The two letters reached the guest hall at Xinye (新野) on the same evening because Cheng Yu's (程昱) two messengers had, by chance, ridden at matching speeds.

That evening, Xu Shu (徐庶) went alone into a small inner room and laid the two sheets side by side upon his desk. The envelopes looked alike on their outer faces. The grain of the paper was alike. The four characters of the recipient were alike. With his left hand Xu Shu unfolded the first sheet. He opened the second only after he had read the first three times.

The brush-strokes on the first sheet were his mother's. The leftward lean of her brush. The small pause at the end of the third stroke. The long drag that loosened her breath before the name. All three matched.

But one thing did not.

The final line had been cut short. Your mother's stride may now go one stride ahead of your own. In his mother's hand, the end of that last stroke should have wavered lightly. In this sheet, it was fixed, firm. His mother had never written the last stroke after the name with such firmness.

That one final stroke lingered long under Xu Shu's left hand. His left thumb nearly ran across it, then stopped without touching.

He unfolded the second sheet.

The first line carried a tune close to the first sheet's. Are you keeping well. But the pause at the end of the third stroke was too precise. His mother's brush never paused at the same measure every time. At some characters she paused half a measure early, at others half a measure late. That irregularity was the very mark of her brush. Here, every third-stroke ending paused at the same measure.

And in the last line there was one more strange turn. Your mother's stride has already begun to go ahead of your own. His mother almost never wrote the word already. Where already might belong, she was more likely to write unbeknownst. Already was not the cadence of her tongue.

That single line lingered long under Xu Shu's left hand. This time his thumb did run across it, lightly. When he drew it back, a little ink came away on his fingertip. The ink on the sheet had not yet fully dried.

Xu Shu laid the first sheet back beside the other.

The first was true. The second was forged. The true was his mother's last hand; the forged was someone's right hand. And yet, for him, the final conclusion of the two sheets was the same.

His mother was already in a study-room at Xudu (許都). The last line of the true sheet — may go one stride ahead of your stride — was not a threat but a preparation for parting. It meant his mother would walk on ahead for her son's sake. That line alone was already firm. The forged sheet had only laid one more firmness upon the same seat.

Xu Shu placed both sheets deep inside the breast of his robe. Then he stood for a while by the study window and looked up at the southern sky. The true writing and the imitated writing of his mother's hand had come down to him together this evening, but his own stride had already been set toward one place.

That night, Xu Shu did not see Liu Bei (劉備). Alone in his own room, he quietly unfolded one of the two sheets again. The true one. With his left hand he stroked, very lightly, the end of the last stroke. It was the place where his mother's brush had wavered. That wavering was the mark of her last breath.

The forged sheet he left folded in his breast. He did not throw it away because one day he wished to see with his own eyes whose right hand had written it. The name Cheng Yu of Xudu now sat quietly upon the forged sheet inside Xu Shu's breast.

When unwritten writing sits beside what is written, the unwritten can at times say more than the written does. This evening, Xu Shu's two sheets were such a case.

At one strand of the southern sky, a single spring star tilted quietly toward Xudu. Xu Shu's right hand already held a resolve that would follow the direction of that tilting star. Only, in what words he would set that resolve before Liu Bei on the morrow — his left hand had not yet decided tonight. The right hand knew where it would go. The left hand, which in his whole writing life had always been the softer of the two, was still searching for a sentence that would not wound the man he was about to leave. That search, rather than the travel itself, kept him up through the rest of the night. Parting-sentences are written, always, in the softer of a man's two hands, because that hand alone knows the weight of what one man can do to another with a wrong line on the way out.

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