New York City, 1992
Bergdorf’s buying office called back in January wanting an answer, and Kit spent three weeks doing the arithmetic properly before she gave them one — not the emotional arithmetic Diane kept nudging her toward, but the actual numbers: what volume Bergdorf’s would require, what that volume would cost in fabric and production before the first check cleared, and whether Katya could absorb that gap without borrowing against terms that would let someone else’s patience, rather than her own, determine the label’s fate.
“I can do it,” she told Daniel one night, spreadsheets spread across the kitchen table the way they’d been for a decade now, “but only if I structure the production financing through the bank myself, on terms I understand completely, rather than through whatever factor Bergdorf’s usual vendors use. I’ve watched too many trade finance clients get squeezed by exactly that kind of financing gap.”
“You’re going to underwrite your own fashion label like it’s one of your trade clients.”
“It is one of my trade clients,” Kit said.
“It just happens to also be mine.”
She structured the deal that spring through a small, carefully negotiated credit line — modest enough not to overextend the business, precise enough to cover the production gap Bergdorf’s volume demanded — and Katya’s third season launched that September in Bergdorf’s own department, a modest corner rather than a splashy takeover, exactly the scale Kit had insisted on despite the store’s own preference for a bigger opening statement.
“You keep doing this,” the Bergdorf’s buyer told her, half amused, half admiring, at the small launch event that September.
“Every retailer wants the loud version. You keep choosing the quiet one.”
“The loud version is expensive advertising for a story that isn’t finished being written yet,” Kit said.
“I’d rather let the clothes make the case slowly and be believed, than make it loudly and be doubted the first time a season underperforms.”
The season didn’t underperform.
By December, Katya’s numbers at Bergdorf’s had outpaced the store’s own conservative projections by a wide enough margin that two more retailers reached out unprompted before the year closed, and Kit found herself, for the first time, having to actually turn away expansion rather than chase it, choosing which doors to walk through with the same deliberate patience she’d once used deciding which bank to join a decade earlier. Get faster updates on NovelPing.
At HSBC, the year brought Kit her most senior promotion yet — Vice President, trade finance, with a book of clients now large enough that Whitmore began, quietly, grooming her for something closer to desk leadership than she’d held before.
“You’ll have your own team within two years,” he told her that summer, over the kind of lunch that had long since stopped being a formality between them.
“I’ve said as much to the regional head. You should know he agreed without much argument, which is rarer than you’d think in this business.”
“I appreciate that.”
“You should also know,” Whitmore added, with the dry, careful precision she’d come to recognize as his version of genuine candor, “that I’ve noticed you building things outside this building that could, eventually, occupy rather more of your time than a desk leadership role would want. I’m not asking you to choose yet, Katherine. I’m simply telling you I’ve noticed, and that when the choice does arrive, I’d rather you tell me honestly than let me find out from someone else.”
Kit studied him for a long moment — Whitmore, who had recruited her at twenty-one on the strength of unassigned homework and had spent six years since proving himself exactly the kind of boss worth being loyal to, for as long as loyalty made sense in both directions.
“When the choice arrives, you’ll be the first to know. I promise you that much.”
“That’s all I’m asking,” Whitmore said, and the conversation moved on, but Kit filed the exchange away with particular care, understanding that her own eventual departure from this floor — not this year, not next, but somewhere in the plan she’d been quietly assembling since childhood — had just become a real, acknowledged variable rather than a private certainty only she and Daniel knew about.
Bill Clinton’s election that November arrived at the Whitfield-Reyes dinner table with more genuine debate than any election in Kit’s memory, Richard cautiously approving of a candidate who talked seriously about deficit reduction, Margaux entirely fixated on Hillary Clinton’s own career as a lawyer rather than merely a spouse, a novelty she discussed with the particular fascination of a woman who had spent her whole adult life inside a role Hillary Clinton seemed determined to redefine in real time.
“She’s a partner at her own firm, Richard,” Margaux said, more animated about a political spouse than Kit had heard her in years.
“The markets will want to see the actual policy before they get excited about anyone’s résumé,” Richard said, ever the banker, though Kit noticed, watching her parents debate it, that her mother’s genuine interest in Hillary Clinton’s professional identity marked something quietly shifting in Margaux herself — a woman who had built an entire life on the currency of being seen well, now visibly curious about a different kind of currency altogether, the kind Kit herself had spent a career accumulating.
“You’d have liked being taken seriously that way too, Mom,” Kit said gently, later, the two of them alone in the kitchen after dinner.
“If you’d come up a generation later.”
Margaux considered that for a long moment, drying a dish with more care than the task required.
“Perhaps. Or perhaps I found my own version of being taken seriously, in the only arena that was actually open to me at the time, and simply never called it a career because nobody handed me that word for it.” She looked at her daughter with something unusually direct.
“I don’t regret my life, Kitty. I built something real inside the rooms I was allowed into. I’m only glad you got more rooms than I did.”
Kit hugged her mother, surprised by how much the moment moved her, and said nothing further, because there was nothing further that needed saying.
By the close of 1992, Katya stood in three major retailers with numbers strong enough to fund its own growth without new debt, Kit’s standing at HSBC had reached a seniority that made her own eventual departure a matter of when rather than whether, and the timeline she’d promised Daniel two years earlier — 1992, maybe 1993 — had arrived at its own deadline with the label finally, genuinely stable enough to bear the weight of what came next.
“You said ’92, maybe ’93,” Daniel reminded her that New Year’s Eve, both of them watching the ball drop from their apartment window with a bottle of champagne neither had finished.
“Which is it?”
Kit considered the question with the same careful weighing she gave every real decision, and found, for the first time in either of her long lives, that the arithmetic and the wanting had finally, fully aligned.
“It’s now,” she said.
“Let’s start trying now.”