Friday.
The lunch rush had only just cleared, tissue paper still scattered across the counter from wrapping someone's birthday order, when a woman I didn't recognise came in looking for a card.
She found one within a minute. Then she didn't leave.
"Can I ask you something a bit random?" she said, still holding the card against her chest. "What have you been using on your skin lately?"
I actually looked around, half expecting she meant someone behind me.
"Sorry," she laughed. "You just look — rested, I guess. Is that a weird thing to say to someone at a till?"
Nobody had ever asked me that in this shop. People ask me about fish oil for their mother, calcium for a bone scan, which probiotic absorbs better. Nobody had asked what I use.
I didn't have a tidy answer ready, so I gave her the real one, in pieces.
Two minutes most nights with the LumiSpa, the same one on the shelf behind her. The ageLOC Activating Cleanser a friend pushed on me weeks ago, still going. A facial on Thursday that left my shoulders feeling like they belonged to someone else, still faintly with me two days on.
She listened properly, the way you listen when you're actually deciding something.
"I might come back for the device," she said. "Once I've had a proper look online."
"No rush," I said, and meant it.
She thanked me, tucked her card into her bag, and the bell over the door rang behind her.
I went back to the tissue paper. Folded a few sheets before it caught up with me properly.
I've spent months on this side of the counter, pointing at bottles, explaining doses, telling people what their mother or their husband or their daughter should try.
I've never once been the thing someone pointed at.
It sat strangely with me. Not bad. Just unfamiliar, the way a coat feels the first time you wear it instead of sell it.
Later, locking up, I caught my own reflection in the front window before I switched the lights off — the shelf behind me, the till, the same face I see every closing time.
I stood there a second longer than I needed to.
I still don't know what to do with being the answer instead of just knowing where to find it.