Rain tapped the shutters of the guest room above the harbor. Yan sat at the table with Qinghe, Han, and Bai. The Forgetting River Sutra lay open between them, its copied pages held flat beneath a smooth stone. Its complete return step had been checked the day before.
Qinghe asked him to choose a memory he was comfortable revisiting. He thought of the first courtyard home he had shared with Ning. “A meal on a rainy day,” he said. “There were steamed buns cooling on the window ledge.”
He took a clean sheet and wrote what he remembered: flour on Ning’s sleeve, the rain on the roof, the table that rocked whenever he leaned against it. He added the smell of hot dough and the way the buns had cooled too quickly near the open window.
For a moment he was back in the small room. The courtyard roof had leaked in one corner, so they had dragged the table away from the drip and set the buns on the sill. Ning had brushed flour from her sleeve, missed a streak, and claimed she had done it on purpose to look like a baker.
Yan had told her the buns were too hot to eat. She had taken one anyway and blown on it until her cheeks puffed. The table rocked beneath his arm. She slid a folded scrap of paper under its short leg and tested the repair with a cup.
