Richest Man: It All Started With My Rebate System-Chapter 63: Genuine Warmth

Steven stepped into the apartment, dropped his duffel bag by the door, and collapsed onto the sofa.

He lay back against the cushions and stared at the ceiling for a moment, letting his body register the fact that it was done moving for now.

He was hungry. But the hunger and the tiredness were currently in direct competition, and the tiredness was winning by a significant margin.

Though the kitchen was twenty feet away, it might as well have been in a different building.

He lay there for another minute, negotiating with himself, and eventually reached a compromise. He would eat. But he would allow himself exactly this much time on the sofa first, without guilt and without anything that required him to think.

He closed his eyes briefly and he let his mind drifted without direction.

It went to Hannah age their conversation, the same way it had been doing in the background since he pulled out of the parking lot.

He hadn’t expected that his friends who hadn’t seen or spoken to in ages, hadn’t lost connection with him.

He had thought about the people from that period of his life occasionally. The phone and the data and the contacts and the shared history of daily contact — all of it had gone together in a single afternoon four years ago, and life had moved in its particular relentless way and filled the space where those connections had been with the immediate demands of survival.

And then this morning, a woman he hadn’t seen in four years had called his name in a parking lot and it brought back memories.

He reached for his phone without sitting up, holding it above him and opening Hannah’s message. He looked at the group chat’s link for a moment.

Hannah had warned him that there would be questions. A lot of them.

He had been off the grid for two years with no contact, no explanation, but an abrupt disappearance that people would have tried to make sense of in his absence. He knew how that worked. He had done it himself with people who had gone quiet without explanation. You constructed a version of events from whatever you had, filed it under the most plausible heading, and moved forward.

The version they had constructed for him was probably not flattering. Or it was too flattering in the wrong direction — assuming something had happened, some crisis or tragedy that had swallowed him up. Both were equally inaccurate. The truth was less dramatic. He had lost a phone, lost the data, lost the thread, and then been too deep in the business of surviving to find a way back.

He clicked the link and a confirmation screen appeared asking if he wanted to join the group.

He clicked join.

The screen loaded and the group chat opened.

The name at the top read: The Originals 🔥, which made him smile.

The chat was active. Messages were moving at a steady pace, a back and forth between several people, and he scrolled upward to get his bearings.

The first thing he noticed was the volume of messages. Hundreds of them over the past three days. He didn’t try to read all of it. He scrolled selectively, picking up threads where he could and letting the ones he couldn’t follow go.

He saw James’s name almost immediately, which produced a recognition in his chest that was sharper than he had expected.

James had been one of the closest. It had been the particular kind of friendship that didn’t require constant maintenance or communication because the foundation had been built on something more durable than proximity — shared history, shared humour, the specific shorthand that developed between people who had spent enough time together to stop explaining themselves.

Callum was there too, further up, in the middle of a running exchange about the venue for Thursday that had apparently been going back and forth for two days without resolution. Someone called Marcus had proposed three options and each one had been met with a separate objection from a separate person, producing a thread of escalating good-natured argument that had taken up approximately forty messages and resolved nothing.

He recognised other names as he scrolled. Priya. Sasha. A few he needed a moment to place. Some he remembered clearly and some existed only at the edge of his recall, faces he could produce but names that arrived a second after he expected them to.

The chat was currently discussing Thursday’s logistics. Time, location, whether the venue required booking in advance, whether anyone was driving or whether they were depending on rideshares. The tone was warm and slightly chaotic. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

He sat up slightly, propping himself against the arm of the sofa.

He typed his first message.

Steven has joined the group.

The notification appeared in the chat before he had a chance to type anything, which was mildly unfortunate timing. He had been about to compose something measured and unhurried. Instead he watched the chat register his arrival in real time.

The response was immediate.

James: STEVEN.

Callum: no way

Priya: wait is this actually him

James: mate where have you BEEN

Callum: two years Steven. two years.

Marcus: the man himself

Steven looked at the screen for a moment. Then he typed.

Long story. Lost my phone and the data went with it. I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain that for two years.

James: that’s it? That’s the whole thing?

More or less, Steven typed. Life got complicated on top of it. I’ll explain properly on Thursday if we’re actually doing this.

Callum: we’re doing it. Thursday. you’re coming.

I’m coming, Steven confirmed.

James: right. okay. I have about four hundred questions but I’ll save them.

Priya: same. also you look well based on your profile picture and I’m choosing to believe it

Steven smiled at that.

I’m doing well,* he typed. *Better than I’ve been in a long time.

Sasha: okay but we need details

James: Thursday, Sasha. Let the man breathe.

Callum: Steven we thought you’d moved away or something. James genuinely thought you’d gone to another city

James: I retract nothing. It was a reasonable conclusion.

Steven: I didn’t go anywhere. I was in Montrose the whole time.

James: Montrose. Right. Okay. Fine. Still.

The exchange had the exact tone he had been hoping for and slightly afraid of simultaneously. The warmth was there and genuine.

Steven looked at the messages flying around in the group chat for a while, contributing occasionally and reading the rest of it as it moved.

At some point the venue discussion resolved itself, a they decided on a bar and grill in Midtown that Callum vouched for and that no one could produce a specific objection to, which in a group chat was as close to unanimous agreement as you were ever going to get.

Thursday. Midtown. Seven o’clock.

He confirmed he’d be there, set the phone down on the cushion beside him, and lay back against the sofa again.

The tiredness was still there but it had shifted slightly, moved into the background by another feeling. It was the particular feeling of a door reopening that you had assumed was permanently closed, and finding that the room on the other side of it was more or less as you had left it.

He lay there for a while longer, looking at the ceiling.

Then his stomach made its position known in terms that couldn’t be ignored.

He pushed himself up from the sofa, walked to the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator.

He stood in front of it for a moment, taking stock of the ingredients he had available. He decided to make something simple that didn’t require much from him beyond the execution of it.

He settled on eggs. Scrambled, with butter and chives, on toasted sourdough.

He cracked four eggs into a bowl, whisked them with a fork, and set the pan on low heat. He worked through it without rushing, letting the eggs move slowly the way he preferred, folding them off the heat at the right moment and sliding them onto the toast while they were still just slightly underdone.

He carried the plate to the dining table and sat down.

The first bite confirmed what he already knew it would.

He ate slowly, looking out at the city through the window, and let the morning settle around him.

His phone buzzed from the sofa. He didn’t reach for it immediately. He finished the last of the toast first, then pushed back from the table and went to see what it was.

It was from the group chat and it was James, asking if he was still driving the same car.

Steven looked at the message for a moment, then typed back.

No. Upgraded.

James: to what

Aston Martin, Steven typed.

The chat went quiet for approximately four seconds.

Then James: okay we definitely need to talk on Wednesday.

Steven smiled, set the phone face down on the cushion, and went to wash the plate.