In the spring, Octavia began holding a small open evening at the shop once a month, not a sale and not a party, but an hour when anyone could come in, look at the bench through the glass, ask questions about stones, and handle the tools under supervision. She had the idea from the trade school, where the instructors had told her that most people had never seen a jeweler work, and that the mystery of the trade was part of what made it intimidating. The first evening, only a handful of people came, mostly regular customers and one curious neighbor, and Octavia showed them how a stone is set, how a ring is sized, how an appraisal is written, and they asked questions, and they left pleased, and the second evening more people came, and by the summer the evenings had become a fixture, small and unadvertised, known by word of mouth, and the shop had a new kind of customer: people who had come to look and stayed to buy, not because they had been sold anything but because they had been taught something, and because teaching, Octavia had learned, is the most honest form of selling there is.
One evening, a young man came in who had never been in a jewelry store before, and he told Octavia so, plainly, and he asked whether he was allowed to be there, and Octavia told him that he was, and she showed him a tray of stones, and she let him hold a loupe, and she showed him how to look at a stone's inclusions, and he looked, and he said that he had always thought jewelry was for other people, and Octavia said that it was for anyone who wanted it, and that the shop's cases opened for anyone who asked, and he nodded, and he came back the following month, and he brought a friend, and Octavia thought about the fourteen customers in Tamsin's notebook, and about how many people had decided, over the years, that jewelry was for other people, because someone at a counter had decided it for them, and about how the open evenings were, in their small way, an answer to that decision, not a reversal of it, because a reversal would require finding every person who had been turned away, which was impossible, but an answer, because a door opened is a door opened, even if not everyone who was once shut out walks back through it.
The suppliers, too, noticed the change. Octavia had kept the Carrows' suppliers, and she had added two of her own, cutters she had vetted during her years online, and she paid on time, and she asked questions about origin, and she published the origin of every piece, as she had always done, and the suppliers, who were used to buyers who asked only about price, began to bring her their better stones, because they knew she would look at them properly, and because they knew she would sell them honestly. One supplier brought her a parcel of emeralds, and she graded them, and she found one that was beautiful but treated, and she told the supplier so, and the supplier, who had not disclosed the treatment, apologized, and Octavia bought the parcel anyway, at the treated price, with the treatment disclosed on the tag, and the supplier respected her for it, and brought her a better parcel the next time, and Octavia thought that honesty, in business, is not a cost but a filter, and that the people who pass through it are the people worth doing business with.
Tamsin, meanwhile, had begun to train a new associate for the repair desk, a young woman from the trade school who had the same patience Tamsin had shown on the Tuesday morning, and Octavia watched Tamsin teach her, and she saw in Tamsin's teaching the same qualities she had seen in Tamsin's service: attention, honesty, and a refusal to hurry. Tamsin taught the new associate to greet every customer, to listen before speaking, to write estimates by hand, and to call every Friday with updates, and the new associate learned, and the desk ran smoothly, and Octavia thought that this was how a shop continues: not by one person's virtue but by teaching, which spreads virtue the way a stone's light spreads when it is well cut, not by diminishing the source but by multiplying it.