Hugh asked for the hour, and Octavia gave it to him, and he left the office and went out to the floor, and Tamsin stayed, and Octavia sat with her for a while, not talking much, because there was not much to say that would make the morning easier. When the hour was up, Hugh came back, and he had called no lawyer, and he signed the resignation letter and the restitution agreement, in a hand that shook a little on the first signature and steadied on the second. He cleaned out his desk while the shop was still open, quietly, without a scene, and he left through the back door with a single box, and Octavia watched him go with a feeling that was not satisfaction and not pity but something between them, the feeling of a person who has done a necessary thing and knows that it will not undo what was done. She turned to Tamsin, who was still standing by the door, and she said, "Thank you for your notes. They mattered. Now we have a shop to run, and I would like you to be part of running it, if you are willing."
That afternoon, after the shop closed, Octavia called the staff together in the back room, not on the sales floor and not in a formal all-hands assembly with lawyers at the table, but in the plain, practical way she had always run a meeting: chairs in a circle, coffee on the counter, and the truth stated first. There were five of them besides herself: Tamsin, the two other sales associates, the bench jeweler who worked three days a week, and the part-time bookkeeper. She introduced herself, and she told them, simply, that she had bought Aster and Grey from the Carrow family three weeks earlier, that she had completed the transition inventory, and that Hugh Ashford had resigned that morning. She did not give them the details of Hugh's notebook or the appraisal fees, because those details belonged to the people who had been harmed and to the restitution process, not to a staff meeting, but she told them, in plain terms, what she had found: that pieces had been diverted, that appraisal fees had been charged for work that was not filed, and that customers had been turned away on the basis of how they looked. She told them that she had signed a restitution agreement with Hugh, and that the customers who were owed money or pieces would be contacted and compensated, and that the shop would be run differently from now on.
She announced the reforms the way she had planned them, one at a time, so that each one could be heard. There would be no more appointment-only viewing: any customer could ask to see any piece, and any associate could open any case, with a second person present for high-value pieces, as the manual already required. There would be a plain-language price and appraisal policy, posted where customers could read it, stating that every appraisal would be filed and that the customer would receive a copy, with the filing logged the same day. The repair bench would be opened to public viewing behind a glass wall, so that customers could watch their pieces being worked on, and so that the bench would no longer be a closed room where things could disappear. The manager's-picks first-look list, which Hugh had used to reserve the best pieces for his favored customers, would be replaced by a first-come, first-served list, kept in a book on the counter where anyone could see their place in it. And the shop would start a paid apprenticeship for young jewelers from Portland's trade school, open to all applicants, with a rotation at the bench, so that the trade would be taught to people who wanted to learn it, not only to people who already knew someone in it.