The page she has never written

A woman in Abu Dhabi designs hair clips and hair bands for little girls and sells them through an online page and a phone number. Orders arrive most evenings. She packs them at the dining table after her own daughters are asleep.

Ask her what one order earns her and she changes the subject. She knows the materials cost something, the courier costs something, the packaging costs something, and the ads she runs at weekends cost something. She has never put those numbers on one page. She prices by feel, a little under the shop she admires, and hopes the total works out.

It is easy to call that disorganised. It is closer to fear. The page might show that the designs she loves most lose money on every sale. It might show that the price has been too low for a year. It might show that the weekend ads bring in orders that cost more than they earn. As long as the page does not exist, none of that has to be true.

But not looking does not keep her safe. It only keeps her guessing. Every choice she makes, which design to make more of, whether to raise the price, how much to spend reaching new mothers, is made in the dark. The ones who gain from that darkness are not her. They are whoever she is overpaying, and every rival who has done the sums.

Money is not why she started. She started because she wanted small girls to wear something pretty that did not fall apart in a week.

The numbers are not the point. They are how she finds out whether the point can last.