That evening, after the shop closed, Octavia returned to Aster and Grey with her key and her inventory binder, and she worked in the quiet that follows a shop's closing, when the lights are half-dimmed and the cases are locked and the day's noise has drained out of the carpet. She had planned to finish the safe inventory that night. The safe stood in the back office, a heavy old unit with a combination dial that the Carrows had shown her, and inside it were the shop's most valuable pieces, the consignment records, and a locked cash box. She worked drawer by drawer, logging each item against the ledger, and she was nearly finished when she found, at the back of the middle drawer, beneath a stack of appraisal blanks, a small notebook bound in dark green cloth. It was not part of the inventory. It had no label. She opened it, and she read the first page, and then she sat down slowly in the office chair, because what she was reading was not a shop record at all.
The notebook was in Hugh Ashford's handwriting. Octavia knew his handwriting by then, from the repair log and from the notes he had left on the counter during the transition, a neat, forward-slanting hand that made even a grocery list look like a memorandum. The notebook was a ledger of a different kind. Each entry gave a date, a brief description of a piece, a name or initial, and two figures: one that looked like a sale price and one that looked like a payment. The entries ran back thirty months. Octavia counted them, twice, because she wanted to be sure before she allowed herself to believe what she was seeing. There were twenty-three entries. The sale figures added, in her head and then on paper, to eighty-seven thousand dollars. The payments were smaller, and they were marked with a single initial, W, and a date a few days after each sale. The pieces described were not the shop's ordinary stock. Several of them Octavia recognized from the repair log: a customer's emerald bracelet that had come in for a clasp repair and had never been collected, according to the log, because the customer had moved away; a limited-edition watch that had been listed in the case inventory and then marked as sold, though no sale receipt existed for it; a pair of diamond earrings that had been consigned by an elderly woman and then recorded as returned, though the consignment file had no return signature. The pattern was consistent, entry after entry, and it was not a pattern that could be explained by sloppy bookkeeping. Pieces that came into the shop through the repair bench or through consignment, pieces whose owners were unlikely to come back and ask, were being sold somewhere else, and a portion of the money was coming back to Hugh in payments marked W.
Octavia closed the notebook and sat in the quiet office for a long time. She thought about the Tuesday visit, about the invented appointment rule, about the way Hugh had looked at her clothes and decided, in a second, that she was not a customer worth a case key. She thought about Tamsin, who had shown her a pendant with care and had not looked at her clothes at all. And she thought about the shop she had bought, which was not only a name and a lease and a set of cases, but a set of obligations: to the customers who had trusted it with their repairs, to the consignors who had trusted it with their pieces, to the staff who worked there, and to the Carrows, who had trusted her to keep it honest. She put the notebook in her own bag, not in the safe, and she finished the inventory, and she locked the shop, and she walked home through the Pearl District in the evening light, past the restaurants filling with dinner crowds, with the notebook heavy in her bag and a decision forming in her mind. She would not confront Hugh that night, and she would not go to