Afternoon thinned to that pale amber hour when shadows grow manners. The Suzhou delegation had scattered across Meiyuan like careful ink: officials to ledgers, attendants to tea, and Master Liang to the east run, where the seam lantern waited like a witness who had sworn the truth to itself.
Lin Xueyi stood beneath the beam. She hadn't meant to. Her steps simply arrived there with the certainty of a river leaving a bend it had memorized.
"Indulge an old man," Master Liang said, gentling his cane to the stone. "Lift the lantern a finger-width."
She glanced at Li Tianhua—he was already at the manual reel, giving precisely the amount of slack a sentence needs to take one more word. The lantern lowered. The beam's lip—the place where hooks had gnawed for generations—exhaled dust as soft as denial.
Master Liang leaned closer, breath held the way craftsmen hold silence. "There," he murmured.
"Where?" Wei Lan asked, ledger ready to normalize whatever happened next.
"The house," Liang said, smiling like a man who had just been forgiven by wood, "kept a receipt."
Xueyi lifted her hand. She didn't touch the beam; she let her fingers hover, palm open, as if asking permission from something older than etiquette. Heat spilled against her skin—faint, like a memory rehearsing. She slid her hand along the underside. A splinter pricked, then yielded. Something thin and stubborn shifted.
A flake fell.
Not wood.
Paper.
It landed on her palm—a curled ember of a century, browned, fragile, edges blackened to silence. Master Liang's mouth opened on a sound that belonged to temples. Wei Lan forgot the ledger and remembered she had a heart.
Tianhua didn't speak. He stepped closer, as if closeness might convince the past to behave.
Xueyi breathed as if the paper could hear impatience. With two fingers she uncurled the flake. The ink had survived in ghost strokes—not words, not yet—enough for the paper to admit what it had once intended to be.
Two characters staggered through the burn:
Lin …
Li …
Not names finished. Names trying.
Master Liang put a hand over his mouth, the gesture of a man covering a wound that has decided to become a mouth after all. "The contract," he whispered. "When they burned it, a corner fled."
Wei Lan's eyes darted to the veranda before loyalty remembered where it owed itself. "We should inform—"
"Inform whom?" Elder Zhao asked from the shadow edge, eyes wet with the relief of someone who had not been crazy all these years. "The house?"
Footsteps. Madam Li arrived without hurry. The delegation followed, curiosity wrapped in politeness. Shen Yiran stood to her right, chin steady, pupils tight as if bracing for an ocean she refused to name.
Madam Li took everything in—the lowered lantern, the dust, Xueyi's open palm holding that impossible flake. Her face did not change. Her breath did. The change was small, but here, small things were verdicts.
"Let me see," she said.
Xueyi did not argue. She placed the flake on a square of clean silk and lifted it toward the veranda. Madam Li did not touch it. She looked in the way people look at ruins they built themselves.
The ink fragment did not flatter. It simply survived.
Master Liang bowed his age. "Meiyuan remembers, Madam."
"Meiyuan manages," she corrected, voice even. "Memory is nothing without management."
A murmur rippled through the officials—agreement disguised as admiration. Shen Yiran's gaze stayed on Xueyi's fingertips, on the precise way she cradled a thing that could not survive rough attention.
Tianhua took half a step toward his mother and stopped—the leash of filial piety tugged with exquisite training.
Madam Li looked from the flake to the beam to the seam lantern—still, obedient, unwilling to lie. Her eyes softened one degree, and the degree was winter allowing March to enter the conversation.
"When paper burns," she said, "the house is relieved of obligation."
She let the sentence hang like laundry. Then, almost kindly:
"Sometimes the house keeps a secret anyway."
Master Liang lifted his head. "And sometimes secrets rot the beam."
For the first time something like weariness crossed Madam Li's face—the fatigue of holding history upright alone. She flicked her fingers once. A steward stepped forward with a brass bowl, a small brass spoon, a match set. Precautions had habits here.
"Place it there," she said to Xueyi.
The courtyard learned to be silent again.
Xueyi did not move. Not from defiance. From listening. Her palm hummed with the memory-heat. The beam above whispered resin and ash. The seam lantern trembled—not in fear. In warning.
Tianhua's voice arrived, low. "Mother."
The single word held winter and petition and something he had never allowed to appear in public: disagreement.
She looked at him. Two lives stood between them: the one the house had wanted, and the one it had endured.
"Burn it," she said, very quietly. "This time completely."
Two heartbeats passed.
"No," Master Liang said, the syllable soft with reverence and rebellion, "—let it live where it hid: in the beam."
Madam Li's gaze did not flicker toward him. "The beam does not need proof to remember. People do." She inclined her head to the steward. "Light it."
The match snicked.
Windless flame.
The seam lantern brightened, gold line catching, as if a throat cleared in the rafters.
Xueyi's hand tightened around the silk square. She felt the paper warm through fabric, the way a story warms when it notices a listener. Her voice came steady, stripped of everything but function.
"If we burn this," she said, "we will only be teaching the house another way to keep quiet."
Madam Li looked at her then—not as artisan, not as outsider. As the girl who had just spoken a truth the house would obey.
"And what would you teach it?" she asked.
"That pity is not repair." Xueyi swallowed. "And that repair is not erasure."
Another heartbeat. Two. The steward's hand hovered with the match.
"Mother," Tianhua said again—no title this time, no house in the word, only son.
The envoy from the Commission cleared his throat in the wrong century. "If I might—this is an internal matter."
"That," Elder Zhao said gently, "is the first correct sentence I have heard you say."
Madam Li drew a breath, deep enough to inventory a life; let half of it go. When she spoke, it was to the steward.
"Take the bowl away."
The steward froze—relief making him clumsy. He bowed, retreating as if reversing a cliff.
A sound moved through the delegation—not approval. Exhale.
Then the matriarch added, almost too soft to hear:
"Burn it again."
Silence turned a page.
She did not motion to the match.
She turned to Wei Lan. "Draft a notice for the archive: 'On this day, Meiyuan affirms that promises once made to the Lin family were handled—incorrectly.' Use that word." A pause. "Add: 'The house stands ready to hear correction.'"
Wei Lan, blinking fast, wrote with her mouth open like a person trying not to drown. "Hear… correction," she repeated.
"And the paper?" Shen Yiran asked. Her voice was even; her pupils were not.
Madam Li looked at the silk square on Xueyi's palms. For the first time all day, she let grief take one step out of its room and stand in the doorway.
"Return it," she said, "to where it hid."
Master Liang bowed until his bones argued. "Meiyuan learns."
"Meiyuan survives," Madam Li answered.
Xueyi turned to the beam. She lifted the hook, lowered the lantern—a hand's breadth, no more. With the gentleness carpenters reserve for wood they love, she slid the flake back into the narrow lip that had kept it alive. It nestled there like a bird rediscovering the first branch it trusted.
The seam lantern dimmed one fraction, as if relieved.
Tianhua's shoulders lost a weight he hadn't admitted he was carrying. His hand—gloved, service cotton—hovered near the rope and did not touch her fingers.
"We will not keep it safe forever," Shen Yiran said quietly. It was the kindest truth she had offered all week.
"No," Xueyi agreed. "Just long enough for the house to say it aloud."
Elder Zhao laughed—the sound of a man forgiven by time. Master Liang pressed a palm to the beam and whispered something in Suzhou river dialect. The wood kept it.
Wei Lan dotted a period like a person signing a treaty with her wrist.
Madam Li looked up at the gold seam. "Tomorrow," she said, to no one and to everyone, "we let this one lead again."
She left without waiting to see if people understood she had just changed the house by a word.
The delegation withdrew in whispers that pretended to be notes. Shen Yiran stayed the longest. Before she turned, she met Xueyi's gaze—no hatred, no plea. Measure.
When they were gone, only five remained: the elder, the historian, the heir, the artisan, and the lantern that refused to lie.
Wind did not arrive.
Still, the seam lantern trembled.
"Did you hear it?" Tianhua asked, eyes on the beam.
"What?" Xueyi said, though she knew.
"It said, 'Not buried.'" His mouth tugged, almost-smile. "Houses make terrible liars."
Master Liang tapped his cane once. "And perfect archives."
Xueyi tilted her head and, for the first time, dared to rest her shoulder lightly against the pillar. The wood was warm. The flake above her breathed like a very old secret practicing how to become public without breaking.
She closed her eyes. The seam glowed through her lids like a vow.
And somewhere beneath the hook, two half-carved strokes darkened another shade closer to names.