From Grandma Su's recipe book, page eight: "Old dough is the oldest member of the household. Never sell it to a stranger."

The beam went in on Thursday, and by Friday afternoon everyone on Sixth Alley agreed it was the most interesting thing to have happened all spring.

It had taken Chengyan, Zhaoyu, and four neighbours the whole of a bright, cold morning. Wenxi had been banished to the courtyard with a flask of tea and strict orders not to stand under anything. From there she had watched the old beam come out of the kitchen ceiling in two pieces, black at the ends and soft as cake, and the new one go up in its place, a long golden length of cedar that filled the whole house with the smell of a forest the moment it was lifted into the light. Auntie Zhou had supervised from the alley with a bag of sunflower seeds. Mr. Qian had offered advice, none of it useful. When the last wooden peg went home and Chengyan rapped the beam twice with his knuckles and it answered with a deep, clean note like a bell, a small cheer had gone up, and Grandma had come out of the kitchen with a tray of hot sesame buns and announced that it was a very respectable beam, and that she had always thought so.

Wenxi had not been able to stop looking at the ceiling since. She kept going into the kitchen to check that it was still there.

Now it was three in the afternoon, the slack hour, when the morning rush was long gone and the tour buses had not yet arrived from the county road. Grandma had gone to the market to argue with the fishmonger. The shop was quiet and smelled of warm sugar and cedar. Wenxi sat behind the counter with the ledger open in front of her and a pencil in her hand, trying to find a way to make the numbers lie down flat, and the bell above the door rang.

"Good afternoon, Ms. Su. I hope I'm not disturbing you."

Shen Haoran stood on the threshold in his good grey jacket, with no briefcase and no notebook and nothing in his hands at all. In the plain light from the alley he looked younger than he had on the banquet platform, and a little tired, in the way of a man who smiles for a living.

Wenxi closed the ledger with what she hoped was a casual hand. "Mr. Shen. Not at all."

"Haoran, please. I was walking past and realised that in all these weeks I have never actually sat down in here. I have only bought things and left, which is a poor way to treat a place one admires." He glanced at the little tea table in the corner, with its three low stools and its dented kettle. "I wondered whether a customer might be permitted a pot of tea."

There was no reasonable way to say no. She got up, went to the kettle, and found that her hands had already taken over.

She made Longjing, the good green tea that Grandma kept in a tin on the high shelf for people who mattered and for days when she wanted to feel that she did. She warmed two clear glasses with hot water first, tipped it out, dropped a pinch of the flat jade leaves into each, and poured the water down the side of the glass in a thin, slow thread, cooled a little from the boil. The leaves rose, turned, and began to stand upright in the water, one by one, like a very small forest waking up. Shen watched them with open pleasure.

"You do that like someone who was taught young," he said.

"Grandma put a kettle in my hand when I was five. She said a girl who could not make tea could not be trusted with sugar." Wenxi set the glass in front of him and sat down on the opposite stool. "You warm the glass, or the leaves get a fright. You never pour onto the leaves, you pour beside them. And you don't stir. You wait."

"Wait," said Shen, with a faint smile. "I seem to hear that word a good deal in this town."

He drank. His eyebrows rose a little, and he held the glass up to the light from the window and turned it, watching the leaves. Then his eyes wandered up to the shelves along the wall, to the rows of old wooden moulds in their dusty ranks, and he rose, quite naturally, and went to look.

"May I?"

"Of course."

He took down a small square block of dark pearwood with a carved face as smooth as a river stone. It was a fish curled through a lotus, its scales cut as fine as fingerprints. He held it in both palms and ran a thumb along the carving.

"Is this one original?"

"It's my grandfather's. He had it made the year they opened the shop." She could not help herself. It was the first time in days that anyone had asked her something she knew the answer to, and the words came out warm and quick. "They're pressed, you see. You dust the inside with rice flour, push the dough in, knock it out, and the pattern comes out raised on the cake. The depth of the carving decides everything. If it's too shallow the fish disappears when it bakes. Too deep and it cracks. The carver who made that set died before I was born, and nobody in the county can cut them like that now. And you can never wash them with soap, never, because wood remembers. You only oil them, and brush them, and hope."

"Hope?"

"Hope the damp stays out. Hope the woodworm stays out. Hope somebody wants them."

She stopped, a little embarrassed. Shen was watching her with an expression she could not read, thoughtful and a shade too gentle.

"That is exactly what I mean," he said. "Forgive me. I do go on. But visitors can buy a clay boat anywhere. What they cannot buy anywhere else is a thing that three generations have done the same way, with the same tools, for the same reasons. That's the whole of what's worth saving in a place like this, and it so rarely survives the people who made it."

He set the mould back in its exact place on the shelf. He did it with care, and then, before he returned to his stool, he laid his hand flat on the counter beside the till, on the long worn dip in the wood where seventy years of elbows and coins and small children's chins had polished a hollow. He stood so for a moment, perfectly still, looking down at it. It was a very small thing, and she nearly missed it. For one second the polished, pleasant face went quite blank, as if he had touched something that had touched him back.

Then he turned, and he was smiling again.

"I understand you design cakes, Ms. Su," he said, sitting down. "For hotels, Zhaoyu told me. Quite grand ones."

"I've done a little of everything." The bright smile slid on without effort. "It's nice to be somewhere slower for a while."

"A while," said Shen.

He did not push. He only drank his tea and let the little word sit there on the table between them, courteous and unhurried, and she had the uncomfortable sense that he had set it down on purpose.

"May I be direct?" he said, at last.

"Please."

"My company has a heritage division. It is not as glamorous as it sounds. We buy things that are about to be lost: a tea house, a weaver's, an old printing works. We do not tear them down. We restore them properly, we keep them working, and we find a way for them to pay for themselves. We have done it in four towns so far." He turned the glass a quarter-turn on the table. "I would very much like Su Ji to be the first in Yunxi."

Wenxi did not say anything. A pigeon fluttered down onto the window ledge and fluttered up again.

"The name would stay. The recipes, the moulds, the counter, everything. We would restore the building from roof to cellar and replace the equipment, and we would pay a fair price for the premises, which I would put at one point six million yuan." He said it as simply as he might have named the weather. "Your grandmother would remain as master artisan, with a salary, a pension, an apprentice of her own choosing, and the freedom, I hope, to stop waking at four in the morning. She could sit in that chair by the stove and tell other people what they were doing wrong. I imagine she would enjoy that very much."

The pencil in Wenxi's hand had stopped moving. She did not know when it had stopped.

One point six million.

Under her left palm, the closed ledger seemed to have grown warm. She did not need to open it. She could see the page as if it were printed on the inside of her eyelids: the red ink, the circled estimate, the three months owed to the flour merchant, the electricity bill with its sharp final notice. She could see the crack in the glass case and the chair holding shut the oven door. She could see Grandma's hands, seventy-four years old, swollen at the knuckles in the damp season, folding dough at four in the morning because there was no one else to do it.

It would be so easy. The thought arrived whole and quiet and entirely reasonable. The roof would be done by autumn. The oven would be new. The red would turn to black. Grandma could sit by the stove with a cup of tea and be waited on for the first time in her life, and nobody would ever have to know that the clever granddaughter had come home with nothing but a cardboard box and a broken suitcase. You could fix everything, said the cold little voice in the back of her mind. All of it. In one afternoon. You have nothing else to offer. Say yes.

She looked at the dip in the counter, the one that Shen had touched.

And under the cold voice there was another, older and slower, with a hum in it like an opera tune. Never sell the old dough to a stranger.

"It's very generous," she heard herself say. "But it isn't mine to sell, Mr. Shen. It's my grandmother's. She would sooner sell her teeth."

"I rather thought you might say that." He did not seem put out. If anything, he looked faintly pleased, as though she had passed some small private test. "The offer doesn't expire. I'd only ask that you think about it, once the roof is a little less of a worry. Think of it as a door that stays open."

"That's very kind."

"It isn't, particularly. It's good business." He smiled. "But I do mean it kindly as well."

* * *

Chengyan had been planing the same board for twenty minutes, and it was not getting any thinner.

The workshop door stood wide to let the afternoon in. From his bench he had a clear view down the length of the alley, past the flowerpots and the sleeping cat, to the weathered red door of Su Ji. He was not looking at it. He was looking at the board. He was looking at it with great attention, and the blade moved along it in long, smooth, pointless strokes, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a man in a grey jacket walk down the alley, slow down, and go in.

He went on planing.

It was none of his business. A man was entitled to buy a bun. Mr. Shen had been in and out of Su Ji a dozen times since the banquet, and nobody had said a word.

"He's going in," said Zhaoyu, from the lathe.

"I can see."

"He's been in there eleven minutes."

"I can see that too."

"Well, I'm only saying," said Zhaoyu, in the voice of someone who was saying a great deal. "A man doesn't need eleven minutes for a bun."

The plane bit too deep. A long curl tore off the edge of the board and dropped, and Chengyan looked at the pale gouge, and then at his own hand, and set the tool down on the bench with an exactness that made Zhaoyu stop pretending to be busy.

"I need to check the beam," said Chengyan.

"It's been checked."

"I'm going to check it again."

"Right," said Zhaoyu, gravely. "It's a very important beam." And when Chengyan took his apron off and hung it on its peg, and walked out into the alley with his sleeves still rolled to the elbow, he distinctly heard his cousin begin to whistle.

The bell over the door of Su Ji rang when he pushed it open, a small high sound, and the three heads in the shop turned. There were only two, in fact: Wenxi behind her counter, and Shen at the tea table with a glass in his hand. But he had the sense of an audience.

"Mr. Gu," said Shen, rising a little. "What a pleasure. I was only saying to Ms. Su how handsome the new beam is. I hear you had it in before the weekend."

"It's a beam," said Chengyan.

He walked across the shop. He did not hurry. He stopped at the end of the counter, one pace and a half from Wenxi's elbow, near enough that she would know he was there, and far enough that no one could have called it anything at all. He folded his arms. He was aware of how much room he took up in the little front room, with its cracked case and its shelves of moulds, and for once he did not mind.

Wenxi looked up at him. She was wearing the bright smile, the polished one, with the dimple. But her knuckles, around the pencil, were white, and a little of the tension went out of her shoulders as he came to stand beside her. He saw it. She would have been mortified to know.

"I won't stay," said Shen pleasantly. "But since you are both here, I may as well save myself a walk. The entry window for the campaign closes in two weeks, on the twentieth. Applications go to the committee office, and Ms. Tang has kindly agreed to take them. I would hate to see either Su Ji or the Gu workshop miss it."

"We have been thinking about it," said Wenxi.

"Excellent. Then I'll offer only a small reminder, since people sometimes skim the rules." He set down his glass. "Entries are accepted from couples only. The judges will wish to meet the pair in person, and to see them together. It is, after all, the whole spirit of the thing." His eyes went from Wenxi to Chengyan and back again, mild and friendly and perfectly unreadable. "I am told that neither of you is, ah, currently attached. But Yunxi is a town where things change quickly. I have seen it."

Nobody said anything.

Shen took out a few notes and laid them under the saucer, exactly the price of the tea and a good deal more. He bowed to Wenxi, and then, with a shade more consideration, to Chengyan. "Thank you for the tea. It was the best I have had in a long while. Good afternoon."

The bell rang. The door closed. His footsteps went down the alley, unhurried, and faded.

For a long time the shop was quiet.

The tea glass stood on the table, the leaves slowly settling in the bottom. A bar of sunlight lay across the floor. Chengyan could hear the small ticking of the old clock above the till, and, very faintly, through the wall, the clink of something in his own workshop that was almost certainly Zhaoyu with his ear pressed to the plaster.

Wenxi put the pencil down. She put it down very carefully, parallel to the edge of the ledger, the way a person puts down something that might go off.

"Did you hear what he offered?" she said.

"No."

"One point six million."

He did not move. He had not known he could go quiet in that particular way. It was the stillness of a man on a ladder who feels the rung shift. One point six million yuan was more than the workshop had earned in the whole of its eighty years. It would have put a new roof on every house in Sixth Alley and left change.

"That's a lot," he said.

"Yes."

"You should..."

He did not finish. He did not know what the end of the sentence was. You should take it. You should think about it. You should do what you came here to do and then go. It was all the same sentence, and every version of it tasted of ash.

"Don't you dare," said Wenxi, quietly, without turning her head.

He shut his mouth.

She opened the ledger instead, flipped it round on the counter so that it faced him, and put her finger on a line near the bottom of the page. The figure was circled twice in red. It was the county company's quote for the roof and the north wall. Under it, in Grandma's small upright hand, ran a list: oven, wiring, glass case, front sill, drain.

"Everything it needs," she said. "That's the whole list. I've been through it three times. It comes to just over three hundred thousand."

He looked at it for a while. Then he took the pencil from beside her hand, tore a sheet from the order pad by the till, and without a word began to write, in the square blocky capitals that she must have recognised, because he heard her breath catch. A drying shed, so that the cedar would stop warping in the rains. A second lathe. A proper wage for Zhaoyu, who had been working for a cousin's rates for three years. A ramp and a rail for the back step, because his grandfather had begun to take the stairs one at a time, with a hand against the wall, and thought that nobody noticed.

He added it up. He had added it up a hundred times before, in bed, in the dark. It was a good deal less than hers. It was almost exactly two hundred thousand.

He slid the paper across.

Wenxi looked at the two columns, hers in black ink and his in pencil, side by side on the counter. She did not say anything for what felt like a very long time. Then she reached out and, with one finger, drew a small line beneath them and wrote the total.

Five hundred thousand yuan, to the cent.

He heard her laugh, a thin, disbelieving breath. "That's the prize."

"Yes."

"That's exactly the prize."

"Yes."

It was ridiculous. It was the sort of coincidence you would have rejected in a bad film. He felt it settle over the shop like a cloth being drawn over a table, and under it he felt something else, a slow, hot, helpless pull, as though the whole town had spent a week quietly tilting the floor and he had only just noticed which way it sloped.

Outside, a boat went by with a long gurgle of water. The clock ticked. The leaves in the abandoned glass drifted slowly to the bottom, one by one.

"I need that money," said Chengyan.

He had not meant to say it aloud. It came out low and level and plain, with nothing dressed over it, the plainest sentence he had spoken to her since she came home. It sat there on the counter beside the ledger and the paper and the pencil.

Wenxi did not answer for a moment.

"So do I," she said.

Neither of them looked at the other. He studied the ledger, and she studied the tea glass, and the clock ticked on, and in the wall behind them, very faintly, something clinked.