The first quarterly certified statements went out that winter, to every living contract holder in the Georgia book, in envelopes from the successor trustee whose return address no one in the state recognized yet. The statements were everything the old trustee's letters had not been: computed, itemized, footed to custody records, stating the trust's funding ratio — seventy-nine percent, in the new trustee's computation, climbing on the order's schedule — and stating, for each contract holder individually, the current fulfillment value of that holder's own contract and the trust assets standing against the book that contained it. In kitchens across the state the envelopes were opened by people in their eighties and nineties, and by their children, and the children telephoned the homes, and the homes, for the first time in years, could answer the telephone with documents that agreed with each other. There were contract holders who framed the statement. There were more who filed it where the paid-in-full statement had always lived, in the envelope with the will, which is the archive of the American family's true beliefs, and where, the examiners had come to understand, the country's actual constitution is kept, one prepaid funeral at a time.
The offers began to reach Loretta in the spring, and they arrived in the forms that rehabilitation takes in American business, which is to say they arrived as honors. The restructured company — Ames having served as interim chairman through the consent order's negotiation and yielded, in due course, to a permanent chief executive recruited from a mutual insurer, a person of unglamorous competence whose name the trade press had to look up — wrote to her through its new general counsel to say that the board would welcome her firm's participation in the company's future financing, on terms the board was prepared to make attractive, and that a seat on the board itself, or on the trust oversight committee the order had created, would be hers for the accepting, the company believing that no one had earned a voice in its governance more plainly. A syndicate of the company's surviving lenders, reorganizing its debts under the order's shadow, sounded her firm about anchoring the successor facility. And in Perry, when the Bookers' intention to exercise the consent order's first-refusal provision became known in the county — the order had given the founding families of the acquired homes a right, on stated terms, to repurchase their homes from the restructured company where the company was willing or required to divest — word reached Atlanta, through the channels that carry such word, that a local bank was assembling the Bookers' loan, and that a word from Ivey Capital, or even its silence favorably interpreted, would ease the loan's committee.
She declined all of it, and she declined it in writing, briefly, through her firm's ordinary channels, in letters that said the firm did not invest in companies whose diligence it had terminated, did not accept governance roles in borrowers it had examined as a counterparty, and did not lend, guarantee, or bless loans in transactions where its earlier involvement might be mistaken for a judgment on the merits. The letters were models of the genre. They expressed no satisfaction. They claimed no victory. They did not mention that the restructured company's invitation, with its talk of earned voices, had attempted the oldest conversion in the affair's long history of conversions: to turn a creditor who had read the file into a participant who would be read as endorsing it. Fenn, reading the drafts, said: "They want your name on the new building the way they wanted it on the old loan. As load-bearing decoration."
"They want absolution at a syndicate's price," Loretta said. "We are not selling it. We are not buying anything either. There is a difference between finishing a piece of work and moving into the building where it happened." She signed the letters. "Our work in that file is one document. Let it stay one document."