From the Agreement of Temporary Cooperation, Clause 4, struck through in Wenxi's hand: "Neither Party shall enter the other's residence after nine o'clock in the evening. No exceptions."

It was Grandma Su who arranged it, though she would have denied it under oath.

She announced her plans at breakfast on Thursday, over the congee, in the voice she used for the price of eggs. The Wei sisters had a spare bed above the cutting room. There was a card tournament on Friday, a serious one, with a prize of a jar of preserved plums, and it would be a pity to miss the early rounds by walking home in the dark with her knees. She had packed already. A small blue bundle stood by the kitchen door, tied with a flat double knot, and on top of it, folded in tissue, lay a pair of felt slippers and a nightcap that Wenxi had last seen on the day of her mother's wedding.

"For one night?" said Wenxi.

"For one night. Perhaps two. The cards are unpredictable."

"Grandma, you hate the Weis' bed. You say it sags."

"It builds character," said Grandma Su, and ate her egg.

By noon the conspiracy had spread. Zhaoyu appeared at the back gate with the two-wheeled handcart and announced, with an innocence so enormous that it was nearly a work of art, that Mr. Gu was going to spend the weekend with his sister in the county town, and that he had volunteered to wheel him to the bus. Old Mr. Gu was already enthroned among the blankets. He lifted two fingers to Wenxi from the cart, with the gravity of a man blessing a harvest, and said nothing at all. Behind them, at the corner of the alley, Auntie Zhou was pretending to sweep a step that she had swept twice. The cobbler's shutters were down. Mr. Qian had taken his bird for a walk on the far side of the town.

Wenxi stood in the courtyard with a tea towel in her hands and the whole of Sixth Alley emptying around her like a theatre before a play.

"They are very bad at this," she said to the jasmine.

The jasmine, which had survived a typhoon, did not comment.

* * *

She stood at the door of the Gu Family Workshop at nine o'clock that evening, and for the first time in her life she did not know what to do with her hands.

It was a warm night, late in the year for it, with a low yellow moon coming up behind the roofs and the whole sky smelling of cut grass and the first sweet rot of fallen plums. The alley was silent. She could hear the canal at the far end, talking to itself, and a cricket under the third flowerpot, and her own heart, which had taken up a quick light knocking, like a small animal asking to be let out. She had changed three times. She wore the orange dress, because he had said once that it was the colour of the last light on a roof, and over it the old yellow cardigan, because her arms were cold and her courage was not entirely her own.

In her pocket the phone was still. She had turned it off an hour ago, in the little room under the rabbit, with her thumb pressed hard on the button until the screen went black. She had told herself it was so that nothing would interrupt. It was a perfectly good reason. It had not stopped her from folding the dead thing in a handkerchief and pushing it to the bottom of her bag.

She raised her hand to knock, and stopped.

There was no clause. She had struck it out herself, in the dark, under a kitchen table, with a typhoon walking across the roof. She could go in. She could go in at nine, or at ten, or at three in the morning, and no one in the world would say it was a breach. It was the strangest sensation. It was like walking down a staircase in the dark and finding one step fewer than she had expected, so that her foot went down through the air and landed on something warm.

She took a breath.

She thought, I should tell him tonight. Before anything else. It sits in me like a stone, and I have promised, in red pencil, on the back of a flour form. I'll say it at the door. I'll say, I've had an email.

The door opened.

* * *

Chengyan had been standing behind it for four minutes.

He had heard her step on the bluestone. He had known it from the end of the alley, the light quick tread with its small catch in the left foot, and he had gone to the door and put his hand on the latch and stood there, quite still, in the dark of the workshop, with his forehead nearly touching the wood. He could hear her breathe. He could hear her shift her weight. He had counted a hundred and ninety heartbeats, and not one of them had been steady, and he had decided, with the grave practicality of a man who has never in his life been able to wait for a thing without making himself useful, that if she did not knock by two hundred he would open it anyway.

He opened it at a hundred and ninety-six.

She was standing on the step with her hand raised and her mouth open on a word. The moon was behind her. It put a thin gold line round the edge of her hair, and picked out the plum blossoms on the collar of the cardigan, and the little glitter of a pin she had stuck through the knot at the back of her head, and he looked at her and forgot what he had meant to say.

"Hello," said Wenxi.

"Hello."

"I was just about to, "

"I know."

"You were behind the door."

"For a while."

"How long?"

"Long enough," said Chengyan, "to rehearse something about the weather."

She laughed. It was a shaky breath of a laugh, and it went through him like warmth into cold hands. He stood back from the door. She did not move at once. She looked past him into the long dark room, the benches and the hanging tools and the thin bar of lamplight at the top of the stair, and then at his face. Her eyes were very wide. In them he saw a question he had seen before, on the quay, in a boat, in the sudden hush of a courtyard in the rain. She was not asking whether she might come in. She had stopped asking that in August. She was asking whether he was sure.

He held out his hand.

She took it. They went up the thirteen steps together, one behind the other, in the dim, with her fingers laced through his and the old boards speaking under their feet, and he thought that it was the longest stair he had ever climbed and also the shortest.

The loft was warm. He had lit the stove, though the night did not need it, because it made the room look as it had on the night of the storm. The storm lamp stood on the door-table. Beside it, in the clean jam jar, the chrysanthemums had been changed for a handful of small white asters. The quilt was folded on the bed. On the shelf, between a book on dovetails and a tin of nails, he had set a plate of four small cakes, pale gold, pressed with two crossing branches, and a flask of barley tea, and two cups.

"You've been busy," said Wenxi.

"I had four hours."

"You've dusted the books."

"I dusted them on Tuesday."

"That's what you said last time."

"It's still true," said Chengyan. "I dust them every Tuesday. It's the only thing I can think of to do with my hands."

She looked at him, and the corner of her mouth trembled, and she slipped off the cardigan and laid it over the back of the stool, and he saw that she was shaking, very slightly, like a leaf in a draught. He wanted to cross the room. He wanted to take her in his arms and say a number of things that he had practised in a mirror. He did none of them. He poured the tea. His hand was not steady, and the cup rattled against the flask, and she heard it and did not say a word.

* * *

They sat on the floor by the stove, because it was where they had sat before.

It had begun as a joke. She said that it was the only place in the house that she trusted. He said that it was only a floor. She said that it was a very good one, oak, she had been told, and he said that it was pine, and they argued about it with great seriousness for a quarter of an hour, with their backs against the crate and their shoulders touching and the little iron box ticking at their feet. The moon climbed. A square of pale silver crept across the boards from the window and lay between them like a dropped sheet.

Then, without any warning, as it does between two people who have been talking a long time, the talk changed its weather.

"Can I tell you what I'm afraid of?" said Wenxi.

He turned his head.

"It isn't a big thing," she said. "It's a lot of small things, all lying on top of each other. I'm afraid that I'm happy." She laughed, a thin laugh, with her eyes on the stove. "I've never been so happy. I wake up and I think, it's Thursday, and nothing's wrong. And then I think, that's what it feels like just before something is. As though happiness were a kind of weather report. You know. Clear skies, and a very low pressure coming up from the south."

"That's not a thing you made up."

"No. It's what my mother used to say." She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms round them. "She was happy once. For about a year. And then she wasn't, and I was eight, and I thought, I see. That's how it works. You can have it, but you can only have it on loan."

He said nothing. He did not offer her a platitude. He had never in his life been able to produce one, and he saw that she was grateful.

"What are you afraid of?" said Wenxi.

He took a long time. The stove ticked. He looked at the square of moonlight, at his own hands lying open on his knees, at a long pale scar across the left one, and the words came up in him slowly, one at a time, like planks being drawn from a stack.

"That I'll be good at it," said Chengyan.

"At what?"

"This." He lifted a hand and let it fall. "Being happy. That I'll learn how, and get used to it. And then I'll stand in a door, one morning, and not know what to do with myself if it stops." He swallowed. "I'm very good at the other thing. I've had twenty years of it. It has a shape. I know where to put my feet. But I don't know the shape of this. I keep looking for the edge."

She was looking at him now.

"And I'm afraid," he said, more quietly, "of asking."

"Asking what?"

"For anything. For more." His voice had roughened. "I told Fang. It's a system I have. If you don't ask, nobody has to say no. And I've been thinking about it for weeks, and I know it's a bad system, and I can't stop using it. I look at you, and there is a thing that I want so much that I can't say it, because if I said it and you looked at me with that kind face and said, I can't, I think that would be the end of me."

The moon moved a little. Somewhere under the rafters a board settled.

It came to Wenxi that this was the place. It was the opening in the wall, a plain wide gap, with a hand held out on the other side. Here was a man who had said, in a low steady voice, I'm afraid of asking, and all she had to do was to say, I know. Me too. I've had a letter. I'm afraid of asking you the same thing. The sentence stood up in her throat, whole, with its edges sharp. She thought of a green blotter and a pen with a gold nib. Neither Party shall keep from the other anything that matters. She opened her mouth, and she felt a cold clean wind blow through the whole of her chest, and heard, from far away, the voice of a woman on a damp bench. Say what you want in the morning. Before the day has had time to talk you out of it.

It was night.

"Chengyan," said Wenxi.

"Yes."

"There's something, "

"I want, " he said, at the same moment.

They both stopped.

He was looking at her. His face, in the lamp and the moonlight, was absolutely bare, without a clause or a wall or a polite shutter anywhere on it, and in his eyes there was an expression she had seen once, over a block of boxwood, on an afternoon when he had said, I want it to be yours. It was fear, and it was longing, and it was a courage so plain and so entire that she felt it in her knees.

He drew a breath.

"I want, " said Chengyan.

She put her hand over his mouth.

She did it quite gently. She laid her fingers across his lips, and felt them move once against her skin, and felt the long shuddering exhalation that went through him. His eyes closed. Her heart was going so hard that she could hardly hear herself.

"I know," she said. "Me too."

He opened his eyes.

"You don't have to ask," said Wenxi. "I'll say it for both. Let me. I've said no to a great many things, in my life, to keep from being the one who wanted. I'm tired of it." Her hand trembled against his mouth. "I want to be here. Tonight. With you. Not for a clause, not for a prize. Just because. Do you understand? I'd like to stay."

He took her hand away from his lips, slowly, and held it. His thumb moved across her knuckles.

"Are you sure?" said Chengyan.

"I'm sure."

"Because I would wait. I have a great deal of practice. I could wait until the willow's gone."

"I know you could," said Wenxi, and her eyes filled, and she smiled at him, the crooked smile, the one she did not know she wore. "That's why I'm not going to make you."

He laid his forehead against hers.

The room went very quiet. The stove ticked. The moon lay on the boards. He put his arms round her, and they were not quite steady, and she felt in them the whole weight of twenty-two years of not asking. She said his name. She said it as one says the name of a thing one has found at the bottom of a bag, after a long search, in the dark.

He reached out with his free hand, and turned down the lamp.

* * *

She woke to sunlight and the smell of cedar.

It came in across her closed lids in a warm red wash, and she lay in it for a long moment without opening her eyes, not knowing where she was, and not caring. She was lying under a quilt. It was very soft. It smelled of linseed oil and sun-dried cotton, and under that, faintly, of something that she was learning to know, a clean dry sweetness like the heart of a newly cut board. Somewhere below her, in the workshop, a plane was moving along a length of wood in long even strokes. Shhk. Shhk. A pause. Then, very low, a man began to hum.

She opened her eyes.

The loft was full of morning. The deep window, which had been a black square the night before, was a frame of pale gold. Dust turned slowly in the light. The stove was cold. On the door-table, beside the jam jar of asters, stood two cups of tea, still steaming faintly, and a round brown loaf with a knife laid across it, and a smear of butter on a saucer. Someone had hung her orange dress over the stool and folded the old yellow cardigan on top of it, and set the pin from her hair, very exactly, in the centre of the cardigan's collar.

She lay quite still, with her cheek on a pillow that smelled of him, and let it arrive.

It came to her in pieces. It came as light comes through a curtain, a little at a time, so warm and slow that she could not have said where it began. His hands. The sound of her own name, in a voice she had never heard, low and unguarded and hardly steady. A long quiet in the dark, and the moon sliding across a wall, and his arm over her shoulder, heavy and warm as a roof beam. She had said something, near the end, in a whisper. She could not remember what. She thought it had been, I'm here. And he had said, I know. I know. And had laid his face in her hair and shaken, once, from head to foot, like a man who has put down something heavy at last.

She turned over, with her face in the pillow, and laughed.

It was a small silent laugh, and it went on a good while. She was twenty-six years old. She had a degree and a portfolio and a recipe for a three-tier lavender cake that had won a regional prize. And she was lying in a carpenter's loft at eight in the morning with her hair in a bird's nest and a grin on her face so wide that it hurt, and she had not, for the first time in as long as she could remember, any plan at all.

The plane stopped below.

She heard the stair. It was thirteen steps, and he took them slowly, in his stockinged feet, heel first, with that small hesitation, and she lay with the quilt pulled to her chin and watched the top of the stair, where a head came into view, tousled and dark, with a curl of cedar caught above one ear.

"You're awake," said Chengyan.

"Barely."

"I tried to be quiet."

"You hum."

"I do not."

"It was the aria," said Wenxi. "The one from the radio. You were doing the high bit."

He stopped on the top step. His face did something complicated. She had been waiting for it, for the dry word, the shut shutter, the practised flat. It did not come. He stood there in the sun with his shirt open at the throat and his sleeves pushed up, and looked at her with an expression of such slow, helpless, astonished tenderness that the breath went out of her.

"I do," he admitted. "I've been told."

"By whom?"

"Zhaoyu. He has a column."

She put the quilt over her face and shook. When she came out again he had crossed the floor, and was sitting on the edge of the bed with a cup in each hand, and he gave her one, and she sat up with the quilt round her and drank. The tea was strong and hot and a little too sweet. He had put honey in it. He had never put honey in anything in his life.

"You made it too sweet," she said.

"I know."

"Why?"

"I thought," said Chengyan, to his cup, "that it ought to be."

They ate the loaf with their fingers. It was still warm. He had been to the tea house at six and stood in the kitchen door among the steam, and Tang Rui had given him the end of the batch without a word and a look that he said he would remember on his deathbed. Wenxi tore off a heel, and buttered it, and fed it to him, and he took it from her fingers with his mouth, and she felt the colour go all the way up to her hair. Outside, a boat went by with a long gurgle of water. A thrush started up in the plum tree and abandoned its phrase halfway.

She looked round the loft, at the cold stove and the ladder of books and the long bar of light across the floor, and her eyes went to the wall above the head of the bed.

She stopped chewing.

It was a long plank wall, whitewashed years ago and gone the colour of cream. Over it, from the sloping rafter down to the height of a man's shoulder, ran a strip of red paper. It was pinned flat with a dozen small brass tacks, one at each corner and the rest along the edges, as carefully as a map on a surveyor's wall, and the early light struck it from the side and lit it up like a stained window. She knew it at once. She knew the soft furred creases and the rose-coloured fade, and the two columns going up beside the ruled line, square capitals on the left and looping script on the right.

"You pinned it up," she said.

"Last night. After." He cleared his throat. "You were asleep. I thought, it shouldn't be in a pocket. It should be where we can see it."

She got out of bed, with the quilt round her, and went across the cold boards, and stood in front of it.

She read it from the bottom, as she always did. Age seven. Because of his hair. Age eleven. Toes again. She read the fourteen and the sixteen and the old furious line at seventeen, FLAT, Witness: the willow. And below it, in the clear space where there had been nothing for eight years, in the stub of red carpenter's pencil he used for marking joints, a new line was written in small square capitals.

She had never read it. He had written it on the night of the typhoon, with the strip spread across his knee, and put it into her pocket, and said, the year, I've left the rest blank. She had held it ever since without once unfolding it to the bottom, because it had seemed to her a thing that ought to be read in the light.

She read it now.

There was the year, in tiny figures. And beside it, in the same hand, a little smaller, as if the pencil had slowed:

SW: FLAT. CY: CONCEDES. Witness: the willow, and everyone.

She put her hand over her mouth.

She stood in front of a strip of paper in the sun, with the quilt falling off one shoulder, and cried, and it was not at all like the crying on the night of the storm. That had been a flood. This was a small steady rain, falling on a field that had been dry a long time. He did not come to her. He sat on the bed with the cup in his hands and let her, and when she turned, with her eyes streaming and a smile that she could not manage to hold level, he said only, "It was the only way I could think of to say it."

"You never conceded anything in your life."

"I did it in pencil," said Chengyan. "So that I could rub it out."

"Will you?"

"No."

She laughed. She went back across the boards and sat down beside him with the quilt, and put her head against his shoulder, and they sat there in the sun and looked at the red strip, with its twenty-two small arguments and its single peace.

"There's a space," she said, after a time. "At the bottom. After this."

"Yes."

"You left it."

"I thought we'd need it," said Chengyan.

She felt it then, the cold small finger, laid very gently on the back of her neck. It was in the bag at the bottom of the stair, wrapped in a handkerchief, in the dark, with its screen gone black. It was in a grey font. It said, I ask only for an answer by the sixteenth of October. And a man who did not ask for things had left a space on a wall, and said, we'll need it, and she was sitting beside him with her face against his shirt and the best morning of her life going on all round her like warm water, and she did not say a word.

I'll tell him tonight, she thought. Tonight, in the lamp, with the whole story laid out. It would be unfair to put it into a morning like this one. It would be a cruelty to hand him a weight when he has only just learned to stand up straight.

The thrush started again in the plum tree. It got a little further this time.

"You've gone quiet," said Chengyan.

"I'm happy," said Wenxi.

It was true. That was the dreadful thing. She had said it in a clear low voice, with her eyes on the red strip, and every word was exact, and he turned his head and looked at her for a long moment with the grave level look of a man checking a board for warp. She felt him not ask. She felt it go past her like a hand held very near a flame.

Then he kissed the top of her head, and rose, and went to fetch her shoes.