Octavia's own days settled into a pattern that she liked: mornings at the bench, afternoons on the floor or in the office, Fridays with the bookkeeper and the restitution account, Saturdays with the apprentices. She still wore denim and a canvas jacket when she worked at the bench, and she still wore no jewelry except her steel watch, and customers who met her for the first time sometimes assumed she was an employee, and she did not correct them unless she needed to, because she had learned that being assumed to be an employee was a useful way to see a shop, and because she liked the work more than the title. When she did need to say that she was the owner, she said it plainly, without ceremony, and people accepted it, because ownership, stated plainly, is less interesting than ownership performed, and Octavia had never been interested in performance.
The shop's finances stabilized through the year, and then improved, not dramatically but steadily, the way a well-run shop improves: by repeat customers, by repairs, by appraisals done properly, by the apprenticeship, which brought in young customers who told their friends, and by the reputation, which spread the way reputations spread, slowly and then all at once. Octavia did not chase growth, and she did not expand, and she did not open a second location, though her broker suggested it, because she had bought a single shop and she wanted to run it well, and because a second location would have meant a second manager, and she had learned, from Hugh, what a manager left unsupervised could do. She kept the shop single, and she kept it close, and she knew every case, and every bench, and every staff member, and every regular customer, and that knowledge, she thought, was the real asset, more valuable than any piece in the safe, because a shop that is known by its owner is a shop that cannot easily be stolen from, not because theft is impossible but because it is noticed, quickly, by someone who is paying attention.
In the winter, the bookkeeper brought Octavia a discrepancy, small and puzzling, in the accounts for the month, and Octavia thanked her, and they investigated it together, and they found that it was a simple error, a deposit recorded twice, and they corrected it, and Octavia told the bookkeeper that she was glad she had brought it, and that she should always bring discrepancies, no matter how small, and the bookkeeper said that she would, and Octavia thought about how different this was from the year before, when a bookkeeper had flagged discrepancies and been told they were timing differences, and she thought about how a shop's culture is built not by policies on a wall but by what happens when a person brings a problem, and about how the bookkeeper's willingness to bring a small error was proof that the culture had changed, more proof than any policy could give.
The apprentices, by then, were teaching each other, which is the sign that teaching has taken root, and Octavia watched them with pleasure: the young woman who had started in a bead shop showing the new apprentice how to hold a loupe, the young man who had repaired watches in his garage showing another how to test a clasp, the new apprentices asking questions that Octavia herself had asked twenty years earlier, at a mall kiosk, of a bench jeweler who had taught her to look first and speak second. She thought about Ansel, and about the kiosk, and about the years between, and she thought that a trade is a long conversation, carried on across benches and across generations, and that her part in it was to keep the conversation honest, and to pass it on, and to make sure that the next person who picked up a loupe would be taught to look at the stone, not at the customer, and to judge the one and welcome the other.