The niece came back once, in that season, with a request she had plainly rehearsed on the drive over: the family had decided that Verna's folder — the twin folder, the kitchen-table folder — should come to rest in the home's drawer with its original, if the home was willing, because the two copies had agreed for twenty-two years and the family did not want them separated now, and because, she said, standing in the arrangement office with the folder in both hands for the second time, her aunt had trusted the drawer longer than she had trusted any living person, and it seemed to the family that the folder had a preference in the matter. Denise took it and filed it behind the original, in the same folder's place, the two copies together at last, and entered the filing in the records in the home's form: documents received from the family; contract complete; arrangements performed; balance, none. And if the entry was not the largest the record book would ever hold, it was, Denise judged, closing the drawer on it, the one the book had been keeping itself for.
From Atlanta, in that season, came the last papers of the affair, arriving at their various addresses with the anticlimax that is the signature of concluded things. The department published its final examination report, in the ordinary course, on its website, where it was read by the trade press and by exactly the population of specialists who had read all the others, and its conclusions, being by then two years of settled fact, made no one's front page. The restructured company issued its annual report with the trust certification on the second page, in type no larger than the type the old company had used for its footnote — per trustee statements, the footnote had said, at ninety-eight percent, and the new report said, in the same modest type, computed by the trustee from its own records, at one hundred point zero — and the sentence passed, in the annual reports of the sector, almost without remark, a change of wording so small that only a filing reader would see it, and so total that a filing reader would see nothing else. Loretta Ivey read it at her desk, in the course of her firm's ordinary surveillance of a sector it no longer lent into on the old terms, and she noted the sentence, and the figure, and the absence of any adjective attached to either, and she had the report filed, and turned to the water authority's file, which had developed, in the months since, its own three delayed letters, in a prose style she was coming to recognize the way one recognizes a relative's handwriting. Fenn, reading over her shoulder the summary her analyst had prepared, said: "Ninety-eight to one hundred point zero, and all it cost was everything." She said: "It cost what it cost because nobody priced the other direction. Two inches of drawer, Russell. That is the whole margin anyone ever has. What the keeper keeps, beyond what the keeper is told to keep." And she initialed the analyst's summary, and the file went to the archive, beside the other closed files, with its number on its spine, its chronology complete, its notice still the only document in it that mentioned no one's conduct at all.
Nick Ames resigned from the board at the annual meeting that spring, which was the first annual meeting in the company's history at which the trust certification was read before the financial results, an ordering the new chief executive had proposed and the board had adopted without debate, as if the company had decided, at the level of instinct, to get its duties in their proper sequence at last. The certification was read by the successor trustee's representative, a person the board had come to know the way one knows a lighthouse: by its regularity. One hundred point zero percent, computed from the trustee's records, contract by contract, for the Georgia book; the other states' books, examined under their own regulators' versions of the same reckoning, stood in their high nineties and climbing on their own schedules, the affair's arithmetic having proved, as arithmetic does, contagious. The restitution fund was reported closed and verified. The escrow account was reported empty, its purpose discharged. The department's final letter was entered in the minutes without comment, which Ames, chairing his last meeting, noted as the most eloquent entry the minutes had ever contained.