She worked it the way it could be worked, from the edges. The syndicate members would not talk, because syndicate members never do while counsel is billing. The trustee would not talk. The company's spokesman offered the statement and the podium. But a signing meeting is attended by thirty people, and thirty people have assistants, and drivers, and spouses, and the story of a refused handshake, in a city like Atlanta, in an industry like finance, does not stay in the room where it happened; it becomes, within a fortnight, a thing that everyone in the relevant zip codes has heard and no one will confirm. The reporter heard it four times in nine days, in three versions, each worse for Dunmore than the last, and she printed none of them, because her paper's standards required confirmation from a participant and the participants' doors were closed with a uniformity that told its own story about instructions given after the fact. What she printed, in the end, was the arithmetic, and it was enough. Her piece, when it ran, set the trustee's computed seventy-one beside the appendix's represented ninety-eight, and the three postponement letters of the state examination beside the company's three explanations, and the replacement lender's name beside its role as trustee, and let the juxtapositions do the work that adjectives do in lesser papers. The final paragraph of her piece, which was quoted afterward in the examiners' own correspondence, observed that the anchor lender's notice, alone among the documents in the affair, mentioned no one's conduct at all — and suggested, in the passive construction that libel lawyers prefer, that this was because its author had understood earlier than anyone else in the story which of the affair's facts were going to matter, and for how long.
Loretta read the piece at her desk, once, and had it filed. Her firm's spokesman had declined comment on Monday, on Tuesday, and on every day that the telephone rang thereafter, in the same nine words, which she had approved: "The notice states the firm's position. We have nothing to add." She did not telephone the reporter. She did not correct the versions of the room that were circulating, including the versions that flattered her, including the one — she heard it from Fenn, who had it from a man at a club neither of them belonged to — in which she had risen from the far end of the table and delivered a speech about her grandmother that had silenced the room. Nothing of the kind had occurred. She had asked three questions about a funding ratio and read a condition aloud from a term sheet, and she was aware, with an irony she kept entirely to herself, that the legend was already improving on the record, and that the record would outlast the legend precisely because she had refused to feed it. Paper does not care who is embarrassed. She had built a firm on the sentence. She was content, now, to let the sentence build what it would.
Privately, in the firm's own councils, the mood was not contentment but the colder satisfaction of a lender whose worst paragraph had proved to be its best. The syndicate's other members, two regional banks and a pension fund's lending arm, had each telephoned Fenn within days of the collapse, and the calls, stripped of their courtesies, all said the same thing: that they had committed behind Ivey Capital's diligence, that Ivey Capital's diligence had been the diligence, and that they would be available the next time her firm anchored a facility, including facilities of borrowers who competed with Fairhaven in every market in the Southeast. The market's verdict on the arithmetic was complete long before the law's verdict on anything had begun. What remained was the law's part, and the law's part moved, as it always moves in the affairs of regulated trusts, at the pace of examinations and hearings, which is to say at the pace of paper, which suited Loretta Ivey, who had never in her life been in a hurry that a document could not outwait.
Fairhaven sued Ivey Capital Partners eleven days after the podium speech, in the superior court of the county where its headquarters stood, and the complaint, which ran to sixty-one pages with exhibits, was delivered to Loretta's office by a process server whose presence in the lobby was itself a piece of theater the company's counsel had either intended or failed to prevent. The theater was the point, insofar as there was one. The complaint alleged breach of the term sheet and of the implied covenant of good faith that Georgia law reads into such instruments. It alleged that the trustee's confirmation condition had been satisfied in substance or waived in practice, that the syndicate's anchor had withdrawn for reasons unrelated to the facility's merits, and that the withdrawal had been timed and framed to inflict maximum damage on the company's refinancing, its share price, and its standing with the families it served. It sought damages in an amount the complaint described as to be proved at trial, and it attached, as exhibits, the term sheet, the three deferral letters, the podium statement, and the trustee's confirmation letter itself, which the company's counsel had apparently concluded could not be avoided, since the whole case was about it, and which sat in the complaint's own exhibit binder like a stone in a shoe.