Her conditions had been neither numerous nor exotic. Pricing, reporting, covenants of the ordinary kind. And one condition that her firm had required in every facility it had ever anchored into a trust-holding business, a condition so standard in her shop that her younger partners called it the Ivey clause without remembering it had ever had another name: before closing, the trustee of the pre-need trusts would deliver a confirmation of the trusts' funding ratio, computed independently by the trustee from its own records, current within sixty days. Not a restatement of the company's figures. Not a letter repeating what management had told it. A computation. She had required it when the facility was a term sheet, and the term sheet, signed in June, carried it in the same type as everything else.
Through the summer, every other closing item had arrived on schedule. Appraisals, opinions, certificates, the long liturgy of a large closing, item by item, checked off by associates in two cities. The trustee's confirmation did not arrive. It was delayed in August, with an explanation about the trustee's conversion to a new accounting platform. It was delayed again in September, with an explanation about personnel. In early October it was delayed a third time, with an explanation Loretta's partner Russell Fenn read aloud in her office and then set down on her desk without comment, because there was nothing in it to comment on: it said the confirmation was in preparation, which was what the previous two explanations had said in more words.
She did not make a speech about it. She noted the third delay in the file, in her own hand, with the date, and she instructed the deal team that the signing meeting could proceed as scheduled, because a signing meeting was not a closing, and that the facility would not close, under any pressure of calendar or courtesy, until the trustee's confirmation was in hand and read. Fenn, who had been with her nineteen years and no longer needed her sentences finished, said, "Then the meeting is a formality." She said, "The meeting is a meeting. The closing is when the paper is complete. It has always been when the paper is complete." He nodded and went out, and she sat a moment longer with the file, not troubled, exactly, because three delays from a trustee in the middle of a platform conversion was a thing that happened in the world, and yet experiencing, in the specific way of a woman who had read paper for thirty years, the faint sensation of a sentence that does not want to be finished.
The signing meeting was held on a Tuesday morning in the boardroom of Fairhaven's headquarters, in a building off Lenox Road with a lobby built to resemble the lobby of a very good hotel that had decided to be sad. Loretta arrived with Fenn and two associates at nine-forty for a ten o'clock meeting. She wore a dark suit. She carried the deal binder herself, which she always did, a habit from the lending-desk years that no quantity of associates had cured. Her place in the room, she saw when the doors were opened for them, had been set at the far end of the long table, past the CFO's seat, past the general counsel's, at the distance usually reserved for the second bank's junior coverage officer. The agenda, printed and laid at every seat, listed Ivey Capital Partners as anchor presenter, first item. The place card at the far end bore her name in the same calligraphy as all the others. She read it, and she set her binder down in front of it, and she sat where she had been put, because the order of business was the order of business and a seat was a seat.
Dunmore came in at ten with the room's weather in front of him, aides and directors arranging themselves, the particular bustle of a chief executive whose entrances were produced. He was fifty-seven, silvered at the temples in a way that looked arranged by a professional, and he moved down the table shaking hands, because the meeting was, in his framing of it, a celebration: fifteen years of building, gathered in one room, about to be financed into its next era. He reached Fenn first, where Fenn stood near the door end of the table. He took Fenn's hand in both of his own, held it, said his name with warmth, said the firm was honored, said the partnership was the making of the next fifteen years, and held on a moment longer than handshake length, the way men do when the handclasp is meant to be witnessed.
Then he came to Loretta, at the far end of her own anchor presentation, where she had stood as he approached, and she extended her hand.