He looked at it. It was not a long look, and later, when she considered it in the privacy of her own accounting, she would be precise about its duration the way she was precise about everything: long enough to see the hand, to understand it, to decide. He turned from it with the smoothness of a man turning from a view he has finished with, and addressed himself to the room, to the agenda, to the day, with his hands now occupied by a folder an aide had materialized, and the moment went past in the general settling of chairs and papers, and might have gone entirely unrecorded by anyone but her, except that Erik Halvorsen, a director of sixty-three with a face the color of good linen, laughed once into his water glass — a single, small, unmistakable sound, immediately swallowed — and Nick Ames, the lead independent director, a retired bank president of sixty-six who had known Loretta by reputation for twenty years, looked down at his agenda and said nothing at all.
She sat down. She opened her binder. Her hand, the one that had been extended and refused, turned the pages of the appendix with no more haste than it turned any pages, and when the chairman of the meeting called the room to order and the agenda reached its first item, the anchor presenter, she presented. She presented the facility's structure, its pricing, its covenants, and the conditions that remained open, in a level voice, to the last item, which she read from the term sheet exactly as it was written there, because it was written there and she had never yet improved a document by paraphrasing it: the trustee's confirmation of the pre-need funding ratio, computed independently, outstanding.
The presentation of the borrower's case fell to Paul Danvers, the chief financial officer, a man of fifty-one whose suits were cut the way his slides were built, conservatively and without surprises, and who had the presenter's gift of making a schedule of numbers feel like a story with a destination. He took the room through the acquisition history, the integration milestones, the same-store performance of the acquired homes, the margin structure that scale had purchased. He was good at it. Loretta had read the deck the night before, twice, and she listened to it delivered with the attention of a woman checking a recitation against a text she already held, which is a colder species of attention than most presenters ever meet, and she could see it cost him something by the third section, a slight quickening, a reaching for the next slide a half-breath sooner than the room required.
The appendix came near the end, as appendices do, in the part of the meeting where the light has changed and the coffee has been refreshed once and everyone present understands that what remains is confirmation rather than discovery. Danvers put the trust slide on the screen himself, rather than leaving it to the associate who had run the others, and Loretta noted the choice without yet knowing what it meant. The slide was a summary of the pre-need position: contracts in force, trust assets, the funding ratio presented as a single large number in the company's green, ninety-eight percent, with a footnote in the smaller type that counsel uses for load-bearing admissions: per trustee statements.
"Our pre-need trusts," Danvers said, "are funded at ninety-eight percent, per the trustee, and have been at or above that level for eleven consecutive quarters. This is, we would submit, the strongest trust position in the consolidated sector, and it reflects a discipline that this company treats as sacred. These are families' arrangements, made in many cases decades ago. The money is there. It has always been there."
Loretta turned a page in her binder. The page she turned to was the appendix page of her own copy, where she had marked, the night before, in pencil, three small checks against three figures, and had written nothing else, because the figures either reconciled or they did not and commentary was not a solvent.
"Mr. Danvers," she said. "The ninety-eight percent. Is that ratio computed against the current cost of fulfilling the contracts in force, or against the original contract prices?"
It was a plain question, and it had a plain answer, and the room understood both facts, because the difference between the two computations was the difference between a promise kept and a promise remembered. A pre-need contract sold in 2004 at the prices of 2004, guaranteed in writing against increase, had to be fulfilled at the costs of the year the death occurred; a trust funded to the original price alone was a trust funded to a number that no longer bought the thing it had been collected to buy.