From Grandma Su's recipe book, page nine: "If the first batch fails, do not blame the oven. Ask yourself whether you were in a hurry."

"Let me make sure I have understood," said Tang Rui. "You want me to find you a boyfriend."

"A partner," said Wenxi.

"A boyfriend."

"A temporary, strictly professional, fully disclosed partner. For the purposes of the campaign. Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Presentable. Single. Discreet. Willing to hold a hand in public for the length of one summer and not read anything into it." She stirred her tea with great determination. "I've written down the criteria."

"You have written down the criteria."

"On the back of a receipt."

Tang Rui put down her cup. She put it down very slowly, with both hands, and then she folded her arms across the counter of the tea house, laid her forehead on them, and began to shake.

It was the quiet kind of laughter, the kind that has nowhere to go. Her shoulders heaved. A small, strangled wheeze escaped her. A customer at the next table, an elderly man doing the crossword, glanced up with mild interest and then returned to his clues.

"It isn't funny," said Wenxi.

"It is the funniest thing," Tang Rui gasped, into her sleeves, "that has ever been said in this building. And I have heard Zhaoyu try to explain cryptocurrency."

"I'm being serious."

"I know you are. That's what makes it so unbearable." She sat up, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand, and looked at Wenxi with great and affectionate delight. "Xi. Sweetheart. In a town of three thousand people, where everyone knows everyone's shoe size, you want me to produce a stranger who will pretend to be in love with you, and you want it done in two weeks, and you want it to be convincing."

"When you put it like that."

"How else would I put it?" She flattened out the crumpled receipt on the counter and read it, and her eyebrows climbed steadily. "Item three. Must not be a talker. Item four. Must not have a mother who is a talker. Item five." She looked up. "Must be taller than you but not, underlined twice, too tall."

"I like to be able to see the person."

"There's no item for the man you actually want."

"There's no man I actually want, that's the whole point of the, " Wenxi stopped, because Tang Rui was gazing at her with an expression of the purest sweetness. "What?"

"Nothing. I was only wondering who had put the beam in on Thursday."

"That is not relevant."

"Of course it isn't."

"It's a completely separate matter. He's a carpenter. It was a beam."

"A very nice beam," said Tang Rui. "I hear the whole alley turned out." She tucked the receipt in her apron pocket with the air of a woman putting away evidence. "All right. I'll make some enquiries. I know a few people who might do it for the sheer entertainment. But I'll warn you now, Xi. A fake partner is like a fake cake. It looks lovely right up until somebody cuts into it."

"That's very profound."

"I stole it from your grandmother."

The first candidate was Hu Bo.

Hu Bo was twenty-eight, a florist, and so gentle that he apologised to the flowers when he cut them. He had a small shop at the east dock, a clear sweet tenor voice, and the sort of face that looked as though it would blush if you complimented the weather. He agreed to the arrangement over the telephone within thirty seconds. He asked only one favour, in a voice that dropped to a whisper.

"Could we not tell my mother?"

"I thought the whole point was to tell everyone," said Wenxi.

"Yes, but, not my mother. Please. She'll, she'll start to, well. She'll start."

Wenxi, in her ignorance, said that of course she understood.

They met on Saturday evening at the noodle shop beside the east dock, a narrow, steamy room with a dozen tables and a smell of beef broth and star anise. She wore her cream dress with the plum blossoms, because it was the only thing she owned that looked like a date. He wore a pressed shirt and carried a bouquet of white ranunculus, wrapped in brown paper, which was so plainly the loveliest thing in the room that she felt a sudden rush of warmth towards him.

"Thank you, they're beautiful," she said. "Shall we sit?"

"Not there," said Hu Bo, in a panicked whisper. "The other side. Facing the wall. Please."

She sat facing the wall. It was a very interesting wall. It had a calendar from a fertiliser company on it and a stain shaped like Australia.

"Is there a reason," she asked, "that I'm looking at Australia?"

"My mother," breathed Hu Bo, hunched behind a laminated menu the size of a tray, "is at table six."

Wenxi turned her head, very slowly.

At table six, with a bowl of noodles she was not eating, sat a small, round, tremendously well-dressed woman in her late fifties. She wore a jade bracelet, a perm, and an expression of fierce and tender interest. She was looking at Wenxi. She was looking at her, in fact, with the frank, professional appraisal of a person who had spent thirty years buying fish and knew exactly what freshness looked like.

She raised one hand and waved.

"She followed me," whispered Hu Bo.

"How did she know?"

"I think," he said, with deep misery, "it was the ranunculus. I've never bought them for anyone before."

Before Wenxi could decide whether to laugh or to flee, the little woman had risen, picked up her bowl, and sailed across the room like a battleship under full canvas. She set the noodles down on their table without being invited. She sat down in the third chair and took Wenxi's hand in both of her own.

"You are the Su girl," she said. "From the bakery. Little Xi. I knew your grandmother's mother, did you know? Lovely woman. What a pair of hands. And such hips."

"I'm sorry?" said Wenxi.

"Hips. Good for childbearing. I can always tell." She patted the hand. "I said to Bo, I said, find me a girl with a bit of weight on her, someone who can cook. And you can cook! It's in the blood. How many children do you want?"

"Ma," said Hu Bo, from behind the menu, in the voice of a man who has been struck by lightning and is waiting politely for the second bolt.

"Two is sensible," said Mrs. Hu. "Three is better. Do you have any problems in the family? Heart? Eyes? Your grandmother's knees, I know about. They are not hereditary, I checked with the doctor."

"Mrs. Hu," said Wenxi, "I think there's been a misunderstanding. We're only, this is only, we're friends."

"Friends! Excellent! Friends are the best basis." Mrs. Hu beamed, and snapped a pair of chopsticks apart. "Eat your noodles, dear. You'll need your strength. Now, tell me about your plans for the shop. I was thinking we might combine the premises. Flowers and cake. Wedding packages. I've already drawn up a diagram."

She had, in fact. She produced it from her handbag. It had arrows.

Wenxi sat in the steam of the noodle shop with a diagram of her own future spread across the table and a bouquet of white ranunculus in her lap and Hu Bo slowly sliding beneath the surface of the table like a man being swallowed by a bog, and she felt her face go hot from the collar to the roots of her hair. She had never in her life been so thoroughly, publicly, and kindly measured for a marriage.

She escaped at last by claiming a pastry emergency. She did not know what a pastry emergency was. It had a very good effect. She left forty yuan under the bowl, and Hu Bo's last whispered words followed her out into the night like a ghost.

"I am so sorry. I'll find you someone better. I'm so, so sorry."

The ranunculus, at least, she kept. They lasted a week on the kitchen windowsill, and every time she looked at them she winced.

"One candidate," said Tang Rui next morning, ticking it off on her fingers, with a face that had been carefully arranged. "One mother. Zero children."

"Do not," said Wenxi.

"I have two more lined up."

"No."

"One of them is a primary school teacher. He's very nice. He keeps a tortoise."

"Does the tortoise have a mother?"

"I'll make enquiries."

Zhaoyu came by at noon, to deliver a crate of chestnut flour that Grandma had ordered and to eat whatever was on offer. He leaned on the counter with a bun in each hand and watched Wenxi rearrange the shelf of moulds for the fourth time that morning.

"I hear you've been out," he said.

"Everyone hears everything in this town."

"It's a gift. Hu Bo's mother has told the whole market that you're a lovely girl with strong bones and he doesn't deserve you." He bit into a bun. "She's started referring to you as the daughter-in-law."

"Zhaoyu."

"I'm only reporting." He chewed with an air of great contentment, then swallowed and added, in an offhand tone: "Do you want to know how Yan-ge's doing?"

Wenxi's hand, on the shelf, did not so much as flicker. She was proud of that. "Why would I want to know how Chengyan is doing?"

"No reason. I thought, as a matter of general interest." He took out his phone, thumbed through it, and turned it to her with a flourish. On the screen, in a tidy and quite beautiful grid, was a spreadsheet. It had coloured cells. It had a header row. "I did say there'd be one."

"You did not."

"I said there would be, eventually. I'm a man of my word." He tapped the screen. "The aunties have gone to work on him. All of the aunties. The fish market, the vegetable stalls, the bridge-side tea sellers, two of the Wei sisters' cousins. They're arranging introductions. That's the first column, number of introductions. Nineteen."

"Nineteen?"

"In nine days. The second column is how long he lasted." He scrolled. "Four minutes. Two minutes. Ninety seconds. There's a, ah, a seven-minute one there, but that was the butcher's niece and I think she was only after the sausage. He turned down a dentist. He turned down a girl who was a professional cellist. He turned down someone's cousin from the county town who had her own boat." He looked up, wide-eyed and innocent. "Last Tuesday a woman brought him a basket of eggs and a cat. A cat, Wenxi. He told me she said it was a gift, to show she was good with animals."

"What did he do?"

"He said thank you. He took the eggs. He gave the cat to Auntie Zhou." Zhaoyu spread his hands. "I've never seen him so tired. He goes to the bench at six in the evening and he just sits there, looking at the canal. Like a man who's been hunted."

"Poor thing," said Wenxi, and found that she was smiling.

"That's what I thought you'd say," said Zhaoyu, with enormous satisfaction, and went away eating his bun.

She found him, in the end, on the bridge.

It was a little after six, on the second Sunday, and the whole canal had turned gold. The evening light came flat across the water and lit the white walls of the houses like paper lanterns, and a long procession of swallows went dipping and turning over the bridge, drinking as they flew. She had gone out to walk off the heat of the kitchen. She had not been going anywhere. She had simply walked until the stone steps of Liu Bridge were under her feet, and then she had climbed them.

He was sitting on the low parapet at the top of the arch, his back against the stone, his long legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankle. He had taken off his boots. He was looking at the canal with the exact blank, exhausted expression of a man who has outlasted a siege.

He heard her coming, of course. His head turned.

"I've been told," said Wenxi, "that you've lasted four minutes."

He looked at her for a moment. Then, very slowly, as if it hurt, the corner of his mouth went up.

"Ninety seconds," he said. "Last Thursday."

"I heard about the cat."

"I do not want to talk about the cat."

"She was good with animals."

"She was," said Chengyan, in a voice of deep, bitter conviction, "extremely good with animals."

She laughed. She could not help it. And then, because her legs were tired and the stone was warm and there was nothing in the whole of the golden evening to stop her, she climbed up and sat down on the parapet beside him, a decent two feet away, with her feet dangling over the water.

For a little while neither of them spoke. The swallows swooped. A boat went under them, and the boatman lifted a hand to them both, and they both lifted a hand back.

"How many?" he said, eventually.

"How many what?"

"Candidates."

"Oh, one." She tilted her head back. "Just the one. He was a florist."

"A florist."

"He brought flowers. They were lovely. His mother came."

"His mother came."

"She sat down at our table and asked me how many children I wanted. And she drew a diagram. A diagram, Chengyan, with arrows. And she mentioned my hips."

He made a sound. It was not quite a laugh. It was a strangled thing, with his hand coming up over his mouth.

"I know," said Wenxi, with dignity. "I know. I was there. I had to look at a stain shaped like Australia for forty minutes."

"That's worse than the cat."

"It is not worse than the cat."

"She asked about your hips."

"The cat had a name!" said Wenxi. "Someone told me the cat had a name! It was called Little Husband!"

Chengyan gave up. His hand came down, and he laughed outright, deep in his chest, the rusty cracked laugh she had heard on the roof, and it rolled out over the water and came back to them from the white walls. She had not realised how much she had missed hearing it. She was laughing too, and the more they laughed, the more ridiculous it all became, until she was holding on to the parapet with both hands and her eyes were streaming.

"Mine was worse," she gasped.

"It was not."

"It had a diagram."

"I was given a cellist."

"A cellist is nice!"

"She brought the cello. She tuned it. In the tea house. She said she wanted to play me something that showed her soul."

"What did it show?"

"A very great deal of vibrato."

She wept with laughter. It was the first time in eight years that they had done this, sat side by side in the evening and laughed at nothing until they ached, and it was not like stepping on a stair in the dark and finding it where she had left it. It was like finding the whole staircase, quite unchanged, leading up into a room that she had not been in for years and that still, impossibly, smelled of home.

When it had worn itself out they sat in the low gold light with their breath coming slowly back. The swallows had gone. Across the water, the first windows were being lit.

"We're hopeless," said Wenxi.

"Mm."

"We have a combined total of twenty-one failed introductions. We are being laughed at by an entire town, a spreadsheet, and a cat."

"There's a spreadsheet?"

"Zhaoyu has one. It has coloured cells."

He closed his eyes. "I'll kill him."

"I'll hold the ladder."

A small silence. She was looking at the water. It had gone the colour of tea, slow and bronze and deep, with the reflections of the houses wavering in it, and the old idea that had been following her about for two weeks like a stray dog came up and sat down quietly at her feet.

"Chengyan," she said. "I've been thinking."

"That's usually a bad sign."

"Listen. Don't say anything until I've finished." She took a breath. She was talking to the canal, because she could not have said it to his face. "The campaign needs a couple. We need the prize. Neither of us can find anyone who isn't a disaster, and the aunties are not going to stop, and we both need the money. We need it exactly. We worked it out. To the cent." The words were coming faster. "So what if we didn't look any more? What if we just, what if it was us? Not really. Obviously not really. Only for show. Until the end of the campaign, until the harvest, and then we'd say it hadn't worked out and nobody would be surprised. We'd be the only couple in the whole contest who could actually stand each other for twenty minutes at a time. We already know each other. We wouldn't have to pretend very hard."

She stopped.

It was very quiet. The canal went on lapping at the foot of the bridge. Somewhere a window was thrown open and a woman's voice called a child in to supper.

She turned her head.

Chengyan was looking at her. He had stopped laughing. His face, in the last of the light, had gone perfectly still and watchful, the face of a man looking at a plank to see whether it would hold. His hands lay open on his knees.

"No," he said.

It was a very quiet word. It was not unkind. She felt it go through her anyway, a small clean shock.

"Right," she said, brightly. "Of course. It was a silly idea. I only thought..."

"No," said Chengyan again, evenly, looking at the water. "I'm not going to pretend to be in love with you in front of the whole street."

"I know. I know that. It's fine, I told you not to say anything until I'd finished, I should have, I'll just, " She was already moving, swinging her legs back over the parapet, her face hot and her smile in place. He did not stop her. He did not say anything. He sat with his hands on his knees while the first lamps came on along the canal, and she had one foot on the step when the silence behind her went on so long that it turned into something else.

She paused.

He was not looking at her. He was looking at his hands, the broad scarred hands with their long white line across the knuckles. He turned the left one over, slowly, and looked at the palm. He looked at it for so long that she thought he had forgotten she was there.

"If I did it," he said.

Her heart stopped.

"If I did it," said Chengyan, "there would have to be conditions."

"Conditions," she said, faintly.

"Rules. Limits. Things we would and would not do." He still did not look at her. His voice was perfectly steady, low and flat and even, the voice of a man reading out the specifications of a joint. But the tips of his ears, in the failing light, had gone dark red. "I would want them in writing."

Wenxi stood very still with one foot on the stone step and the evening wind lifting the loose ends of her hair.

"Then write them," she said.

"No," said Chengyan. He lifted his eyes at last, and met hers, and held them. They were very dark, and very serious, and, underneath, so tired and so careful that her breath caught. "You'll write them down. I'll tell you what they are."