How to check session attribute in CanCan's ability model?

Ruby on Rails
1

I have a feature where an admin can ‘Sign In As’ a customer. The feature works by setting a session variable when the admin switches to a different user and then signing in as the customer using the sign_in(user) helper in Devise.

Based on this: How To Masquerade As Another User To See How They Use Your App

# users_controller.rb
def become
  user = User.find(params[:id])
  if impersonating?
    session[:admin_id] = nil
  else
    session[:admin_id] = current_user.id
  end
  sign_in(:user, user, bypass: true)
  redirect_to root_url, notice: "Now signed in as #{user.full_name}"
end

# application_controller.rb

def impersonating?
  session[:admin_id].present?
end
helper_method :impersonating?

Problem: I use CanCan for abilities and I’m stuck on how to give admin abilities to a customer when it’s actually an admin signed in as a customer. Basic abilities might be:

# ability.rb
class Ability

  include CanCan::Ability
  
  def initialize(user)

    user ||= User.new

    if user.type == 'Admin'
      can :manage, Product
    end

    if user.type == 'Customer'
      can :read, Product
    end
  end
end

What I’d like to do is something like this but I know I can’t access the impersonating? helper inside the model:

if user.type == 'Customer'
  can :read, Product
  can :destroy, Product if impersonating? # <-
end

I tried using a virtual attribute and setting user.impersonating so I could check it in the ability model:

if user.type == 'Customer'
  can :read, Product
  can :destroy, Product if user.impersonating? # <-
end

but the attribute doesn’t carry across requests.

The only other way I can think of is to create a real model attribute and write user.impersonating to the database, which I don’t really want to do.

What else can I try?