Wei cooked dinner. Properly. With ambition.

  Rice — washed three times, because Auntie Huang had explained that twice was laziness but three times was respect for the grain. Vegetables — bias-cut, because of course. A piece of pork that he'd bought at the market for a price he announced with the pride of someone who had negotiated a transaction and won.

  "Too much," I said. Meaning: the pork. Not the cost.

  "It's fine."

  "We don't need—"

  "It's fine, Yun."

  The tone. The flat finality. The act of closing a conversation not through argument but through refusal to continue it. The verbal equivalent of turning your back. I did it with silence. He did it with repetition. Different instrument, same wall.

  He cooked. I sat.

  Outside, the evening performed its transition. Light became less. Shadows became more. The settlement's daytime population yielded to its evening population — inside instead of outside, seated instead of standing, quieter instead of louder.

  Auntie Huang's voice carried across the yards and fences.

  "SHEN! COME HOME! NOW!"

  Deaf Boy — somewhere between our yard and the next — did not respond.

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  Wei set the table. Two bowls. Two sets of chopsticks. The rice: steaming, correctly washed, the texture that indicated he'd learned the water ratio and the heat timing.

  "Are we staying here?" he asked.

  The question arrived between the rice and the pork, in the conversational space that dinner provided.

  "Perhaps."

  "That's not a yes."

  "It's not a no."

  "You said that before."

  "And I'll say it again."

  He ate. Chewed. The silence between bites was the silence of someone finding the response insufficient but acceptable — not by content but by the relationship's long-established rules about the things Yun says when she means yes but can't commit to yes.

  "I like it here," he said.

  "I know."

  "The market's good. Lao Chen is—" He searched. "Lao Chen is real."

  Real. The word he chose. Not kind, not wise, not skilled — real. The quality of someone whose existence was not performance, whose presence was the un-curated version of a person. Wei valued that because Wei's life for more than a year had been lived in the proximity of a being whose every word was curated.

  "The food is good," I said. His rice. His vegetables. His overpriced pork. A small compliment, deliberately concrete, because concrete compliments were the ones Wei trusted.

  He tried not to smile and failed. The failure was small and bright and entirely adequate.

  I did the dishes after dinner. Wei worked on a technique — the third sequence, the one he'd modified. He practiced the modification while I washed, his hands forming the positions in miniature.

  "Why won't you just tell me if the angle is right?" he asked.

  I rinsed a bowl. Set it down. "Find it yourself."

  "Why do you always—"

  "If I solve everything, he never learns."

  The words came out — not as instruction, not as philosophy. As thought.

  And if he never learns, he dies the first time I'm not there.

  Wei found the angle. Himself.

  I sat in the doorway. Cold tea on my lips, which I drank anyway. Stars in the sky. The settlement sleeping around us.

  He'd found it himself. That was the goal. Always.