Wednesday.
I caught her in the hallway mirror this morning, the big one by the stairs, chin tilted the exact way I do when I'm checking something I don't want to say out loud.
She didn't notice me watching.
Sixteen going on seventeen, and somewhere in the past year she stopped looking at herself like a kid checking for spinach in her teeth and started looking at herself like a woman deciding what she wants to become.
I stood there a second longer than the coffee needed me to, doing the maths I keep doing lately. If she's not a kid anymore, what does that make me.
Ninuo's story from last night hadn't left me. The husband, the other woman, five years of not knowing how the next month would work.
Mine wasn't so different, if I'm honest with myself for once. My ex left for someone else too, a few years back now. But the truth is we'd been finished long before she showed up — just neither of us had said it out loud yet. She only made it quick instead of slow.
He still sends something for our daughter every month. Mum and Dad help out some months when my pay from the shop doesn't quite stretch. We're not struggling, not really. I've never told Ninuo any of that. She's never asked, and I've never offered.
Funny, hearing someone else's hardest years out loud and realising you've been sitting on your own version this whole time, just never taking it out to look at it.
Ninuo texted mid-morning, while I still had a load of washing half hung on the line. Nothing pushy about it — her company's running a small daytime thing today, people from her Nu Skin team getting together for a few hours, nothing formal. Come if you're curious, she wrote. No pressure either way.
Wednesdays I'm not rostered at the shop anyway, so there wasn't even a real reason to say no.
I stood in the laundry a while with my phone in one hand, a peg still in the other.
Caught myself in the little mirror by the back door on the way in, the one I usually only glance at to check for washing powder on my sleeve.
I looked at my own face longer than the sleeve needed today.
No woman doesn't want to look a little more like the version of herself she used to be. I don't think that's vanity, exactly. I think it's just wanting proof you're still becoming something, not just ageing quietly next to your own daughter.
I looked at Ninuo's message longer than I looked at anything else this morning.
Typed "maybe," deleted it. Typed "I'll think about it," deleted that too. Typed it a third time, something noncommittal and small, and deleted that one as well.
Then I just wrote "what time" and hit send before I could talk myself out of it.
She replied with a time and a smiley face, nothing else. No fuss, like she'd expected it eventually.
I still don't know what I'll say when my daughter gets home from school and asks how my day was.