In the elevator, going down through the building's polished shaft with the deal team arranged around the binder she still carried, Fenn waited until the doors had closed and the floor numbers had begun their descent before he spoke, and what he said was not about the handshake.
"The confirmation," he said. "Three delays, and in the room, the CEO himself tells us the trustee is verifying it three ways. If it were ninety-eight, Russell Fenn would have had it in August."
Loretta watched the numbers descend. "You are Russell Fenn," she said.
"I am reminding myself," he said, "out loud, in a safe place."
"It is not a safe place," she said. "It is an elevator." But she said it in the tone that, between them, meant she had heard him and agreed with him and was already doing the arithmetic in the order it had to be done.
That evening she did not go home at her usual hour. The offices of Ivey Capital Partners emptied in their ordinary sequence — the traders first, then the analysts in their pairs, then the partners, calling their good nights down the corridor — and she stayed at her desk with the Fairhaven file and the closing checklist, doing personally a piece of work she would ordinarily have left to the machinery of her firm, because the machinery of her firm was excellent and because that was not, tonight, the point.
The checklist was four pages. Every item on it bore the initials of the associate who had cleared it and the date it had cleared, a small green country of completion, and near the bottom of the third page, in the section headed Conditions to Closing, one line stood without initials, the only one, its box empty, its language unchanged since June: Trustee's confirmation of pre-need trust funding ratio, computed independently by trustee from trustee's records, current within sixty days. Three times since August the item had been the subject of correspondence, and the correspondence lay behind the checklist in the file, in date order, because her files always lay in date order. She took the three letters out and read them again, in the order they had been sent, though she knew them the way she knew everything in a file she intended to act on.
The first was from Fairhaven's general counsel, in August, on the company's letterhead, regretting that the trustee's confirmation would be delayed by the Boyce Trust Company's conversion to a new trust accounting platform, a conversion described in terms admiring of its thoroughness. The second was from the same hand in September, regretting a further short delay owing to personnel changes within the trustee's reporting group, and assuring the syndicate that the confirmation, when delivered, would reflect the position as previously reported. The third, in early October, was shorter, and had been signed by an outside firm Fairhaven had newly engaged, and said that the confirmation was in preparation and would be delivered in advance of closing, and asked the syndicate's indulgence for the trustee's diligence, which it called, in a phrase Loretta underlined once with her pencil and did not otherwise mark, a hallmark of the relationship.
She laid the three letters side by side on her desk. Then she did what she had done since she was a lending officer with two telephones: she made a list of what the letters actually said, stripped of their letterheads. A platform. A personnel change. A preparation. Not one of the three said that the trustee had begun the computation. Not one of the three said the trustee had been asked to begin it. The letters accounted, with great fluency, for the absence of the document, and said nothing at all about the document, and there was a species of absence, she had learned over thirty years, that was itself a kind of answer, the way a borrower's explanation of a missing tax return, in its third iteration, is an answer about the tax return.