thought, the best use of anger she knew: to turn it into a practice, and to turn a practice into a place. The students wrote this down, some of them, and Octavia did not mind, because she had written down things her teachers had said, too, and because teaching is a chain, and because she was, in that classroom, one link in it, as Ansel had been, and as she hoped her apprentices would be.
Back at the shop, the summer passed in the usual rhythm of repairs and sales and appraisals, and Tamsin ran the desk, and the apprentices worked, and Octavia worked, and the willow-leaf emerald ring sat in its case, and customers asked about it, and it was shown, and the card that Octavia had been thinking about, a small card to sit beside the ring, waited in her mind, not yet printed, because she had not yet found the right words for it, and because she did not want to rush it. She thought about the words from time to time, while she worked at the bench, turning them over the way she turned a stone, looking for the facet that caught the light: words that would say, plainly, that the case opened for anyone, without an appointment, without a judgment, without a rule invented for the occasion. She tried several versions in her notebook, and she discarded them, because they sounded like slogans, and she did not want a slogan, and because a slogan, posted beside a ring, would be a performance, and she wanted a practice, not a performance. She decided to wait, and to let the words come when they were ready, the way a setting comes when the stone is ready, and she went back to work, and the card waited, and the ring waited, and the shop went on.
In the autumn, a customer came in with a piece that had been in her family for fifty years, a brooch that had lost a stone, and she asked Octavia to find a matching stone, and Octavia searched her parcels, and she found one, and she set it, and the brooch was whole again, and the customer told Octavia that her mother had worn the brooch to every important occasion of her life, and that she intended to do the same, and Octavia thought about how jewelry, at its best, is a continuity, a thing passed from hand to hand, from mother to daughter, from one life to another, and about how a shop's job is to keep that continuity unbroken, by repair, by honesty, by care, and about how Hugh's thefts had broken continuities, small ones, a bracelet uncollected, a pair of earrings unreturned, a watch sold without a receipt, and about how the restitution had tried, imperfectly, to mend them, and about how the shop's new practices were meant to ensure that no continuity would be broken again, at least not by the shop itself, which was all a shop could promise, and which was, Octavia thought, promise enough.
Tamsin, in the following months, began taking evening classes in gemology at the trade school, and Octavia paid the tuition, not as a bonus but as an investment, because a floor lead who could grade stones was a floor lead who could answer customers' questions without calling for help, and because Octavia believed that education, like restitution, was a debt a shop owed to the people who worked in it. Tamsin studied in the evenings after long days at the desk, and she brought her textbooks to the shop, and she practiced grading on the shop's stones, and Octavia quizzed her, and corrected her, and praised her when she was right, and Tamsin learned quickly, because she had the same quality Octavia had seen in her on the Tuesday morning: attention, paid fully, to the thing