Danvers smiled the smile of a man who has been asked the question he prepared for. "The trustee's methodology is consistent with regulatory standards," he said, "and the appendix sets out the position as the trustee reports it. The company does not compute the ratio itself, for obvious reasons of independence. The trustee confirms the position, and the position, as I say, is ninety-eight percent."
"That is the source of the number," Loretta said. "It was not my question." She said it without edge, as a correction of the record, and let the silence stand one beat, and then, because she had decided on the order of her questions on the drive in and did not believe in improvising discipline, she asked the second. "The trust assets. Do they include any obligations of the company itself, or of any affiliate? Any notes, any paper of Fairhaven's, held in the trusts?"
This time the pause was longer. Danvers looked, not at her, but at the slide, as if the slide might have developed a footnote in the last minute. The general counsel, two seats down, became interested in the cap of his pen. "The trusts are invested in accordance with the trust agreements and applicable law," Danvers said. "Permitted investments. The schedule of holdings is a trustee matter, and I would not want to characterize it loosely in a meeting. It is, of course, available through the trustee in the ordinary course."
"The ordinary course," Loretta said, "has been in preparation since August." She said it mildly, as a date is mild, and she asked her third question. "The confirmation my firm's term sheet requires — computed independently by the trustee, from the trustee's own records. It is the last open condition. Will the trustee deliver it this week?"
Dunmore answered that one himself, from the head of the table, with the fluency of a chief executive reclaiming the weather of a room. "Leland Boyce's people are the most careful trust officers in the Southeast," he said. "The Boyce Trust Company has held these trusts since before some of the homes in this portfolio were built. They are converting their systems, as you know, and they are not going to sign a number they have not verified three ways, and frankly, Loretta — " he used her first name with the ease of a man distributing a familiarity he had not been given — "frankly, I am glad of it. We are asking the market for five hundred and forty million dollars against the good faith of this company. I want the trustee's letter to be bulletproof when it comes. It will come. And when it comes, it will say what Paul has told you it says."
"Then it will say ninety-eight percent," Loretta said.
"It will say what Paul has told you," Dunmore said, and smiled, and the room took its cue from the smile and not from the sentence, which were not the same thing, and which she had noticed were not the same thing, and filed, with the date and the hour, in the place where she filed sentences that had declined to be answers.
The meeting ran its remaining length on rails of courtesy. The syndicate's other members, present by telephone, asked their questions, which were about pricing and tenor and the subjects lenders ask about when the diligence has been done by someone else. The closing timeline was recited: documents to be finalized, funds to flow the following week, a closing dinner mentioned and seconded with the laughter of people scheduling a celebration. Loretta's associates took notes. Her own contributions, after the third question, were brief and exact and entirely without decoration, and when the agenda was exhausted and the chairman thanked the anchor firm for its leadership of the syndicate, she closed her binder and stood, and Fenn stood with her, and the room performed the small ceremony of adjournment — chairs, folders, the gathering of phones — through which she moved with her binder in her hand and her face arranged in the expression she used for all rooms, which was neither warm nor cold but simply finished.
No one shook her hand on the way out either, because by then the company was dispersing in its several directions and handshakes were happening in the pairs and trios that rooms resolve into, and she did not offer hers again, and she did not note the omission aloud, then or later, to anyone.