Master Liang did not walk with the others toward the veranda where tea and formalities waited.
Instead, he turned toward the beam beneath the seam lantern, cane tapping like a heartbeat that had learned patience and survived anyway.
Madam Li noticed.
Her steps, elegant and unwavering, slowed.
The Suzhou delegation followed her gaze and one by one, their eyes rose to the gold seam, the incense ash on the wood, the unfinished characters:
Lin—
Li—
Two families in half-ink.
Master Liang's voice was calm, but old calm—the kind that comes after grief has been sharpened and put away as a tool.
"Madam Li," he said, "I was there the winter they signed it."
A ripple moved across the officials like cloth catching wind.
Yiran went still.
Xueyi's fingers tightened unconsciously around the folded strip of silk in her sleeve.
Li Tianhua lowered his gaze, not in shame— in memory.
Madam Li met Master Liang's words with perfect spine.
"That document was never ratified," she said with precise coldness. "Circumstances changed."
The elder did not argue.
"Yes," he said softly. "The Lin girl never arrived."
The air moved—not from wind. From something older.
Xueyi felt it before she understood it.
Lin girl.
Never arrived.
A line she had not known belonged to her opened like a book.
Master Liang turned to Xueyi.
Not as guest to artisan.
Not as elder to junior.
As witness to heir.
"Do you know," he asked gently, "which seam you are mending?"
The courtyard quieted. Even birds seemed to hold their wings closer.
Xueyi did not reply at once.
Because answers could be spoken or lived, and she had only just begun stepping into the latter.
Madam Li cut through the silence.
Her tone remained level. But it carried something human this time. Something like tired dignity carefully preserved over years of holding a house upright.
"Meiyuan does not reopen contracts," she said. Her eyes did not leave Xueyi.
"But it remembers who walked away…
and who was left standing."
The line was not cruel.
Cruelty would have been easier.
This… was a truth framed in etiquette.
Li Tianhua finally moved.
He lifted his head, eyes trailing from the seam lantern… to the beam… to Xueyi.
A brief flash—a memory, uninvited:
A younger Li Tianhua, hiding behind winter columns, watching as paper burned in a brass bowl.
A lantern outside flickered—violently—as if it could feel the fire swallowing a promise.
A voice—maybe his mother's, maybe the house's—whispered:
"Do not speak her name."
And yet today, he had spoken it.
Xueyi looked at Master Liang, then at the beam.
Her voice was soft. But clean.
"A seam only exists because something once broke," she said.
"I am not here to reopen the old promise."
"I am here to ask why it was sealed before it was spoken."
Something shifted in the wood above.
The half-carved strokes seemed to breathe.
Master Liang closed his eyes once, slow, like a man offering incense to memory.
"Then you are mending the correct seam."
Shen Yiran's face did not change.
But her fingers, resting lightly on her sleeve, curled ever so slightly.
A movement so small only the house saw it.
And overhead—
The seam lantern flickered.
Not like flame.
Like something waking.
—To Be Continued…