"And if I decline your proposal?" Dunmore said. He had recovered the podium voice, but it was thinner now, a voice doing an impression of itself. "If I take the company into the department and fight, the way fighters do? The stock is mine in a third part. The board—"
"The board meets Thursday," Ames said. "The independent directors are a majority of it, as of Halvorsen's resignation and the audit chairman's, which I received this morning and have not yet announced. Thursday's agenda, if you have not resigned by then, is your removal, and after your removal the board will propose the same consent order, with the escrow, because the escrow is not my invention, it is the department's remedy, priced in advance. The only question your calendar decides, Wesley, is whether the letter that begins the end of this is written by you or about you. As a courtesy — the last one I can offer, and I offer it knowing what courtesies have cost in this company — I am asking you to write it yourself."
He stood. Dunmore did not stand. Ames had reached the door when Dunmore spoke again, and the voice, this time, was not the podium's at all, and it was not addressed to the board, or the department, or the company; it was addressed, so far as Ames could judge, to the room itself, fifteen years of it, the photographs and the models of unbuilt chapels and the map with its two hundred and twelve pins. "I buried my father-in-law out of that home in Macon," he said. "I buried my wife's mother. I have stood in the chapels of this company ten thousand times, Nick, and I have never once, not once, taken a dollar that a family would miss—"
"No," Ames said, from the door, not unkindly. "You took it in amounts no single family would ever see missing, from a trust no single family could audit, over years no single family could assemble. That is the whole design of the thing, Wesley, and it is why the counting had to be done by someone else." He opened the door. "Tonight. Read the chronology. The secretary will have my number."
The resignation letter arrived at the secretary's office at seven the following morning, by hand, in an envelope without the company's mark. It was two paragraphs. In the first, Wesley Dunmore resigned as chief executive and as a director of the Fairhaven Memorial Group, effective immediately, citing his belief that the company required leadership unburdened by the regulatory matters now before it. In the second, he recorded his pride in the company's fifteen years and its service to the families of fourteen states, and his confidence in its future. It did not mention the trust. It did not mention the escrow, though the escrow, negotiated by counsel over the following nine days and embodied in the consent order, would be funded from his shares precisely as Ames had proposed, and the letter's silence about it was understood, by everyone who read both documents, as the last exercise of the founder's lifelong prerogative to narrate himself, exercised now in the only tense remaining to him, which was omission. Ames read the letter twice, and filed it, and then he telephoned the department's lead examiner himself, as the board had authorized, and said that the company was ready to discuss the terms of a consent order, and that it would not be contesting the arithmetic. The examiner, in the flat voice of her profession, said the department was gratified to hear it, and proposed Thursday, and Ames, looking at the calendar his duty had become, said Thursday would do, and hung up, and sat for a moment in the quiet of an office that was not his, in a building full of other people's promises, and thought about a water glass, and a laugh, and a hand extended at the far end of a table, and how cheap the whole catastrophe would have been to prevent, at any of a dozen moments, by any of a dozen men, at the price of one raised voice — and how the only person in the story who had ever paid full price for anything was the woman who had been refused the handshake, and she had paid it in advance, in the coin of being disbelieved about a number she had not yet been shown.