in front of her. By the spring, Tamsin could grade a diamond, and a sapphire, and an emerald, with confidence, and she began doing preliminary gradings for the desk, which Octavia then checked, and the desk ran faster, and the customers noticed, because a customer who asks a question and receives an answer from the person in front of them, rather than being told to wait for someone else, feels respected, and respect, Octavia had learned, is the currency of a shop, more valuable than any stone in the safe.
A neighboring shop owner, who ran a small gallery down the street, came to Octavia one afternoon and asked for advice, because he had discovered that one of his own employees had been discounting pieces without authorization, and he did not know what to do. Octavia listened, and she told him what she had done with Hugh, not as a prescription but as an example: gather the evidence, check every figure, give the person a choice between resignation with restitution and a report to the authorities, and then, whatever the outcome, change the practices that had allowed it, so that it could not happen again. The gallery owner listened, and he thanked her, and he went away, and Octavia did not hear what he decided, and she did not need to, because her advice had not been about his decision but about his method, and because method, in such matters, is the only thing one shop can responsibly give another. She thought, afterward, about how strange it was that her hardest experience as an owner had become something she could offer to others, and about how experience, like a stone, gains value when it is cut and set, rather than left rough, and about how she had cut hers, over the past year, into something she could hand to another person without shame.
The following spring arrived, and with it a new class of apprentices, and a new set of customers, and the same rhythm: mornings at the bench, afternoons on the floor, Fridays with the bookkeeper, Saturdays with the apprentices. Octavia no longer counted the months since the Tuesday morning, because counting them had ceased to be useful, and because the shop had become, in her mind, not a project of reform but a place of work, and work, done daily, does not need to be measured against its beginning. She still kept the old notebook, Hugh's green notebook, in a locked drawer, not as a trophy but as a record, because records matter, and because a shop that forgets how it was harmed may forget how to protect itself, and she still kept Tamsin's first notebook, the one with the fourteen entries, in the same drawer, because it, too, was a record, of customers who had been turned away, and of a young woman who had written them down when no one asked her to, and of a shop that had learned, from those notes, to open its cases.
One afternoon, a man came into the shop who had been one of the fourteen, though Octavia did not know it at the time, and he asked to see a watch, and Tamsin showed it to him, and he bought it, and as he was leaving he said that he had been in the shop once before, years earlier, and had been told to come back another day, and that he had come back, and that he was glad he had. Tamsin told him she was glad too, and Octavia, overhearing, thought about how many returns a shop needs before it can say it has changed, and about how the answer is that it never finishes saying it, because change is not a statement but a practice, and a practice must be repeated, daily, to remain true, and about how she was content with that, because repetition, in a shop, is not boredom but devotion, and devotion, practiced daily, is what makes a place last.
In the summer, Octavia designed a small collection of her own for the shop, the first new line Aster and Grey had carried in a decade, built on the ethical sourcing she had practiced since her online days. She chose the stones herself, from cutters she trusted, and she published the origin of every piece, and she priced them plainly, and she put them in the case nearest