Tuesday.
Second week of it now, though I'm only really counting from Monday. My daughter's LumiSpa going every night without me saying a word, that low hum through the wall while I fold washing in the hallway.
Tonight she came down for dinner already scrubbed clean, hair still damp, and asked — completely offhand, over the rice — whether we had any more of the cleanser left in the cupboard. Not "can I have some." Just checking stock, like a person who plans ahead now.
I said no but I could buy from Auntie Ninuo. She nodded and went back to her noodles like it was nothing.
It wasn't nothing. A few weeks ago I was the one nagging her to wash her face properly before bed. Now she's doing inventory.
I didn't say any of that out loud. Just felt it, quietly, washing up after.
Ninuo called around nine, something about a Melbourne flight on Thursday, half business, half just checking in. I told her about the cleanser, the inventory-checking, the whole small thing that had made me strangely happy all evening.
She laughed, not surprised at all.
Then, before I'd properly planned to, I said it. "I want to actually understand this. How you started. Not just watch from the side anymore."
There was a pause. Not long. Just enough that I wondered if I'd said too much.
"You know I didn't start because someone sold me on it," she said. "I started because my life had fallen apart."
She said it plainly, the way she says most things — no drama in her voice, just fact.
"Five years ago. My husband left — for someone younger, the whole cliché of it. I got the kids. Both of them. He does odd jobs here and there, whatever comes up, so what he sends some months barely covers school shoes."
"There was a stretch where I didn't know how the next month was going to work. I'm not exaggerating. I mean I actually didn't know."
"But it wasn't just the money that scared me. It was looking in the mirror and seeing someone who'd let herself go completely — tired skin, tired everything, like I'd given up on being looked at. And some stubborn part of me just refused. If he got to start over looking happy, I wasn't going to fall apart looking like it."
"A friend of mine — older than me, someone I'd known for years — she's the one who brought me into this. I didn't have money to start. None. She lent it to me herself, so I could get the basic kit, the skincare, the probiotics, the R². She just said, try it on yourself first, worry about the rest later."
"So that's exactly what I did. Used it on myself. Took the probiotics every morning, did the skincare properly, actually followed through instead of buying things and letting them sit in a drawer. And slowly I started looking like someone again. Not overnight. But slowly."
"That part came first, before any of the money. Just me, wanting to feel like a person worth looking at, for myself, not for anyone else."
"Then I went to her team meetings. Sat in the back at the talks not really understanding half of it. Turns out I'm good at talking to people — didn't know that about myself before. A few months in, I was actually making something from it. More than my old job, if I'm honest. Enough that I stopped having to ask my parents for anything. Enough that it was just — mine. My kids, my money, my face in the mirror I could actually stand to look at."
"That's the part that got me, more than any of it. Not the products by themselves. Being able to look at myself — how I looked, what I'd built — and know I'd done it myself, out of nothing, after everything that happened."
"So I stayed. Kept going. Here we are."
She said it without asking anything of me. Just telling it, the way you'd tell someone the plain version of how you got somewhere, if they happened to ask.
I didn't say anything for a second. Just stood in the kitchen, phone warm against my ear, the shower running upstairs again — hers this time, not my daughter's.
"I'm not trying to convince you of anything," she added, quieter. "I just like telling people the actual version. Most people only hear the after."
I said goodnight not long after. Stood in the kitchen a while longer than I needed to, phone dark in my hand.
The after was the only version of her I'd ever seen. The healthy skin, the flights, the way a room rearranges itself around her.
I hadn't once pictured the before.
I still don't know what I do with that.