The consent order took nine weeks to negotiate, which in the annals of regulatory practice is a gallop, and the speed had a single cause: the company, for the first time in its existence, was negotiating with its own arithmetic on the table and no instruction to its lawyers to move the arithmetic. The department's team and the board's new counsel met in a conference room of the department's building, with the examiners' findings bound in volumes at one end of the table and the company's reviewers' binder at the other, the two accounts of the same fifteen years facing each other like the two sides of the fraction at last assembled in one room. Where the documents disagreed, the disagreement was in the company's disfavor by small amounts and in its favor by none, and Ames, who attended every session in his capacity as interim chairman, developed the negotiator's version of a rule Loretta Ivey had kept for thirty years: you do not argue with paper that can survive being read; you settle with it, and you spend your energy on the schedule.
The order, as it was finally executed and entered, ran to forty-one pages, and its provisions became, in the counties where Fairhaven did business, a kind of secular scripture, quoted at desks and in kitchens by people who had never read past the paragraph that concerned them. The Georgia pre-need trust would be replenished to one hundred percent of current fulfillment liability on a fixed schedule of eight quarters, no quarter's installment to be deferred for any reason the order recognized. The replenishment would be funded first from an escrow of the founder's shares — thirty-one percent of the company's equity, placed with an escrow agent under the order's terms, to be sold in an orderly manner across the schedule, the proceeds applied to the trust before any other corporate purpose — and thereafter from operating cash flow, subordinated, until the trustee certified the ratio. The Boyce Trust Company was removed as trustee of all Fairhaven pre-need trusts in the state, effective on the appointment of a successor, which the department made from a list of national trust companies with no other Fairhaven relationship; the successor's first duty, ahead of all others, was to recompute every trust from its own records, contract by contract, and to publish the computation's result to the contract holders, quarterly, in certified statements mailed to the last address of every living contract holder and the estates of the dead. Every family charged any sum under the amended fulfillment schedule, in Georgia, from the schedule's first application to its last, was to be repaid the sum charged, with interest at the statutory rate, from a restitution fund the order established and the department's auditors verified, name by name, against the arrangement records — the examiners' count, by the time the order was entered, having been verified to two hundred and fourteen families, each of whom was to receive, with the repayment, a written statement identifying the charge, the contract term it had violated, and the amount restored. The amended schedule itself was withdrawn, annulled in the order's language as to any guaranteed contract, and the company was enjoined from applying any unfiled schedule to any contract containing a price guarantee, in terms broad enough to cover synonyms. Management certifications under the order were to be made by officers the department had not found cause to name, which provision, in the order's diplomatic arithmetic, retired the chief financial officer and the general counsel without the discourtesy of naming them; Danvers resigned on a Friday, with a statement about new challenges that the trade press printed without comment, and if he ever explained, to anyone, how the number ninety-eight had come to be in his appendix, the explanation does not appear in any record this story has access to. It remains as his claim, made in his pleadings and his podium seasons, that the ratio had been the trustee's to state and his to repeat, and the order weighed the claim in the way orders do, by assigning the certification duty, forever afterward, to people who compute.