From a strip of red couplet paper, in two handwritings, Age seventeen: "CY: Still on her toes. SW: FLAT. Witness: the willow."

The loft over the Gu Family Workshop had been built to keep out weather, and that night it did its job so thoroughly that Chengyan could hear the whole drowned town through the floor.

He set her down at the top of the stair. She did not seem to want to be set down, and then she did, with a small embarrassed laugh, and stood barefoot on the boards with the mould still pressed to her chest and water dripping from her hem. He lit the stove. It took three matches, because his hands were not entirely his own. When the kindling caught, a low orange glow came up the rafters and showed him the room as she must see it: a long attic under a steep slate roof, with a narrow bed against the far wall, a table made from a door, a shelf of books about joinery, a window cut deep in the thick wall. He had lived above his work since he was nineteen. He had never once thought of the room as small.

"It's very tidy," said Wenxi.

"I tidied it on Tuesday."

"Why on Tuesday?"

"I don't know," said Chengyan, which was a lie, and she did not say anything, which was a kindness.

He fetched blankets from the chest. He fetched a towel, a dry shirt of his own, the grey wool sweater his grandmother had knitted when he was sixteen and he had never been able to throw away. He put them in her arms and turned his back and found something to do with the kettle. Behind him he heard the soft sounds of a person changing in a cold room, the wet rasp of cloth, a gasp as something clung, and he fixed his eyes on the little blue flame under the pot and counted the rivets on its side. There were eleven. He counted them again.

Outside the window, the storm walked about on the roof.

He had set the storm lamp on the table, and its small yellow light made a room inside the room. When she came and sat on the edge of the bed, wrapped to the chin in the grey sweater with the sleeves rolled four times and a blanket round her shoulders, with her wet hair loose and her feet drawn up under her, she looked like a child who had been brought in from the snow. He gave her a cup of tea. She took it in both hands. He sat down on the upturned crate by the stove, a decent six feet away, and for a while neither of them said anything at all.

The window showed him the town. In the long white flashes he could see Sixth Alley, and it was not an alley any more. It was a canal. Brown water ran between the white walls from end to end, carrying planks and baskets and a drowned umbrella, and the street lamps stood up out of it like reeds. Su Ji's red door was a hand's breadth under. The cobbler's roof was black with rain. Somewhere very far off a bell was ringing, over and over, slow and flat, and he knew it was the bell tower and that somebody was pulling the rope to say that the town was still there.

"They're all right," he said. "Your grandmother, my grandfather. Zhaoyu texted at ten. They're upstairs at the Weis' with the cards. Your grandmother has won four hands and is insufferable."

"Thank goodness."

"My grandfather says the tea is terrible and he will not be moved."

She laughed, a small breath of a laugh, and drank. He watched the steam curl against her chin. He thought: it is half past ten at night in the middle of a typhoon, and she is sitting on my bed in my grandmother's sweater, and I have no clause to hide behind. He felt it settle on him, that bare plain fact, like a hand on the back of his neck.

* * *

Wenxi had known since the cart left the alley that this was the night.

She had not known it in words. She had known it as one knows the moment before a cake comes out, in the hands and the back of the neck and the soles of the feet. She had carried the knowledge across the yard in his arms, with her face against his wet collar and the rain striking the back of her head, and up the narrow stair, and into the circle of lamplight, and she had put on his sweater and sat on his bed and waited for the courage to arrive. It had not arrived. It had simply been there, steadily, like the floor.

She set down the cup.

"Chengyan."

"Yes."

"I need to give you something. And I need you to let me do it the way I've planned, which is badly."

He waited. He had always been good at waiting, and she saw it now, with a pang, as a thing that had been taught to him by an empty doorway.

She reached for the cardigan. It lay over the end of the bed where she had dropped it, damp and heavy, the yellow gone to the colour of weak tea. She put her hand into the pocket. She did not hurry. Her fingers closed on the soft folded thing, and she drew it out into the light.

It was a strip of red paper.

She unfolded it, one crease at a time, and laid it across her knees. It was a metre long and as soft as cloth, furred at every fold, the red worn to the colour of an old rose, and down the middle ran a ruled pencil line with a column of square capitals on the left and a column of looping script on the right. She smoothed it flat with both hands. Then she held it out.

"I took it," she said. "The night I left. It was in my drawer, the bottom one, under the sketchbooks. I don't remember how it got there. I think you gave it to me to keep, one summer, and I forgot to give it back. I stood over my suitcase for ten minutes and couldn't take it, and couldn't leave it. So I put it back in the drawer and shut it hard."

He was looking at the paper. He had not moved.

"I found it again when I came home," said Wenxi. "The first week. In the bottom drawer, exactly where I'd put it. It's been in my pocket ever since. I've carried it for three months. I've read it every night. I've taken it out in the middle of the market and looked at it behind the flour sacks." She swallowed. "I'm so sorry. You looked for it. In the morning. You told Zhaoyu on the livestream that you knew the numbers, because you didn't have it. And all that time it was against my ribs."

"Wenxi, "

"I wanted to say it was an accident." Her voice had begun to shake. "But it wasn't. It was the one thing I couldn't give back. If I gave it back, I'd have to say why I had it. And I'd have to say what it was to me."

He put out his hand.

It came across the lamplit space between them very slowly, the big scarred hand she had known for twenty years, and it stopped an inch from the paper. She saw that it was shaking. She saw him look at the pencil line, at the first small notch, at his own eleven-year-old capitals. Taller. She saw his lips move, a very little, and she knew that he was reading the numbers.

He touched it.

He laid two fingers on the paper as a man touches a sleeping animal, to find out whether it is warm. Then, all at once, his whole hand closed over the strip and her fingers with it, and he made a sound she had never heard from him in her life. It was low and rough and torn, like a plank splitting along the grain.

"Eight years," said Chengyan.

"Yes."

"I thought it was lost."

"I know."

"I went to the drawer. The morning after. I opened it and it wasn't there, and I stood there with my hand in the empty drawer and I thought, she has taken the last of it, and I was so, " He stopped. His eyes were shut. "I was so glad."

"Glad?"

"That you had something of mine. That wherever you were going, you'd gone with something." His voice broke on the word. "I never told anyone that. I told myself it was lost. I couldn't bear to think it was gone on purpose, and I couldn't bear to think it was gone by accident. So I said, lost."

He bent his head over their joined hands, and she saw his shoulders move. She did not think. She slid off the bed onto the boards beside the crate, on her knees in the grey sweater, and put her arms round his neck and her wet face against his, and held on.

They stayed there for a long time. The stove ticked. The rain drummed on the slates. Between her chest and his the strip of red paper lay crushed and warm, with its twenty-two small arguments, and she felt him breathe in against her hair, and out, and in.

* * *

It was Chengyan who spoke first, and what he said was not what she expected.

"There's more," he said, into her shoulder.

"What?"

"You've got more. I can hear it." He drew back a little. His face was wet, and very close, and utterly grave. "You've been carrying it since June. You said, at the shed, you owed me a story. You told me one half. That wasn't the half that made you say fine to a train window."

She went still.

"How did you know about the train window?"

"Zhaoyu. He saw you the night you came. He was on the jetty, with a cat." The corner of his mouth moved, and was still. "He said you sat there for a minute looking at the water as if you'd lost something and were trying to remember what."

She took a breath. It shook. She sat back on her heels with the blanket slipping off one shoulder and put both hands over her face, and then took them away.

"I don't have a job," said Wenxi.

The lamp hissed. The rain went on.

"I haven't had one since the end of May. Aurelle closed. I got an email on a Tuesday, a grey one, with my name spelled right. They gave me a cardboard box." She heard her own voice go small and exact, the voice of a person reading from a card. "It was too small. I remember thinking, they could at least have found a bigger box. I carried it out onto the pavement with my best spatula sticking out of the top, and I stood there, and I thought, I'll be fine. I'll be fine by the weekend. And I was fine for nine days. I said it to everyone. I said it to my flatmate and my landlord and the man in the shop. And on the tenth day I packed the suitcase and got on the last train, and I told myself I was visiting."

"Wenxi, "

"I'm not done." She put up her hand. "Please. I've got to say it all at once or I'll go back in." She drew a breath that hurt. "I didn't tell Grandma. I didn't tell Tang Rui, I didn't tell you. I told the whole street I had a secret project. I had a very good smile. I've been using it for eight years. And every single day that I stood in that shop and let people tell me how well I'd done, I thought, one more week. I'll fix the roof, I'll fix the oven, I'll get a plan, and then I'll tell them it was only a detour. It won't count as failing if it's a detour."

She was crying now. She did not try to stop. The tears ran down her face and dripped off her chin onto the grey wool, and she let them, and went on.

"Seven years. I gave them seven years. And when they let me go, I thought, that's it, then. That's the whole of me. The cakes were the only thing I had, and the cakes weren't enough, and now there's nothing underneath. I came home because there was nowhere else. I didn't come to save the shop. I came because I couldn't think where else a person goes when she's no good."

"That isn't true," said Chengyan.

"It's what I thought."

"It isn't true."

"You don't know that, you've only seen me when I was, "

"I've seen you," he said, "in the rain, at one in the morning, in a yellow jacket two sizes too large, climbing a ladder after a fool. I've seen you make a cake from a recipe that was cut out of a book, with nothing but a memory and a bad oven. I've seen you carry eggs up a flooded stair as if they were the crown jewels." His hands had come up. They closed round her wet face, rough and warm, and held it so that she could not look away. "I've seen what's underneath. I told you at the Water Pavilion. I'd check. I did. I've been checking for three months. There's a floor, Wenxi. It's a very good one. It's oak."

She made a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob.

"You don't have to be any good," he said. "Not for me. You don't have to succeed to be worth staying for. You never did."

It went into her like warmth into frozen hands. It hurt as the warmth hurts, a sharp bright pain that she thought would split her open, and then it did not hurt at all. She had carried a sentence for eight years that said you must be enough, and a man with sawdust in his hair had taken it out of her arms and set it down on the floor and said, no. She put her forehead against his collarbone. His arms came round her, not quickly, but entirely, a slow wide closing, like a door being drawn shut against a wind.

He drew the blanket up over her shoulders. He tucked it in at the back of her neck with a hand that was not quite steady. He said nothing else. He rocked her, a little, without seeming to know it, to the rhythm of the rain.

She cried until she was empty. It took a long time. When it was over she felt scoured, and light, and very tired, as the town must feel after a storm, with everything that was loose swept off and only the stone left standing.

"Your sweater's wet," she mumbled.

"It's my grandmother's."

"Oh, no."

"She'd have liked it," said Chengyan. "She always said wool was for crying in."

* * *

They did not move to the bed. There did not seem to be any need.

He pulled the blanket and the old patchwork quilt from the chest and made a nest on the floor beside the stove, where the boards were warmest, and they sat in it with their backs against the crate and the red strip spread across both their laps. She told him about the boxes. She told him about the offset spatula and the ballroom with the broken air conditioning and the sugar peony that had sold for a month's rent. He told her the name of every joint on the door-table, and which of them he had cut at nineteen and which at twenty-six, and what he had been thinking of at each. It was a strange tender conversation, quiet and aimless, like two people walking slowly through a garden.

Once, near midnight, he said, "I have my half of the night."

"I know."

"I haven't put it in order yet."

"I know," said Wenxi. "I'm not asking."

"I want you to have it."

"Then I'll have it when it's ready." She laid her cheek on his shoulder. "I've waited eight years. I can wait till the water goes down."

He was silent. His hand found hers on the quilt and turned it over, and his thumb traced the burn on her wrist, the small oval scar from the oven door that she had earned at nineteen. He had not asked how she got it. He simply looked at it for a long time, as one looks at a word in a foreign language that one is beginning to understand.

The rain eased towards one. The thunder rolled off east, grumbling, like furniture being moved in a house far away. The little radio on the table, which had been murmuring all night, gave a last thin quaver and went to static, and he reached out without looking and clicked it off, and the silence that followed was soft and enormous.

She was nearly asleep when she felt him lift the red strip from her lap.

She opened one eye. He had spread it across his knee and taken the carpenter's pencil from behind his ear, the stub of red that he used for marking joints, and he was writing at the bottom, below the last notch, below age seventeen. He wrote slowly, in small square capitals. She could not read it upside down. She did not try. He finished and laid the pencil down, and folded the paper along its creases, and put it, not in his own pocket, but into the pocket of her cardigan, where it lay on the end of the quilt.

"What did you write?" she murmured.

"The year."

"Which year?"

"This one," said Chengyan. "I've left the rest blank."

She could not answer. She put her head back down on his shoulder, and he laid his cheek against her hair, and the stove ticked and settled, and she was asleep before she knew it, with the red strip safe in her pocket and a hand on her back as steady as a keel.

The last thing she heard was his voice, very low, very close, saying her name as a man says a word he has been saving for a long time.

The morning came up grey and gold and astonishingly quiet.

Chengyan woke with a crick in his neck and a weight on his shoulder and, for a long moment, no idea where he was. Then he knew. He lay without moving. The light came in through the deep window, pale and clean, and lay across the quilt in a long bar, and in it the dust turned slowly, and on his shoulder Su Wenxi was asleep with her mouth a little open and one hand curled loosely against his chest. There was a crease from the quilt on her cheek. Her hair was an unholy tangle. She had never in her life looked so entirely like herself.

He thought, I will not move for an hour.

He thought, I will not move for the rest of my life.

Then, from the courtyard below, a voice cried, thin and cheerful and cracked with excitement, "Yan-ge! Yan-ge! It's gone down! The water's gone down! You can see the third step!"

It was Zhaoyu. He could be heard splashing about in the yard with the abandon of a man who has been up all night and discovered that the sky has been returned. A door banged. A dog barked. Somewhere in the distance, the bell tower, which had been tolling slowly since midnight, broke into a quick bright peal, and a hundred voices rose to meet it up and down the length of the alley.

Wenxi stirred. She did not open her eyes. She turned her face into his chest and said, in a muffled voice, with enormous dignity, "Tell him we're not here."

"He knows we're here."

"Tell him we're structural."

He laughed. He could not help it. It shook them both, and she began to laugh too, with her face hidden, helplessly, in the wool of his grandmother's sweater, and the quilt slid down, and the bar of morning light moved a hand's breadth across the floor, and below them in the drying yard Zhaoyu stopped splashing and said, in a voice of the deepest satisfaction, "Oh."