She also reviewed each staff member's record, as she had promised, and she found what she had hoped to find: that the rest of the staff had not taken part in the diversions. The bench jeweler had kept his own log, which matched the repair log except where Hugh had altered it. The bookkeeper had flagged two discrepancies in the accounts the previous year and had been told by Hugh that they were timing differences, and she had believed him, because she had no reason not to, and because Hugh had been the manager for eleven years. The two other sales associates had followed Hugh's instructions about appointments because they had been told, when they were hired, that the appointment rule was shop policy, and they had not known that it was not in the manual. Octavia told each of them what she had found, and she told them that their records were clear, and she told them that from now on, if a rule was given to them, they could ask to see it in the manual, and that no one would be punished for asking. She meant it, and they believed her, not all at once, but over the following weeks, as they saw that the new policies were not slogans but practices, enforced the same way for everyone.
Two months after Hugh resigned, Octavia learned that he was trying to open a competing shop. She learned it the way such things are usually learned: a customer mentioned it in passing, while picking up a repaired ring, and said that she had received a letter from a new private client service, signed by Hugh, offering her first look at pieces that sounded, to Octavia's ear, very much like the pieces Aster and Grey carried. Octavia asked the customer, politely, if she could see the letter, and the customer, who had been coming to Aster and Grey for years and who had been refunded an appraisal fee the month before, handed it over without hesitation. The letter was printed on plain, expensive paper, and it offered a private clientele, by invitation, with first access to limited pieces and personal service, and it was signed with Hugh's name and a new business name, Ashford Private Clients. Octavia recognized the mailing list at once, because she had built it herself during the transition: it was the shop's client list, the names and addresses of the customers who had bought or consigned or repaired at Aster and Grey over the past five years, taken from the store system, which Hugh had still been able to access in the days before his resignation, before Octavia changed the passwords.
Octavia did not panic, and she did not call Hugh. She called her attorney, the attorney who had handled the purchase from the Carrows and who knew the purchase agreement by heart. Her attorney read the letter, and she read the purchase agreement, and she told Octavia what Octavia had already suspected: that the agreement contained a non-solicitation clause, which barred the seller's former manager, as a party to the transition, from soliciting the shop's clients for two years, and that Hugh's use of the client list was a clear breach of it, as well as a misuse of data that did not belong to him. Her attorney wrote a letter, not a threatening letter but a precise one, citing the clause, demanding that Hugh cease soliciting Aster and Grey's clients, return or destroy the list, and confirm in writing that he had done so. The letter gave him fourteen days. Octavia signed it, and her attorney sent it by certified mail, and Octavia went back to the shop and did not mention it to the staff, because there was no need to worry them with a dispute that might resolve itself.