Her hands stilled. She didn't look at me. "If he falls, I fall with him."
"That's a choice," I said. "Not a law."
"For a daughter," she murmured, "it feels like both."
Aunt Ping rapped her knuckles lightly with the handle of the broom. "Stop talking where the cloth should be listening."
Meiling flinched, then bit back whatever insult her tongue had grown fat on and returned to the row.
I let the hall breathe around us: threads humming, women counting in low voices that made the air feel honest. It calmed me the way a clean ledger calmed me. You can't lie when a warp tangles; everyone sees the knot.
"Two men came to me this morning," I told Meiling as if discussing dye. "A scribe who thought he knew what a confession looked like. A porter who actually did."
Her shoulders rose a fraction. "Porters carry other people's mistakes."
