She was aware of the other thing, too, and she handled it with the same discipline, which is to say she looked at it directly and assigned it its correct place, which was not in this file. The moment at the far end of the table that morning — the hand extended, the look, the turn — had been what it had been. She had been read rooms since she was a girl counting the offering at her grandmother's church, and she did not require a committee to tell her what she had seen. But the insult, if she allowed it into the file, would become the file, and the file was about a trust that held the funeral money of people she would never meet, in towns she had never visited, who had paid for their own burials in installments and in faith. The handshake concerned her. The trust concerned them. She had been in business long enough to know which of those two matters she was being paid, and trusted, and syndicated, to attend to — and long enough to know that the men who had arranged the seating that morning would very much have preferred her to attend to the other one, loudly, publicly, and at the expense of the arithmetic. It was not lost on her that an insult costs nothing to deliver and can be priced, by the man who delivers it, at exactly the value of the confusion it creates. She declined the confusion. She kept her eyes on the missing letter.
Her grandmother had prepaid her own funeral in the spring of 1989, at a funeral home on Auburn Avenue, in a ceremony of exactly the kind Fairhaven's entire empire was built upon, except that in 1989 it had not been called an empire or a portfolio. Her grandmother had been seventy-one, widowed two years, in possession of a house, a pension, and opinions. She had taken Loretta, who was nineteen and home from college for the weekend, because she said a person should not sign such a paper alone and because she intended the paper to be witnessed by someone who would outlive it. The funeral director had known their family for thirty years. The contract had been written in a hand like copperplate. The price had been guaranteed in the document's plain language: paid in full, the arrangements were the arrangements, and no further sum would be asked of the family at the time of need, ever, in so many words, because the director had believed that the words were the product. Her grandmother had paid in installments across two years, and each payment had been entered in a passbook, in the same copperplate hand, the balance declining like a tide going out on schedule, until the final entry, in the spring of 1991, read simply: Paid in full. Arrangements complete. She had kept the passbook in her Bible for the remaining fourteen years of her life, between the Psalms and the ribbon marker, and Loretta, who was not a sentimental keeper of objects, kept it still, in a drawer of the desk at which she now sat, because it was the first trust document she had ever read and because its arithmetic had been honored to the cent.
Her grandmother's funeral, when it came, in 2005, had cost the family nothing further, though the prices of everything named in the contract had doubled in the interval. The home had kept its word because the word was the business. Loretta had thought about that on the day, standing in the chapel in her black dress with the passbook at home in its drawer, and she thought about it now, in her office, with Fairhaven's three letters arranged on her desk like a hand of cards nobody wanted to play, and what she felt was not anger, which she rationed, but the specific professional emotion that had built her firm: the wish to see a number computed by the people whose legal duty it was to compute it.
She called Fenn at home. She called the firm's outside counsel, a woman in New York who answered on the second ring in the voice of someone who had also not gone home. She called her own deal team leader and woke him, and apologized, and did not sound sorry. To each of them she said the same thing, in the same words, because she wanted the record of the instruction to be uniform: the closing would not proceed, and no further courtesy extensions would be granted or implied, until the trustee delivered the confirmation the term sheet required, computed independently, from the trustee's own records. If the trustee required a formal demand, the syndicate would make one, jointly, in writing, by morning. She did not mention the meeting. She did not mention a handshake, a seat, or a laugh into a water glass. There was nothing in her instruction that could not have been read aloud in any boardroom in the country, and that was not an accident; it was, in the deepest sense she understood the word, the point.