She made Tamsin floor lead, effective immediately, with a raise and a regular schedule, and she said so in front of everyone, not as a reward for loyalty but because Tamsin had done the work of noticing and writing down what was wrong, and because a shop that wanted to be honest needed someone on the floor who had already shown that she would be. She told the rest of the staff, plainly, that no one else was being fired that day, and that each person's record would be reviewed on its own, by what they had actually done, not by who they had worked under. She told them that if anyone had taken part in the diversions or the appraisal fees, they should come to her privately within the week, and that honesty now would be treated differently from concealment later. She told them that the shop would stay open, that their jobs were safe, and that she intended to keep the name, the bench, and the staff, because those were the things the Carrows had asked her to keep, and because they were the things worth keeping.
The staff listened in silence, and then, one by one, they asked questions, and Octavia answered them as best she could. The bench jeweler asked whether the glass wall would change how he worked, and Octavia said it would not change the work, only who could see it, and that she would build the wall herself with a contractor, at the shop's expense, and that he would have a say in where it went. The bookkeeper asked about the restitution payments, and Octavia said they would be tracked in a separate account, with a monthly statement she would review herself, and that the bookkeeper would help her set it up. One of the sales associates asked whether the first-come list would hurt the regular customers, and Octavia said that the regular customers would still be welcome, and still be served well, but that they would wait their turn like everyone else, because a list that could not be seen was a list that could be abused, and she did not intend to run a shop with lists that could not be seen. Tamsin did not ask a question. She sat with her hands folded, and she looked, for the first time since Octavia had met her, like a person who was not bracing for something. When the meeting ended, the staff went home in the evening light, and Octavia stayed behind to lock up, and she stood for a moment on the sales floor, in the quiet, looking at the cases, and she thought about how much work there was still to do, and how glad she was that the work was hers to do.
In the weeks that followed, Octavia did the work in the order it needed to be done. She contacted the customers who had paid for appraisals that were never filed, one by one, by phone and by letter, and she told them, plainly, what had happened, and she refunded their fees, and she offered them a proper appraisal, filed and copied, at no charge. Most of them were surprised, and some were angry, and a few were quietly grateful, and all of them, in the end, accepted the refund, because a refund given without being asked for is a different thing from a refund extracted by complaint. She contacted the consignors and the repair customers whose pieces had been diverted, and this was harder, because a piece that has been sold cannot be refunded the way a fee can, and because some of the pieces were gone beyond recovery, sold through Wexford's online shop to buyers who could not be traced. For those, she paid compensation from the restitution fund, based on the documented value of each piece, and she wrote each person a letter explaining what had happened, what had been recovered, and what had not, and she did not soften the parts that could not be fixed. For the pieces that could be recovered, she worked with the police to trace them, and she returned what she could, and she kept a record of every return, because a record was the only way to be sure that the same thing would not happen again.