and that had arrived with stones set crooked, and Tamsin showed them, under the loupe, exactly what was wrong, and she did not mock them for buying online, and she fixed the settings, and they left as customers who would come back. A woman brought in a necklace that had been her grandmother's, tangled and broken, and Tamsin untangled it while they talked, and the woman cried a little, and Tamsin did not hurry her, and the necklace went home whole.
Octavia watched all of this from the bench, where she worked three days a week herself, because she had never wanted to be an owner who did not work, and because the bench was where she thought best. She resized rings, she reset stones, she repaired clasps, and she taught the apprentices in the afternoons, standing behind them at the bench and guiding their hands the way Ansel had guided hers. She kept the restitution account herself, reviewing it every month with the bookkeeper, and she watched the payments come in from Hugh on schedule, and she watched the money go out to the customers who were owed it, and she kept the ledger clean, because a clean ledger was the only way to be sure that the restitution was real and not a promise. By the spring, more than half of the appraisal fees had been refunded, and several of the diverted pieces had been recovered or compensated, and the file that had once been a stack of paper on her desk had become a set of accounts that balanced, or nearly balanced, and that was, she thought, as close to justice as a shop could come without a courtroom.
The shop's reputation changed, slowly, the way reputations do, not by announcement but by experience. Customers who had once been turned away began to come back, not because they had heard about the reforms but because they had heard, from a friend or a neighbor, that the shop on Glisan Street was a place where you could walk in and be served. A woman in scrubs, on her lunch break from the hospital nearby, came in to look at a watch, and she was shown the watch, and she bought it, and she told Octavia, on her way out, that she had tried once before and had been told to come back another day, and that she was glad she had tried again. A man in work boots came in to ask about a chain for his wife's anniversary, and he was shown the chains, and he bought one, and he told Tamsin that he had expected to be told the chains were by appointment, and that he was glad he had been wrong. Octavia did not keep a list of these returns, because keeping a list would have made them into a campaign, and she did not want a campaign. She wanted a shop. But she noticed them, and she was glad, in the quiet way a person is glad when a thing she has fixed stays fixed.
In the summer, the trade school sent two more apprentices, and Octavia took them both, and the bench grew crowded in the afternoons, and the shop had the particular energy of a place where people are learning. The apprentices learned to grade, to set, to solder, to appraise, and they learned, too, the rule that Octavia repeated more than any other: that a customer is a person before she is a sale, and that the case opens for anyone who asks, and that the only appointment that matters is the one you keep with honesty. They learned it not from a speech but from watching Tamsin greet a stranger, and from watching Octavia refuse to hurry a customer who was deciding, and from the glass wall, which made the work visible, and from the list, which