New York City, September 1986
HSBC USA’s trading floor occupied three stories of a building on Fifth Avenue that still smelled faintly of new carpet and old ambition, and Kit’s first morning there she arrived forty minutes before her official start time, a habit she’d carry, largely unbroken, for the next decade.
“You’re early,” said the man at the desk beside hers, not looking up from his terminal.
He was perhaps thirty-five, prematurely gray at the temples in the specific way that suggested the market had aged him faster than the calendar had, and he wore his shirtsleeves rolled with the efficiency of someone who’d stopped caring about appearances the day he’d started caring about numbers instead.
“Everyone’s early the first week. Nobody stays early past the first month.”
“I intend to stay early,” Kit said.
He looked up at that, actually looked at her, and something in his expression shifted from mild amusement to something closer to appraisal.
“Marcus Feiler. Trade finance, mostly Asia desk. Whitmore tells me you’re the one who showed up to your superday with unassigned homework.”
“I am.”
“Good. We’ll get along, or you’ll make me look lazy by comparison, and either way I’ll learn something.” Marcus said it without rancor, the flat professional courtesy of a man who’d decided long ago that ego was the most expensive thing you could carry onto a trading floor, and Kit understood, within her first hour, that she’d landed beside exactly the kind of colleague worth learning from rather than merely surviving.
The floor itself, that first autumn, ran on an energy Kit recognized immediately even though she’d never stood on one before — the specific hum of a market that believed, collectively and almost giddily, in its own momentum. Get faster updates on novelping . com.
Reagan’s deregulation had loosened five years of accumulated caution, the dollar was finally coming down off the punishing highs of the early eighties under the Plaza Accord’s engineering, and every desk on the floor carried the particular swagger of an industry that had convinced itself the good times were structural rather than cyclical.
Kit had heard enough of Yekaterina’s memory-shaped instincts whisper otherwise — booms convince everyone they’re permanent right up until the morning they aren’t — that she watched the swagger with more interest than participation, cataloguing which of her colleagues actually understood their risk and which merely enjoyed the ride.
Her actual work, that first year, was almost aggressively unglamorous by trading-floor standards — letters of credit, documentary collections, the unphotogenic plumbing of how goods actually moved across oceans and got paid for once they arrived, exactly the discipline she’d chosen Stanford’s supply chain seminar to master.
She didn’t mind the lack of glamour.
She had spent a decade learning that the unglamorous plumbing was where the real leverage lived, invisible to everyone chasing the flashier desks until the year it suddenly mattered more than anything else on the floor.
“You could ask for a rotation onto FX,” Marcus told her over lunch one October afternoon, watching her work through a stack of trade documentation with more attention than the task strictly required.
“Faster money. Faster reputation, too, if that’s what you’re after.”
“I’m not after fast,” Kit said.
“I’m after the desk that’s still standing in fifteen years when half these FX boys have burned out or blown up. Trade finance doesn’t excite anyone at happy hour, Marcus. It also doesn’t disappear the first time a currency does something nobody modeled for.”
Marcus studied her for a long moment, the same appraising look from her first morning, now settling into something closer to respect.
“You talk like someone who’s already watched a boom collapse once.”
Kit’s chest went cold and still for exactly one beat — the old, familiar fear of having shown too much of the hand underneath — before she recovered, smooth as she’d trained herself to be over two decades of practice. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping . com.
“My father’s been in this business since before I could read a balance sheet, Marcus. I’ve watched plenty of things collapse from the dinner table. Never had to live through one myself. Yet.”
“Smart girl,” Marcus said, satisfied, going back to his own terminal, and Kit exhaled slowly and filed the exchange away with the others — a reminder that even careful people occasionally got closer to the truth than she liked, and that the price of being genuinely excellent at her work was, apparently, being watched more closely by the people sharp enough to notice.
The culture of the floor was, in its particular 1986 register, loud in ways Kit found more useful to observe than to resent.
There were perhaps six women on the entire floor, most of them in support roles rather than production ones, and Kit was one of only two actually trading anything, which meant she spent that first year fielding a specific, tiresome catalogue of assumptions — that she was someone’s daughter finding her way into the family business rather than a hire on her own merit (true, technically, about Lehman, entirely false about HSBC, and Kit corrected the assumption exactly as many times as it was worth her breath and not once more); that her attention to detail meant she lacked the stomach for real risk-taking (disproven, patiently, over eighteen months of increasingly large positions executed without a single costly mistake); that she’d eventually leave for marriage and motherhood the way two of the floor’s earlier female hires already had (true, in its way, though not remotely in the way anyone assumed, and not for another decade).
She let each assumption run its course rather than fighting it directly, the way Vivian had taught her to let an unfair opening offer sit until the other party arrived at its unfairness on their own.
By the end of her first year, she’d built a book of trade finance clients — shipping firms, textile importers, a steel concern out of Pittsburgh that nobody senior had wanted to bother courting — that outperformed two of the floor’s male analysts with twice her tenure, and the assumptions, one by one, quietly stopped being said out loud in her presence, which was, Kit understood, the only kind of victory that particular battle was ever going to offer.
Daniel started his residency at Columbia that same September, and the two of them settled into a small apartment on the Upper West Side that neither of their families entirely approved of — too modest for Margaux’s taste, too far from the hospital for Daniel’s — but which suited them both precisely because it was theirs, unencumbered by anyone else’s expectations of what a young banker and a young doctor’s first home ought to look like.
They married in a small ceremony that October, smaller than Margaux would have chosen and exactly the size Kit had insisted on, Diane standing up beside her in a dress Kit had chosen specifically because Diane looked, in it, exactly like the girl who’d once fallen down laughing at a roller-disco fundraiser and never once needed Kit to be anyone other than herself.
Richard, giving the toast, said something that stuck with Kit longer than he likely intended — “I used to think I understood my daughter. Somewhere around age seven I stopped being sure, and somewhere around Stanford I stopped minding not being sure. Whatever’s actually going on in that head of hers, Daniel, I hope you enjoy finding out, because I never did finish the job myself.” The room laughed, warm and easy, and Kit caught her mother’s eye across the table and found Margaux watching her with the same quiet, knowing patience from the townhouse hallway years earlier, and neither of them said anything more about it than that.
By the close of 1986, Kit stood twenty-two years old, married to a man who never asked her to be smaller than she was, employed at a bank that valued exactly the unglamorous instincts she’d spent a lifetime — two lifetimes — cultivating, and standing at the very base of the mountain she’d been quietly, patiently surveying since she was six years old sorting pennies on a windowsill.
The real climb, she understood, watching the floor empty out on New Year’s Eve into a city glittering with a decade’s last full year of unbroken confidence, was only just beginning.
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