Hugh did not reply within fourteen days. Her attorney wrote again, this time with a draft complaint attached, and this time Hugh replied, through a lawyer of his own, denying that he had taken the list and claiming that the names had come from his own memory and his own contacts, built over eleven years. Her attorney answered with the evidence: the letter's mailing list matched the shop's client list in order and in detail, including three customers who had moved and whose new addresses were only in the shop's system, and including two customers who had asked, in writing, not to receive marketing mail, and who had received Hugh's letter anyway. Faced with that, Hugh's lawyer advised him to settle, and Hugh signed a written undertaking: he would cease soliciting, he would destroy the list, and he would not open a competing business using Aster and Grey's clients for the remainder of the two-year period. The competing shop, which had never actually opened its doors, fizzled. A notice appeared on its website, briefly, saying that Ashford Private Clients had postponed its launch, and then the website disappeared altogether. Octavia did not celebrate. She filed the undertaking with the restitution agreement, and she told Tamsin about it, briefly, because Tamsin had asked, and because Tamsin deserved to know that the man who had cut her hours was not coming back through the front door with a new sign.
Around the same time, Octavia reported Gordon Wexford to the police. She had his name from Hugh's notebook, where the payments were marked W, and from the online listings where several of the diverted pieces had appeared, photographed against a plain background with descriptions that matched the shop's records. She gave the police the notebook, the listings, and the matching figures, and she answered their questions as fully as she could, and then she stepped back, because the case was theirs now, not hers. The police investigation took several months, and it ended the way such cases often do: Wexford was charged with receiving stolen property, and he pleaded guilty, and he was sentenced to probation and a fine, and he was ordered to pay restitution for the pieces that could be traced to him. Octavia did not attend the hearing. She read about it in the police report that was sent to her, and she filed the report with the restitution papers, and she moved on, because the shop needed her attention more than the courtroom did.
As for Hugh himself, the prosecutors made their own decision, and Octavia was careful, whenever anyone asked, to state it as theirs and not as hers. After full restitution was underway, and after Hugh had signed the undertaking about the client list, the prosecutors declined to bring further criminal charges against him, on the grounds that restitution was being made and that the victims were being compensated. Octavia did not ask them to change their minds, and she did not claim credit for their decision. She told the staff, when they asked, that Hugh had resigned and was paying back what he owed, and that the prosecutors had decided not to charge him further, and that those were two separate facts, and that she would not confuse them. She told the customers who asked the same thing, in the same words, because consistency was the only way to be fair to people who had been treated unfairly. Hugh's resignation stood. His restitution stood. The prosecutors' decision stood. And Octavia, who had never wanted to be a judge, went back to being a jeweler, which was what she had always wanted to be.
One of the quieter consequences of the change came from the regular customer whom Hugh had served on the Tuesday morning while Octavia waited. He was a man who had been buying from Aster and Grey for years, who knew Hugh by name, and who had grown accustomed to being treated as the shop's most important customer, with first looks and private viewings and the kind of attention