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“Low. She underprices everything she makes. It’s her only flaw as a businesswoman, and I’ve documented it.”

Ming set down the cleaver. He looked at his daughter, then at the man she’d brought, and the line of his mouth moved a quarter inch, which Knox would learn over the course of the evening was the Wang family standing ovation.

“Sit,” Ming said. “Fold.”

The dumpling operation occupied the kitchen table with the logistics of a small military campaign. Mei-Lin had made the filling that morning, pork and chive and ginger and a measure of white pepper she refused to disclose to her own children. The wrappers came in stacks under a damp cloth. Jane folded with the lazy competence of someone who’d done it ten thousand times and stopped being proud of it. Lucy folded like she piped buttercream, fast and exact, each pleat identical, a production line of one.

Knox’s first dumpling looked like a filing error.

“Too much filling,” Mei-Lin said. “You’re greedy.”

“I’m thorough.”

“Greedy.” She took his second attempt and opened it with one finger. “Ten pleats. No more. Greedy pleats tear the skin, and then everything you tried to hold falls out in the water. Again.”

He tried again. The third one held its shape. The fourth one had something approaching a spine. Mei-Lin watched his hands, and Knox felt the inspection in the exact place he’d felt Lucy’s at the first budget meeting, somewhere underneath the spreadsheets.

“Lighter,” Lucy said, without looking up from her own row. “You’re not signing a contract.”

“I’ve been told.”

“You’ll be told until it stops being true.”

Jane leaned toward her mother. “He brought you tea he researched. He probably made the man at the shop explain oxidation levels.”

“I know,” Mei-Lin said. “I already looked in the bag. It’s good tea.” She nudged Knox’s sixth dumpling into line with the others, where it sat like a junior analyst among partners but did not fall over. “Better. Your hands listen. Most men’s hands argue.”

Across the kitchen, Ming had drafted Lucy into vegetable duty, and Knox watched a thing happen that no one announced. Lucy took the cleaver, set a carrot on the board, and her father reached over and moved her thumb half an inch back along the handle. Thirty years of knife skill correcting a few years of bakery habit. Lucy, who did not accept notes from anyone, who had threatened Knox with a rolling pin for the word acceptable, adjusted her grip and kept cutting.

“He still does that,” Jane said quietly, following his gaze. “Every Sunday she comes, he fixes her grip. She lets him. It’s the only correction she’s ever taken without a counterargument.”

“Why that one?”

“Because it’s not really about the knife.” Jane went back to her wrapper. “Keep up, Knightly.”

Dinner was fourteen dishes pretending to be six. The dumplings went into bamboo steamers, and the steamers went into the middle of the table, and Ming sat across from Knox like a man who had conducted thirty years of job interviews at a wok station and knew that people revealed themselves around food.

The interrogation was conducted entirely through hospitality. Ming filled Knox’s plate and asked what his father had done. Knox said finance, and that he’d died when Knox was twenty, and Ming nodded once and put another dumpling on his plate, which appeared to be the currency for honesty. Mei-Lin asked about his mother. Knox said they spoke twice a year, and Mei-Lin’s chopsticks paused, and she put two dumplings on his plate.

“At this rate,” Jane said, “tell them something really sad and you’ll get the whole steamer.”

“Jane,” Lucy said.

“I’m observing. It’s a professional skill.”

The dumplings were the best thing Knox had eaten since a lemon elderflower cake, and he ate like a person, per instruction. He took second helpings, then thirds, and offered no commentary on ratios, although the wrapper-to-filling ratio was perfect and withholding that observation took real effort.

It was Ming who opened the door Lucy had told him not to touch.

“She showed you the menu,” Ming said. It wasn’t a question. “By the kitchen door.”

“I saw it.”

“Thirty years.” Ming refilled his own tea. His voice stayed level, a man reading a recipe he knew by heart. “I started with one wok and my wife’s handwriting on the specials board. The mayor’s office gave us a certificate at twenty-five years. My wife framed it the same afternoon.” He set the teapot down. “Then a letter came. A company that owned a company that owned the building. Ninety days.”

The number landed in Knox’s chest and stayed there. Ninety days was the same arithmetic that had arrived at Flour & Honey in an envelope at the start of the summer. It was also, possibly, the same arithmetic that might be buried in the 2018 files he’d been chasing for weeks—a corrupted archive that IT kept promising to recover and never did—a restructuring his own signature might have set in motion before he understood what a signature cost.

“We never learned the name,” Mei-Lin said. “Of the people who decided. The letter was signed by a title, not a person.” She looked at her husband for a heartbeat, and then she reached over and put the last dumpling on Knox’s plate. “It’s old soup, that story. Eat.”