New York City, 1995–1996
Meridian Artists Group opened its doors that June in a modest suite of offices on Madison Avenue, three rooms and a receptionist and considerably less marble than half the agencies Kit had toured before choosing the space, which suited her exactly — she had built two businesses already on the principle that substance should always outweigh appearance, and she saw no reason to abandon it now that the appearance was, for the first time, entirely her own to design.
Her first client arrived almost by accident, through Daniel’s hospital rather than any of Kit’s own considerable network — a young shortstop named Marcus Deveraux, freshly called up to the majors that spring after the ’94–’95 strike had finally, bitterly resolved itself, referred to Daniel’s cardiology practice for a minor arrhythmia that turned out to be nothing more than the ordinary strain of a young athlete’s nerves.
Daniel, making conversation in the exam room, had mentioned his wife’s new venture, and Marcus, twenty-two and visibly exhausted by an agent he didn’t fully trust and didn’t know how to fire, had asked, half-joking, whether Kit’s agency handled ballplayers.
“I don’t know anything about baseball contracts,” Kit told him plainly, at their first meeting, because she had learned long ago that a false confidence cost more than an honest gap.
“I know a great deal about protecting someone’s long-term financial architecture, and I intend to learn baseball’s particular version of that gap fast enough to be useful to you within a month, not a year.”
“My current agent tells me he knows everything already,” Marcus said, wry despite himself, a broad-shouldered young man from Baton Rouge who’d clearly spent his whole short career being managed by people more interested in the commission than in him.
“Forgive me if ‘I don’t know yet, but I will’ actually sounds more honest.”
Kit did learn it — arbitration timelines, the specific vulnerability of a player’s post-career finances once the paychecks that felt endless at twenty-two inevitably stopped, the predatory endorsement deals dangled in front of young athletes who’d never had anyone explain the actual math to them — and within two months had renegotiated Marcus’s endorsement portfolio into terms that made his previous agent’s contracts look, by comparison, faintly embarrassing.
“You actually read every clause,” Marcus said, genuinely startled, watching Kit walk him through a sneaker deal line by line.
“Nobody’s ever done that in front of me before. They just say ‘sign here, trust me.'”
“I don’t ask anyone to trust me,” Kit said.
“I ask them to read the number themselves and then decide if they trust the number. Trust that isn’t verifiable isn’t actually trust. It’s just hope with better manners.”
The second client came through Vivian’s old network, a referral Vivian made personally with the specific pride of a woman handing off her most promising protégée to someone she trusted completely with the rest of the girl’s career: an actress named Sabrina Kohl, twenty years old, two years into a career that had started with a breakout indie film and was now, precisely at the moment nobody had prepared her for, being circled by three different studios with three different visions of what she should become next.
“Everyone wants to tell me who to be,” Sabrina told Kit at their first meeting, sharp and visibly wary in a way Kit recognized from her own younger self, a girl who’d learned early that being underestimated was safer than being fully seen.
“One studio wants me doing rom-coms for the next decade. Another wants me doing exactly one prestige picture and disappearing if it doesn’t work. Nobody’s asked me what I actually want to build.”
“What do you actually want to build?”
Sabrina blinked, as if the question itself was unfamiliar.
“I don’t know yet. I’ve never been asked in a way that wasn’t actually just someone trying to sell me their own answer.”
“Then we’ll figure it out together, and I’ll represent whatever we land on rather than whatever’s easiest to sell this quarter,” Kit said.
“I’m not interested in managing you into someone else’s five-year plan for your face. I’m interested in building your actual career the way I’d build a portfolio — diversified enough to survive one bad picture, deliberate enough that you’re still working, and still yourself, in twenty years.”
Sabrina studied her for a long moment, the particular assessment of someone who’d been disappointed by promises before and had learned to weigh them carefully.
“Vivian said you were different. I didn’t quite believe her.”
“You don’t have to believe me yet,” Kit said.
“Believe the first contract I negotiate for you instead. Let the number do the convincing.”
The third client arrived the way Kit least expected any of them to — through Alex’s own toddler-aged fascination with the radio, of all things, and a chance conversation at a downtown recording studio where Kit had gone, mostly out of curiosity, to observe a former Meridian intern’s cousin at work.
There she met Andre “Ronin” Carver, twenty-three, a rapper out of Queens whose first single had cracked local radio that spring and whose label, Kit could tell within ten minutes of watching the meeting unfold, was structuring his publishing deal in a way that would leave him with almost nothing once the advance ran dry.
“You understand what a hundred-point spread means to a publishing deal?” Ronin asked her afterward, testing, half amused and half genuinely curious about the composed white woman in a tailored blazer who’d sat quietly through his label meeting asking sharper questions than his own lawyer had.
“I understand it considerably better than the deal they just tried to give you,” Kit said.
“You’re about to sign away seventy percent of your publishing on a term that doesn’t even revert to you after a reasonable period. That’s not a record deal. That’s a lease you can never buy out of.” Follow the newest chapters on novelping . com.
Ronin was quiet for a moment, recalculating something in his expression that Kit recognized as the specific moment a person realized they’d nearly been taken advantage of by people they’d trusted by default.
“Nobody’s broken it down for me like that. My own team just said ‘this is standard, take it.'”
“Standard isn’t the same as fair,” Kit said.
“It’s just what people take when nobody’s told them they could ask for better. I can get you better. I’d want a real conversation first about what your catalog’s actually worth over the next decade, not just this single deal.”
He signed with Meridian within the month, the label’s original publishing terms renegotiated hard enough that his own lawyer, incredulous, asked Kit twice how she’d gotten the label to move that far.
“I priced the actual value of his catalog properly and refused to accept a number that didn’t reflect it,” Kit told him simply.
“Most negotiations aren’t won by being louder. They’re won by knowing the real number before the other side does.”
By the end of 1996, Meridian’s small roster — a ballplayer building a reputation as someone whose off-field business sense matched his talent, an actress finally shaping a deliberate rather than accidental career, a rapper whose catalog was, for the first time, structured to actually enrich him rather than merely the label distributing it — had become the agency’s quiet proof of concept, word moving the same slow, durable way it had once moved for Katya: not through splashy press, but through the specific, hard-won trust of clients who’d been burned before and finally found someone who did the arithmetic on their behalf rather than against it.
“You’re building something strange, Kit,” Daniel told her one night, watching her review Sabrina’s latest contract at the kitchen table while Alex, three now, drew determinedly on a legal pad beside her with a crayon he’d stolen from her briefcase.
“An agency that’s ruthless in negotiation and completely loyal to the client at the same time. Most people think those are opposites.”
“They’re not,” Kit said, echoing the words she’d given Vivian a year earlier, watching her son’s careful, oversized scribbles with the same patient attention she gave every real thing she was building.
“You just have to actually mean both halves at once, instead of using one to hide the absence of the other.”
She was thirty-two years old, a mother, a founder, three careers now compounding in parallel exactly the way she’d once told Renata a decade earlier that parallel lines could still meet if nobody insisted the world was flat, and Meridian Artists Group — hers, entirely and only hers — was, at last, genuinely, visibly alive.