Wednesday, later.
I stood in the doorway a beat too long, deciding.
Then I just sat down across from her, pushed the revision notes gently to one side, and told her the whole thing. Not a version. The whole thing.
The café on Rowe Street. Ninuo, Amy, the two women whose names I never caught. The gym mornings, the reformer Pilates, Amy touching her own cheek like she still couldn't believe her own skin.
"And?" my daughter said, capping her highlighter for once.
"And I felt envious," I said. Plain, the way Ninuo tells things. "Watching them. All that ease. Like keeping yourself together was just something you did, not something squeezed in around everything else."
She didn't say anything for a second. Just looked at me the way she'd looked at herself in the hallway mirror last week — deciding something.
Then I said the other part, the part I hadn't planned to say out loud until I was already saying it. That I'd been thinking — just thinking, nothing decided — about selling a little myself. Not joining anyone's team. Just retail. A few things, the way I already move fish oil and calcium for Carol and the others, except properly this time, on my own.
She sat up so fast the revision notes slid onto the floor.
"Mum. Yes." No hesitation at all. "Your skin's honestly so much better since you started using that stuff. And mine—" she touched her own jaw, the same gesture Amy must have made without either of them ever knowing about the other, "—it's actually so much clearer than last term. I don't know if it's the LumiSpa or what. But it's something."
I told her not to get ahead of herself. She didn't listen.
"You already know what people want," she said. "Aunty Carol buys her fish oil off you every week anyway. You could just do both. The supplements and this. Same customers, basically."
I hadn't thought of it that plainly until she said it. The daigou side of things has always just been me and a notebook and whoever needs their calcium or CoQ10 shipped off to a cousin in Guangzhou. Nothing official. Nothing with a name on it. It's been running itself quietly for years, and nobody's ever had to convince anybody of anything. They just come to me when they need it.
"I could mention it to people at school too," she said, already somewhere ahead of me. "Not selling. Just — if anyone asks."
I told her we'd see. Meant it, for once, instead of just saying it to end a conversation.
What I didn't tell her — couldn't quite find the shape of it yet — was that this wasn't anything like Ninuo's version of it. No team. No talks in the back of a café I don't understand yet. Just me, doing more of what I already do.
She went back to her notes eventually, slower than before, glancing over every so often like she was still turning it over.
I sat at the table a long while after she went up. Kettle boiled and I didn't get up for it.
I don't know yet what any of it actually looks like. A few boxes in the hall cupboard, maybe. Or nothing at all once the light of an ordinary Thursday hits it.
Either way, I'd finally put it down on the table between us. Plain, the way Ninuo tells things.