"With the documents," Loretta said, "is the only way it was ever going to be true." She was at her desk, and the Fairhaven file was by then a closed file, shelved in the firm's archive with its number on the spine, and on her desk was a new file, a water authority in a county two states away, with its own missing documents and its own fluent explanations. She opened it as she spoke. The light that October afternoon came through the tower glass the way it had the year before, in the season of the meeting, and the city performed its grids and its traffic below, and she read the new file's first page with the attention she had brought to all of them, a woman of fifty-five now, whose grandmother's passbook sat in the drawer of the desk beneath her hand, its last entry ninety years of weather old and honored to the cent: Paid in full. Arrangements complete. She did not touch the drawer. She did not need to. The drawer was not where the passbook's lesson lived anymore; the lesson had been promoted, years ago, into the firm's whole method, and it lived wherever paper was being read by people who had decided, in advance and on principle, to believe it.
The successor trustee arrived in the story the way weather arrives in a county that has stopped expecting it: impersonally, on a schedule, and in a form that had to be experienced to be believed. It was a national trust company whose name was a row of surnames from another century, and it had no offices in Perry, no history in Houston County, no friendship with anyone in the story, and a professional reputation, in the trust industry, of the specific kind that made its appointment by the department a sentence in itself: the new trustee computed. Its examiners-for-hire and its own trust officers fanned out across the Fairhaven book in the order's first quarter with a mandate the order stated in one sentence and the trustee executed in eleven months: every pre-need contract in the Georgia portfolio was to be read, priced at current fulfillment cost, and matched against the trust assets standing behind the book that contained it, contract by contract, home by home, until the ratio the trustee certified was not a percentage quoted from a schedule but the sum of sixty thousand individual promises, each one standing in a row with its name on it.
The work was not dramatic. It was, in most of its particulars, Denise Booker's drawer, replicated four hundred times. In home after home, the trustee's teams found the same geology: a digitized portfolio upstairs, in the systems, harmonized and amended and reported at ninety-eight; and a paper stratum underneath, in desks and file cabinets and the backs of arrangement offices, where the founding families' directors, or their successors, or no one at all, had kept the originals. Where the originals survived, the recomputation was archaeology with a happy ending: the contract said what it said, and it could be priced, and the pricing could be footed. Where they did not — where an acquirer's document service had pulped the paper in some long-ago efficiency, as had happened in eleven of the Georgia homes — the trustee reconstructed the obligations from the payment records and the families' own copies, and the department's auditors, reading the reconstruction files, noted that the families of Georgia had kept their contracts, in envelopes with their wills, at a rate that no document-management consultant would have predicted and that every funeral director in the state could have told them on the first day: the people had always known which paper was the load-bearing paper. They had filed their promises with their testaments. It had been the company that treated its copies as redundancy.