It was not lost on him — nothing arithmetical was ever lost on Nick Ames — that Loretta Ivey had then done, in that room, the thing he had not: she had behaved as if the papers were the business. Three questions, a condition read aloud, no more. And it was not lost on him, in the weeks that followed, as the trustee's letter arrived and the facility collapsed and the company's explanations multiplied like rabbits, that his silence in the room and the company's silence about the trust were the same species of act, performed at different scales: a decision, taken in the moment it was cheapest, not to look directly at the thing that had just happened, in the hope that the agenda would carry everyone past it. He had spent forty years declining loans on the strength of that exact tell in borrowers. He recognized it in himself with a banker's impartiality, which is to say without the consolation of surprise.
What he did, he did in the order bankers do things, which was after the numbers and before the emotions. When the trustee's confirmation reached the board — delayed, Ames noted, by a full week after it had reached the syndicate, a delay for which Dunmore's explanation, that the company had been reviewing the methodology before troubling the board with it, struck Ames as the first sentence in the affair he could not have repeated aloud with a straight face — Ames moved, in executive session, that the board commission its own review of the trust position and of every representation the company had made about it for five years, to be conducted by counsel and accountants who had never done Fairhaven work, reporting to the independent directors alone. The motion carried. Dunmore voted for it, smiling, in the manner of a chief executive confident that reviews, like trustees, can be relied upon to arrive at the customary figures. Halvorsen voted for it too, and then sat looking at his hands for a long moment after the vote, like a man who has locked a door and is trying to remember whether the house behind it is the one he meant to keep.
The review took eleven weeks, and it traveled, as Ames had designed it to travel, on a collision course with the state's examination, each confirming the other's route. The board's accountants priced the Georgia book independently and produced a figure two points kinder than the trustee's and sixty-one million dollars' worth of identical in every way that mattered. The board's counsel interviewed, in sequence, the chief financial officer, the general counsel, the regional directors, and two former officers of the trustee bank, and assembled, in a binder Ames read at his kitchen table over four nights, the fifteen-year biography of a number that had never been computed: who had drafted the appendix language, and on what instructions; who had designed the recognition policy, and what the compensation committee had been told it produced; who had requested each examination postponement, and in what words; who had signed the amended fulfillment schedule into the systems, and under whose authority the guarantees in two hundred families' contracts had been stepped over, one desk at a time, by a costing tool. The binder's last section was a chronology, and Ames read the chronology last, and when he finished it he sat for a while in his kitchen with the binder closed under his hand, a retired banker of sixty-six in a quiet house, doing the sum that directors are finally for: the sum between what the company had said, and what the company had signed, and what the company's own paper, read in sequence, by its own reviewers, could no longer be prevented from saying on its own behalf.
His wife, who had known him for forty-four years and had watched him read bad files in that kitchen since before their children were born, asked him from the doorway whether it was as bad as the ones that used to keep him up. He said it was worse than the ones that used to keep him up, because in the old ones the borrowers had generally known they were lying, and liars can be reasoned with, whereas this company had arranged, with great ingenuity and at considerable expense, never to know — had built itself a trustee to not-know on its behalf, and a schedule to not-know at its desks, and a calendar of examinations perpetually postponed to not-know at the state's convenience — and a man could not reason with a machine whose product was his own innocence. He said he intended to do the only thing the machine could not process, which was to hand its owner its output, in person, and watch him read it.