looking at the cases, which were thinner than they had been in November but still gleaming, and she thought about the year that was ending, and about the shop, and about how far it had come from the Tuesday morning, and she felt, for the first time in a long time, something like pride, not in herself but in the shop, which had become, through the work of many hands, a place where a person could walk in, in any clothes, and be served, and where a piece could be repaired, and appraised, and kept, honestly, and where the people who worked there knew that their work mattered, and that it would be noticed, and that it would be remembered, not in sales figures but in sentences, like the ones in Tamsin's notebook of restorations, which by then had grown thick, and which Octavia read, sometimes, in the evenings, when the shop was quiet, and when she wanted to remember why she had bought it.
In the new year, three siblings came into the shop together, carrying a box of their late mother's jewelry, and they asked Octavia to appraise it, because they needed to divide it fairly, and because they did not trust each other to do it alone. Octavia had done such appraisals before, and she knew how delicate they were, because jewelry, divided among siblings, is never only jewelry: it is memory, and favor, and old arguments, and the question of who was loved best, all rendered in gold and stone. She took the box, and she laid out the pieces, one by one, on a tray, and she graded each one, and she photographed each one, and she wrote a description and a value for each one, and she gave each sibling a copy, and she charged the posted fee, and she did not take sides, and she did not hurry, and the siblings, who had come in tense and wary, left calmer than they had arrived, because a fair appraisal, written down and given to everyone, is a kind of peace, and because Octavia had given them not only values but a process they could trust. One of them came back a month later, alone, to have her share reset, and she told Octavia that the division had gone better than she had expected, and Octavia said she was glad, and she reset the ring, and the woman left, and Octavia thought about how an appraisal, done properly, can do more than price a stone: it can settle a family, at least for a time, and that is no small thing.
Tamsin's desk, by then, had become the busiest part of the shop, and she had hired, with Octavia's approval, a second person to help her, a young man from the trade school who had the same patience she had, and together they ran the desk with a competence that made Octavia proud, though she rarely said so, because pride, spoken too often, becomes pressure, and she did not want to pressure Tamsin, who was already doing more than anyone had asked of her. The desk handled repairs, restorations, cleanings, and appraisals, and it handled them with the same practices: estimates written by hand, calls every Friday, copies to the customer, filings the same day, and a chair offered to anyone who needed one. Customers began to ask for Tamsin by name, and she became, in the neighborhood, a known person, the young woman at Aster and Grey who would listen to you talk about your mother's ring for twenty minutes before she talked about the ring at all, and Octavia thought that this was the best kind of reputation, earned not by advertising but by attention, and that attention, given freely, is the rarest commodity in a luxury shop, and the most valuable.
Octavia's own work at the bench continued, and she took on, in the spring, a piece that challenged her: a bracelet of intricate filigree, so fine that it seemed impossible it had been made by human hands, which had been crushed in a car accident, and which its owner, a woman who had worn it every day for thirty years, wanted restored, not replaced. Octavia studied it for