Richest Man: It All Started With My Rebate System-Chapter 50: Peaceful Reflection

Steven arrived at the restaurant an hour ago. He had made his order, finished his meal, and had been staring out the window blankly since, watching people and cars go by.

As he stared out the window, a lot of thoughts roamed his mind but none of them stuck around long enough to settle. Most of them were related to what he was going to do with his time going forward, while some were about his past.

He thought about his late parents and how much he had been missing them lately, even though he never wanted to admit it. He kept thinking about them and wishing they were here to share the new, good life he was now living.

He couldn’t help but sigh when he thought about everything they had done for him. He really did miss them, but he knew he would only continue to miss them, because they weren’t coming back.

While thinking of his past, Steven also thought of his friends from school. Or his schoolmates, more accurately. He had been close with some of his classmates back then. He had good friends and they had all kept in touch for a while. But after they graduated from high school, life happened and they all started growing distant from each other.

Or Steven was the one who had grown distant from them. He remembered losing their contacts when he lost his phone and couldn’t recover his data.

The incident had happened after his mother died. He had tried to recover his data from the old phone using his email account but couldn’t, because he didn’t remember his email password and hadn’t set up a recovery email or phone number.

He had been broken by it. That phone had held every image and video of his mother and father. And because it happened just a week after his mother’s burial, it had felt even worse.

It was like the universe had really wanted to take everything from him.

Thinking about it now, he realised that losing the phone had been a result of carelessness. But there was no point thinking about it. It was all in the past.

As for his friends, Steven had no idea how he was going to find them. He was sure most of them had probably moved far from the city by now to start their lives elsewhere.

He hoped they would meet again one day. It would be good to talk and catch up. But he felt it would be difficult with how focused everyone was on building their lives.

He sighed quietly at the thought, remembering that he too had been focused on nothing but survival two weeks ago. Now he was in a completely different situation.

His phone buzzed, pulling him out of his thoughts. He looked at the screen and saw it was the front desk. He picked up immediately.

"Mr. Craig, good afternoon. This is the front desk. The housekeeping team has just finished and they’re heading out now. They asked us to let you know."

"Understood. Thank you," Steven said.

"Of course, Mr. Craig. Have a good afternoon."

The call ended.

Steven set the phone down and looked out the window for a moment longer. Then he reached for his card, settled the bill, and stood up.

The apartment was ready. The morning had been spent well, even if most of it had simply been time given back to himself without agenda.

If he was being honest, he had genuinely enjoyed it. Sitting alone with his thoughts, moving through the city without purpose, letting his mind go where it wanted without pulling it back. It had given him a different kind of clarity. He still had no clear answer for what he was going to do with his time going forward, but he had a better sense of what he wasn’t going to do.

He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair and walked out.

He walked to the car, got in, started the engine, and headed home.

***

He arrived home a few minutes later. He stepped into the apartment and paused just inside the doorway.

The difference was subtle but immediate. The surfaces were clean in a way that he hadn’t been able to achieve with the surface-level tidying he had been doing himself.

He stood there for a moment, taking it in, then smiled quietly to himself.

He crossed the living area and walked to the bedroom. The wardrobe was undisturbed, everything exactly where he had placed it. The laundry basket was empty and had been set back in its corner. The bed had been made perfectly.

He looked at it for a moment, then sat on the edge and lay back.

He was feeling a bit tired even though he hadn’t done anything tasking. It wasn’t the bone-deep exhaustion of long shifts and difficult days. It was something lighter than that, and considerably more pleasant.

Steven decided to sleep. Dinner with Lena was still hours out, which meant that he had the time.

He closed his eyes and went to sleep.

***

He slept through the entirety of the afternoon, deeper and more completely than he had expected to. When he opened his eyes, the light through the windows had shifted into its early evening tone, with the city beginning its quiet transition into night.

He lay still for a moment, orienting himself.

Then he checked the time and saw it was just under an hour before eight.

He sat up, rolled his shoulders, and stretched his neck slowly to one side then the other. The sleep had done what it was supposed to do. His body felt rested and his mind was clear in a way the morning’s reflection had started and the afternoon had completed.

He stood up and walked to the bathroom.

He showered without rushing, letting the water run warm, and stepped out fifteen minutes later feeling properly awake. He dried off, dressed deliberately — dark trousers, a clean Oxford shirt in pale blue with the sleeves left unrolled, the quilted Burberry jacket over the top.

He dressed smart without being formal.

He fastened the first watch he had bought, to his wrist and stood in front of the wardrobe mirror.

He looked at himself for a moment with the particular self-awareness of someone who had spent most of his adult life not thinking much about his reflection and was still adjusting to having a reason to.

He wasn’t someone who considered himself especially good-looking. He never had. But the haircut was sharp, the clothes sat well, and something in how he carried himself had shifted over the past two weeks in a way that went beyond what any of it looked like on the outside.

He felt it more than he saw it and he knew that it was because of his dressing, and the money in his account.

He turned away from the mirror and walked to the living area.

There was a quiet layer of nervousness sitting somewhere in his chest, which he noted without dismissing it.

He was aware that dinner was Lena’s way of closing the loop on the accident, of expressing something she had clearly felt the need to express since the day it happened. He understood that and had accepted the invitation on that basis.

He was also aware in honesty, that he had accepted because he had wanted to.

He wasn’t looking for anything beyond the evening. The breakup with Tara was barely two weeks behind him and he had no interest in moving quickly toward anything.

But Lena was interesting in a way he hadn’t been able to set aside entirely since the night outside the restaurant, and an evening in good company with good food wasn’t something that required a deeper justification than that.

He picked up his phone, key card, and car key fob from the side table and left the apartment.

The hallway was quiet as always. The elevator came immediately. He rode it down to the garage, walked to the Aston Martin, and got in.

He entered the restaurant’s address into the navigation system, started the engine, and listened to it come alive beneath him.

He pulled out of the space and drove up the ramp into the evening air.