was painful. One consignor, an elderly woman whose diamond earrings had been among the diverted pieces, cried when Octavia told her that the earrings could not be recovered, and Octavia sat with her, and did not hurry her, and paid her the documented value, and the woman said, at the end, that she was grateful to know the truth, even though the truth was sad, because not knowing had been worse. Octavia wrote that down in her own notebook, not as a lesson but as a reminder, that the truth, told plainly, is a kind of restitution in itself.
By the spring, the prosecutors' decision had become a settled fact, and Octavia stated it the same way whenever anyone asked: Hugh had resigned, he was paying restitution, and the prosecutors had declined to bring further criminal charges after restitution was underway. She did not add her opinion to it, and she did not invite opinions from others, because the decision was not hers to praise or to blame, and because the shop's business was jewelry, not judgment. Wexford's probation continued, and his fine was paid, and his online shop closed, and Octavia heard no more about him, except once, when a customer brought in a piece she had bought online and asked Octavia to verify it, and Octavia recognized the listing style, and she verified the piece as genuine, and she did not mention Wexford, because the piece was genuine and the customer was happy, and there was no need to attach a sad story to a happy purchase.
The apprentices finished their first year in the late spring, and Octavia held a small ceremony in the shop after closing, with coffee and cake, and she gave each of them a set of tools of their own, and she told them that they had earned them, and they had, because they had learned to grade and to set and to solder and to appraise, and because they had learned, too, to greet a customer without measuring him. One of them stayed on at the shop as a junior bench jeweler, and the other went to work for a repair shop across town, and both of them wrote to Octavia later to thank her, and she kept their letters in a drawer, not as trophies but as reminders that teaching is a form of keeping, and that a trade kept honestly is a trade that continues.
Tamsin, by then, was running the repair-and-restoration desk entirely, with her own hours and her own judgment, and she had become, in the eyes of the customers, the face of the shop, the person they asked for when they came in with a piece that mattered. She had also become, in Octavia's eyes, something rarer: a colleague, not an employee to be managed but a partner to be consulted. Octavia consulted her about the cases, about the list, about the apprentices, about the customers, and Tamsin consulted Octavia about the bench, about the stones, about the appraisals, and the shop ran on their conversations, which were frequent and practical and entirely without ceremony. They did not talk about the Tuesday morning often, but when they did, they talked about it the way people talk about a storm that has passed: with respect for what it had taught them, and without wishing it back.
Some of the fourteen customers from Tamsin's notebook came back, and Octavia recognized them not because Tamsin had written their names, for she had not, but because their stories matched the entries, and because they told her, in the unguarded way people tell a shopkeeper something true, that they had tried before. The man in work boots came in on a Saturday morning, his boots dusty from a job site, and he asked to see a gold chain for his wife's anniversary, and Tamsin showed him the chains, and he chose one, and he paid for it, and as he was leaving he said, almost as an afterthought, that he had come in once before, months earlier, and had been told the chains were by appointment, and that he had almost not come back. Tamsin told