Gerald folded his hands. "There may be alternative uses for the acreage."
Casey sat at the end of the table, saying nothing.
Warren smiled without humor. "Funny. All summer you called it damaged collateral."
"Circumstances evolve."
"Land didn't move."
"Information changes."
"Exactly."
Warren slid the proposal back across the table.
"No."
Gerald stared at him. "You haven't countered."
"I'm not selling."
"At some point stubbornness becomes self-destruction."
Warren's expression hardened, but Casey saw Harlon subtly raise one hand from where he sat beside them. Let him talk.
Gerald continued. "The bank has been patient. We have offered restructuring, partial sale, and now a premium price. If you refuse every reasonable path and the loan remains out of compliance, you cannot later say Cornerstone forced the result."
Harlon finally spoke. "And if the loan condition was materially worsened by drainage changes connected to a project financed and coordinated by Cornerstone's affiliates, the bank may have its own difficulty explaining the result."
Douglas Kern turned toward him. "That's an unsupported allegation."
"Then the document preservation request should be painless."
The meeting ended there.
Two days later, Cornerstone delivered several thousand pages of project records in response to the initial requests. Most were useless to Warren: routine loan files, engineering transmittals, scheduling emails, spreadsheets, insurance certificates, and committee summaries dense enough to make Casey's eyes blur. Harlon hired a small litigation-support service to organize the documents electronically.
Casey volunteered to help review them.
For four nights she sat at the kitchen table searching names, dates, project terms, parcel numbers, and phrases related to drainage. Warren tried to help for one evening and gave up after twenty minutes.
"People get paid to write emails like this?"
"Apparently."
"Nobody says anything."
"That's the point."
The first meaningful message was not dramatic.