The guests moved inward after noon tea, leaving the courtyard half-empty, filled only with lantern shadows and the scent of camphor warmed by sun.
Li Tianhua walked beside Madam Li in silence.
Silence in Meiyuan was not absence of sound—it was a language of its own.
They reached the inner gallery—columns tall, beams polished, air still. Only here did he speak.
"You called her forward."
Madam Li did not stop.
She did not look at him.
She set each step down with the measured grace of someone who has practiced disappointment until it became posture.
"I did what the house required," she said.
A pause stretched—thin, brittle.
"And what do you require, Mother?"
His voice was calm. That was worse than anger.
She stopped then, turning just slightly, enough that the lantern light caught in the carved line of her cheek.
"That Meiyuan does not break again because someone thinks a seam is poetry."
There it was.
Not rage.
Not contempt.
Fear.
Tianhua saw it. That was why he didn't bow.
"Seams are not poetry," he said quietly. "They are consequences."
Madam Li's fingers—resting on the rail—tightened a fraction.
She did not ask how he had learned to say such sentences.
She did not ask who had taught him to see seams.
Because she already knew.
And she feared that knowledge more than any contract.
Later, when dusk began washing the estate in muted amber, Lin Xueyi walked the east corridor alone.
She didn't intend to return to the beam.
Her feet did anyway.
Habit, or hunger.
She stood beneath the seam lantern, looking up at the faint incense mark she had left that morning. It had dried into the grain like a bruise that refused to fade.
Her voice, when it came, was almost a whisper.
"Do you want to be mended? Or do you want to be remembered?"
She wasn't talking to the lantern.
She was talking to herself.
The lantern answered anyway.
A single flicker.
Not wind.
Acknowledgment.
From the shadows, a young servant saw it.
She had come to retrieve unused oil paper. She froze mid-step, eyes wide.
"The lantern—" she whispered. "—it moved."
Her companion laughed. "Wind."
"There is no wind," she said, voice unsteady.
The other servant placed a finger over her lips. "Then do not say it. Houses hear things and remember too long."
They fled before the house could listen harder.
On the upper veranda, Elder Zhao sat with his cane, watching the beam the way one watches a door that might open by itself.
"Speak, then," he murmured to the wood. "You've waited long enough."
The beam did not speak.
But it listened differently.
Down the corridor, a quiet voice broke the stillness.
"Lin Xueyi."
She did not jump. She had begun to expect her name in this place now, though part of her still flinched at how easily it moved through Meiyuan's air.
Li Tianhua stood near the lantern line, his expression unreadable in the half-light.
"The Suzhou elder spoke of a winter," he said.
"Yes." She didn't ask him to continue. She already knew he would.
"And of a promise that—" He paused, as if the word was caught between duty and something softer. "—never arrived."
The seam lantern flickered. Once.
As if correcting him.
Not 'never arrived.'
Never allowed.
Xueyi's eyes lifted again to the beam. The half-carved strokes seemed darker than yesterday.
"Do you believe the house is lying?" she asked quietly.
For a heartbeat, he didn't answer.
Then:
"I believe," Li Tianhua said, "that Meiyuan has excellent memory… and terrible confession."
The lantern glowed softly in agreement.
And above them, unseen by those who still believed wood was only wood—
the beam absorbed every word.
—To Be Continued…