money, not time, and not trust, and not the feeling of being welcome. Octavia thought about them sometimes, when the shop was quiet, and she wished she could write to each of them, but she did not have their names, and Tamsin's notebook had not recorded them, out of a kindness that Octavia respected, and so she did the only thing she could do, which was to make the shop the kind of place they would have wanted to come back to, if they ever did, and to trust that word of mouth, which is slow, would do what advertising, which is fast, could not.
The Carrows visited in the autumn, a year after the sale, or nearly, and they walked through the shop with the particular pleasure of people seeing a place they loved in good hands. They looked at the glass wall, and at the list on the counter, and at the policy on the wall, and at the apprentices at the bench, and they asked Octavia how the year had gone, and she told them, honestly, that it had gone well and that it had gone hard, and that the hard parts had been necessary, and they nodded, because they had run a shop for forty years and they knew that hard parts were part of it. They did not ask about Hugh, and Octavia did not volunteer, because the Carrows had trusted her with the shop and she had kept that trust, and the details of how she had kept it were hers to carry, not theirs to worry over. They stayed for coffee, and they looked at the willow-leaf emerald ring, which was still in its case, and the elder Carrow said it was a beautiful piece, and Octavia agreed, and they left, and Octavia stood in the doorway watching them go, and she thought about how a shop passes from one pair of hands to another, and about how the hands matter less than the habits, and about how habits, once formed, outlast the people who formed them, if they are good habits, and if they are practiced.
In the winter, a woman brought in a piece that tested everything Octavia knew about restoration. It was a necklace, or rather it had been a necklace, before a house fire had melted its clasp, blackened its chain, and cracked three of its stones. The woman, who was in her sixties and who spoke about the fire with the flat calm of a person who has told the story many times in order to survive it, laid the necklace on the desk at the repair-and-restoration counter and said that it had been her mother's, and that her mother had worn it every day, and that she wanted to know, honestly, whether it could be saved. Tamsin took the necklace gently, and she looked at it, and she did not promise anything, and she called Octavia from the bench, and Octavia came out, and she looked at the necklace under the loupe, and she saw what Tamsin had seen: that the chain could be rebuilt, that the clasp could be replaced, that two of the cracked stones could be recut, and that the third, a small garnet, was too damaged to save, and would have to be replaced with a stone that matched as closely as possible, and that the whole job would take weeks, and that it would cost more than the necklace was worth on any market, and that none of that mattered, because the woman was not asking about the market.
Octavia told the woman all of this, plainly, in the order that mattered: what could be done, what could not, how long it would take, and what it would cost, and she wrote it down, and she gave the woman the estimate to take home, and she told her to think about it, and not to decide in the shop, because a decision made under the pressure of a counter is not a decision at all. The woman took the estimate home, and she came back three days later, and she said to go ahead, and Octavia and Tamsin and the bench jeweler set to work, and the work became, over the following weeks, a kind of education for everyone in the shop. The apprentices watched as Octavia rebuilt the chain, link by link, matching the