest went tight and warm in a way he had not given permission for.

He set the box on the end of the workbench, beside the whetstones, and he did not open it.

He saw her notice. It was only a flicker, a small drop in her eyes, a hairline crack in the shine. She covered it at once by turning, walking a slow circle around the workshop with her hands clasped behind her back, like a guest in a museum.

"You've changed it," she said.

"A bit."

"You've moved the lathe. And that's new, that long bench by the window. And there's, oh, you've got electric sanders now. Look at you. Entering the twenty-first century." She trailed a finger along a stack of drying boards, left a streak in the dust. "It smells the same, though."

"It would."

"Pine and oil and that sweet something. What is that, cedar?"

"Cedar."

"I always liked cedar."

"I know."

He had not meant to say it. It slipped out under the whisper of the shavings, and the room seemed to change its air pressure around the two words. Wenxi's hand stopped on the boards. She did not turn around.

Chengyan looked down at the whetstone. He realised he was holding his breath, so he let it out slowly, quietly, as if the building might hear him.

When she spoke again her voice had gone light and clear, with a little more polish on it than before.

"Who's that for?" she asked. "The cabinet. It's beautiful."

He followed her gaze. It was a medicine cabinet for the old pharmacy on Second Street, camphor wood with forty small drawers, each carved with the name of an herb in a tiny cramped hand. He was proud of it. He opened his mouth to say so, and what came out was, "Pharmacy."

"Wow. A whole word."

"It's a lot of drawers."

"I can see that." Her mouth twitched. "Forty. Who'd have thought a man could be so loquacious."

He almost smiled. He felt it begin in the corners and killed it at once, firmly, the way he would have killed a spark on a pile of shavings.

She was walking toward the back of the shop now, past the rack of chisels, past the long pegs where the aprons hung, and then she stopped. He knew exactly what she had seen before she did anything about it.

In the far corner, against the wall under the high window, stood a small square table, no taller than her hip. It was made of pale pearwood. One leg was shorter than the others, and had been fixed with a wedge, and on the top, if you tilted your head, you could still see the faint ring of a teacup she had once left there. It was covered from edge to edge with a white dust sheet, tucked in at each corner, neatly, like a bed.

He had made that table when he was thirteen. It was the first piece of furniture he had ever finished.

He watched her look at it, and he found that he could not move.

"That's..." Her voice cracked. She stopped and began again. "That's still here."

"It's in the way," said Chengyan. "I keep meaning to move it."

It was a lie so large and so obvious that the dust sheet itself seemed to flinch.

Wenxi gave a small laugh, not a bright one this time, and when she looked back at him, he saw it: for the space of a heartbeat there was nothing at all in her face, no smile, no polish, only an exposed and tired softness, like the inside of a shell. Something in him lurched toward it. Then it was gone, and she was bright again, and the smudge of flour on her cheek, absurdly, was still there.

"I should talk to you about the roof," she said.

The change of subject was so sharp he almost felt the draught. He recognised it for what it was, a door shutting politely, and he let it shut.

"All right," he said.

The door through which the story passes now is hers, and it opens on a different pair of eyes.

Wenxi stood in the middle of the Gu Family Workshop with her hands shaking slightly inside the sleeves of her cardigan and tried to remember how to be a professional.

She had done this a hundred times. A client, a quote, a negotiation. She sat across from people in glass-walled offices and explained, with a pleasant expression, exactly why their bride's dream cake would cost three times their budget, and then sold it to them anyway. She was good at it. She had a way of making people feel grateful to be told no.

She looked at Chengyan and her entire professional vocabulary left the building.

He had gone back to the workbench and stood with his arms folded, weight on one hip, and it was unfair, honestly unfair, that a person could simply grow into a shape like that. The boy she remembered had been all elbows. He had been tall and thin and permanently surprised by his own wrists. This man filled the room. There were pale scars on his forearms, a thin silver line across the knuckles of his left hand, and a way of standing that suggested he had never in his life been hurried by anything. His eyes were still dark and very steady. They watched her the way a carpenter watches a plank, as if he were checking for the grain.

He had not smiled. She had made two jokes, three, and he had not smiled once, and she could feel the old bright machinery of herself spinning in the vacuum, throwing out sparks.

"The roof," she said again. "Right. I looked at the ledger this morning. I mean, I'd like to start by saying thank you. For the tarp. And for, you know, every day. Uncle Ma said you've been coming by to check the tiles."

"It was nothing."

"It wasn't nothing. It's a lot of nothing, if you do it every day."

He shrugged one shoulder. "She needed it done."

She. Grandma. Not you. It was a perfectly neutral thing to say and it landed on her like a stone in a pond, rings spreading and spreading. Of course he had not done it for her. Why would he? She had not been here. She had not asked.

"Right," she said. "Of course. So. What would it take to fix it properly? Not a tarp. A real repair."

"Full re-tile. Replace the rafters on the north side, maybe half the purlins. The beam over the kitchen is rotted at the end." He said it all in the same low, level voice, without a flicker, as if reading out a recipe. "Three weeks, if the weather holds. Materials, roughly this."

He picked up a pencil stub from the bench, wrote a figure on a scrap of plank, and turned it to show her.

She looked at it. It was, by a long way, the smaller of the two numbers she had seen on the ledger. Grandma had been quoted twice that, by a company from the county town, in a note circled with red.

"That's not a fair price," she said slowly.

"It's what it costs."

"It's what it costs you. It's not what it costs." She looked up. "You're not charging for labour."

"Terms are fifty percent upfront, balance on completion," said Chengyan, as if she had not spoken. "Deposit by the end of the month. Materials ordered once it's paid. I can schedule you for the week after the festival."

It was the voice of a stranger. It was the voice of a man dealing with a customer he had never seen before and would be glad never to see again, and every word was so reasonable, so courteous, so utterly closed, that she felt it settle round her like frost.

She thought: so this is what it looks like. This is what eight years does. It does not make people angry. It makes them polite.

Her chest hurt. She would have given anything for him to shout.

"Fifty percent," she repeated. "Fine. That's fine. I'll, I'll arrange it. I'm not going to be here forever anyway, so it's better to settle things, you know, cleanly." She waved a hand, bright and airy. "I'm only back for a little while. Just until things are sorted. Then I'll go."

The words were out before she had weighed them.

She heard the stillness before she saw it. The faint rasp of his thumb against the pencil stopped. The whole workshop seemed to settle a quarter-inch lower, as if the floor had taken a weight. Chengyan did not move. His face did not move. But something behind it shut, quietly and completely, like a door closing in an empty house.

"I see," he said.

And then, after a very long moment, he nodded once, a short, flat bob of the head, the nod of a man agreeing to something he had expected from the start.

Wenxi's heart sank straight through her shoes.

"That's not what I..." she began.

"The deposit," said Chengyan, "by the end of the month."

"Right," said Wenxi, very quietly. "Of course."

She left a moment later with a very bright, very brittle goodbye and the dust sheet in the corner watching her all the way out.

Chengyan stood at the door of the workshop and watched her go down the alley.

She walked fast, head high, her ponytail swinging. At the bend by the third flowerpot she lifted one hand and pressed the back of her wrist to her cheek, quickly, as if she were brushing away a fly, and then she was around the corner and gone, and the alley was empty and bright with morning.

He was not angry.

He told himself this carefully, in plain words, the way he would have read out the steps of a joint. I am not angry. She was always going to leave again. She told me the first time, in the only way she knew how: a box of pastries on a doorstep. I knew then. I knew now. Nothing has changed. A person who has already been told the truth cannot be hurt by hearing it twice.

He went back to the bench, picked up the plane, and ran it along the cedar. The blade bit too deep. The curl tore halfway and the plank beneath it showed a long ugly gouge, a pale wound across the grain.

Chengyan looked at it. He put the plane down.

It was a rare thing, for him, to ruin a board. He could count on one hand the times it had happened in fifteen years.

He took a breath, picked up a rag, and for a long moment simply stood there with both hands braced against the bench and his head bowed over the ruined wood, and from outside came the muffled clink of a bucket being filled, and the sound of an old woman humming a wedding song.

He did not touch the box until noon.

By then the workshop had gone quiet and warm, the light slanting low through the high window and setting the dust alight in long gold columns. Old Mr. Gu was asleep in his chair in the back, his bad knee propped on a stool. The plane lay where he had left it. Chengyan wiped his hands, sat down on an upturned crate, and pulled the white box onto his knees.

The red string came away at one tug. He lifted the lid.

Inside lay six small round dumplings, jade-green and glossy, dusted with a little rice flour, each pressed with the faint imprint of a wooden mould. He knew the pattern. It was a pair of plum blossoms, linked at the stem. And beside them, in the corner of the box, tucked into a twist of paper, was something that he had not seen in eight years: three sesame brittle sticks, thin and amber and glinting.

He sat completely still.

Sesame brittle was the thing he had loved best as a child. He had never told a soul. He had never even asked for it. He had only, once, at the age of seven, eaten three of them so quickly at the New Year market that he had been sick, and Grandma Su had said nothing, only given him a cup of warm water and a look. And then every year afterwards, on the first morning of the new year, there had been a twist of paper on the doorstep.

Always exactly three. Always without a note.

She remembered. Not Wenxi. Grandma Su. The old woman had known what he liked for twenty-two years, and she had gone on knowing it all through the long grey stretch when no one else had asked, and she had put it into a box this morning and sent it next door in the hands of the one person who could least afford to carry it.

Chengyan bit down on the corner of a laugh and it came out as something stranger.

"You," he said, aloud, to the empty workshop, to the ruined cedar, to the sly old woman in the kitchen next door, "are impossible."

He ate one dumpling, then another, and they were still faintly warm. They tasted exactly as they always had. Of spring, and sweet red bean, and a very long time ago.

He did not look at the dust sheet in the corner. He did not look at it at all.