Still Wednesday.
I changed twice before I left the house. Ended up back in the same cardigan I always wear, because trying too hard felt worse than not trying at all.
The address Ninuo sent led me to a café on Rowe Street in Eastwood, not the hall or the office I'd half pictured. I sat in the car a full minute first, engine off, hands still on the wheel.
I don't know exactly what I was braced for. Something with a stage, maybe. A clipboard. Someone telling me my life could look different by six o'clock if I just said yes to something.
What I got was two tables pushed together, five chairs, and a waitress who already knew Ninuo's order before she'd finished sitting down.
Five of us, once I'd counted properly. Ninuo. A woman about my age called Amy, still in gym gear, hair damp at the roots. Two others I didn't catch the names of fast enough to use later. No stage. No clipboard. Just flat whites going cold while everyone talked over each other.
Ninuo waved me into the last chair, the way you'd wave a friend into the last seat at a wedding. No introduction, no fuss. I liked her for that more than I expected to.
Most of the hour wasn't about the business at all, as far as I could tell. Amy was mid-story about her skin since she'd switched up her routine — more even, she kept saying, touching her own cheek like she still didn't quite believe it. Someone else asked what she was using now, not in a selling way, more the way you'd ask a friend where she got her haircut.
Then it turned into gyms. Which one near Epping had the good reformer Pilates instructor. Whether the boxing place on Rowe Street was worth the membership. Amy said she trains four mornings a week now, non-negotiable, and the others nodded like this was just understood between them.
"You carry yourself differently when your body's doing something," Ninuo said at one point, to no one in particular, stirring a coffee she wasn't really drinking. "Half of this is just posture, honestly. The rest follows."
Nobody argued with her. Nobody made it into a bigger point than it was.
What I kept doing, the whole hour, was just watching them talk.
Not warily. Not braced for anything, in the end. Just enjoying it, plain and simple — the kind of enjoying I haven't let myself do in a while.
Amy telling the Pilates story with her whole hands. The other two finishing each other's sentences about a hike they've got planned. Ninuo laughing at something before the punchline had even landed.
I didn't know any of them a year ago. Barely knew Amy three months ago, if I'm honest. And there I was, glad to be at that table, glad for no particular reason except that it was easy.
Somewhere around the second coffee I noticed what I actually felt, underneath the plain pleasantness of it.
Not curiosity about the business, particularly. Not even really about the products.
Envy, if I'm honest. The plain kind, not the ugly kind.
They all seemed to know something about running a life that I've never quite worked out — the gym mornings, the trip planning, the easy way Amy talked about her own face like it still belonged to her. Like upkeep was just something you did for yourself, same as brushing your teeth, not a chore squeezed in around everything else.
I used to think that kind of ease belonged to a different sort of woman than me. Sitting there with a cold flat white, I wasn't so sure anymore.
Drove home with the radio off.
My daughter was in the lounge room when I got in, revision notes fanned out across the coffee table, phone propped against a water bottle playing something about winged eyeliner. The formal dress bag hung off the back of the door, still zipped, waiting on shoes I haven't ordered yet.
No school run for her these next few weeks — study leave now, exams close enough to touch. And somewhere underneath the flashcards, formal, ten days out, always in the room whether she says it out loud or not.
She looked up when I came in, a highlighter still between her teeth. "How was your day," she said, muffled, eyes already back on the page.
Tired around the edges, the way she's been for a fortnight. But something else close to the surface too — a brightness she didn't used to bring to an ordinary Wednesday.
I stood in the doorway a second too long, working out which version I was about to give her.