Richest Man: It All Started With My Rebate System-Chapter 64: The Get Together

After Steven had eaten breakfast, he spent the rest of the morning in the group chat.

The next morning, the conversation picked up overnight and hadn’t slowed down. James had been the one keeping it moving, which was exactly what Steven remembered about him. He had always been the energy in any room he was in, the person who filled silence as he always genuinely had something to say and didn’t see any reason to hold it back. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

The chat had moved through half a dozen topics since Steven had joined the previous morning. The Thursday venue had been confirmed and reconfirmed.

Someone had raised the question of whether to do a dinner beforehand and the debate had run for thirty messages before collapsing under its own weight.

Callum had posted a photo from their final year that Steven hadn’t seen in four years, and the reaction to it had occupied the chat for the better part of an hour.

Steven had contributed where it felt natural and read the rest without forcing himself into threads he didn’t have the context for.

There were conversations that had clearly been running for long before his arrival, in-jokes with histories he wasn’t fully across, references that landed without explanation for everyone else and sailed past him. He didn’t mind. He would catch up. That was what Thursday was for.

In the afternoon, he switched to the console and played until his eyes told him it was time to stop.

He ate dinner, cleaned up, and went to bed earlier than usual.

***

The next day passed in much the same way.

He trained with Raymond in the morning. The session was upper pull — back, biceps, rear delts — and Raymond pushed the load slightly higher than the previous sessions, which Steven registered in his lats and the back of his shoulders for the rest of the day in a way that was productive rather than painful.

He ate well after the session, took his time with it, and spent the afternoon between the group chat and the game.

Lena didn’t call and Steven didn’t call her. There was no topic that required it and he had no desire to manufacture one. Steven had never been one for small talks.

The conversation from Monday had ended in exactly the right place and he was content to let it sit there until the due diligence report arrived and gave them something real to discuss.

He read for a while in the evening, something he hadn’t done in years, working through the first few Chapters of a book he had downloaded on impulse from a reading app. He wasn’t sure yet whether he liked it. But the act of reading itself, unhurried, with no particular reason to stop, felt like something that belonged to the version of his life he was still in the process of building.

That night, he slept well.

***

The following day followed the same shape. Training in the morning. Food. Time with the game and the chat, then an evening that moved without any particular demand.

The one thing that broke the pattern arrived mid-afternoon, when his phone buzzed with a message from Fletcher.

"Mr. Craig — confirmation received from TikTok’s corporate partnership desk. Your account has been designated as a verified high-volume account effective immediately. Platform spending limits have been removed at the session level. Standard terms of service remain applicable. Let me know if anything else is needed. — JF"

Steven read the message, then set the phone down and looked at the ceiling for a moment.

The restriction that had been working against him since that first evening with the gifting sessions was gone. The platform ceiling that had capped each session, forced him into repetitive small transactions, and limited the base the system had to work with was no longer there.

He could move significantly more money through a single TikTok session now than he had been able to move across an entire evening of back-to-back recharges.

He made a note to test it properly, but not today.

He replied to Fletcher with a single line of thanks, set the phone on the coffee table, and picked up the controller.

***

Thursday finally arrived.

Steven’s morning followed its now-established pattern without variation. He was up before seven, in the car before half past, and through the entrance at LT Fitness with enough time to exchange a few words with Raymond before the session began.

Raymond ran him through the second lower body session of the week. The load was higher than Monday’s, the rest periods slightly shorter, and by the end of it Steven’s legs had the particular heavy, wrung-out quality that Raymond had told him early on was the correct feeling to be chasing. Productive fatigue.

"You’re adapting faster than most people do in the foundation phase," Raymond said, as Steven finished the last set, making a clinical observation.

"Is that unusual?" Steven asked.

Raymond looked at Steven for a moment with the particular attentiveness he brought to anything he was trying to understand properly. "Whatever you’re doing outside the gym, keep doing it. Sleep, food, recovery. It’s showing."

"Good to know," Steven said.

He showered, changed, and drove home.

***

The afternoon moved slowly with nothing much happening. Steven ate lunch, spent time in the group chat where the pre-Thursday energy had elevated the conversation into something closer to chaos — James had sent three separate voice notes in the span of an hour, each one louder than the last.

By four o’clock he had accepted that he wasn’t going to get anything meaningful done and set the controller down.

He sat on the sofa and looked at the city through the window.

He was looking forward to tonight in a way he hadn’t expected to. He had spent four years without these people, by circumstance, and the anticipation of walking back into a room where they existed felt different from what he had imagined when he thought about it abstractly.

Part of it was straightforward. He had missed them. Missing people was simple even when the circumstances around it weren’t.

But there was another part that sat alongside it. He was aware that the version of himself that these people had last known was not the version that would be walking through the door tonight.

The young man they had last seen had been eighteen, recently bereaved, already showing the strain of someone managing too much with too little. That was the last image they had. Whatever gaps they had filled in over two years of silence, they had been filling them in from that starting point.

He wasn’t worried about it. He wasn’t performing anything or trying to present a curated image of a life that was going well. It simply was going well, and that was the only version of himself he had to offer. But the gap between who they remembered and who would arrive was wide enough that he was aware of it.

He checked the time. Just past five.

He stood up, walked to the bedroom, and opened the wardrobe.

He looked at the options for a moment. The suits were too formal and he had no interest in arriving at a bar and grill in Midtown looking like he was coming from a board meeting.

The full casual end of the range felt like an undershoot. He wanted something in the middle. Smart causal.

He pulled out a pair of dark slim chinos and a white Oxford shirt. He added the quilted Burberry jacket in dark navy over the top, the same combination he had worn to Brennan’s, and decided it still worked.

He laced the white leather Burberry trainers, fastened the first wristwatch he had bought — not the Cartier, which was too much for a Thursday evening among old friends — and stood in front of the wardrobe mirror.

He looked good.

He turned away from the mirror, picked up his phone, car key fob, and key card from the side table, and walked to the front door.

The hallway was quiet. The elevator came immediately, the way it always did. He rode it down to the garage, his mind already running lightly over the evening ahead. James’s voice. Callum’s deadpan look that took new people at least an hour to calibrate to. Priya’s laugh, which he remembered being contagious. The things that time changed and the things it didn’t.

He stepped out into the garage, walked to the Aston Martin, and got in.

He started the engine, listened to it settle, and entered the address into the navigation system. Midtown. The bar and grill Callum had vouched for. Estimated arrival in eighteen minutes.

He pulled out of the space, drove up the ramp, and came out onto the evening street.

The city was in its early Thursday evening mood. The sky had gone to a deep amber at the edges, the streetlights coming on in sequence, the roads filling with the particular energy of a weekday evening finding its second wind. He drove calmly, letting the navigation guide him through the streets, and let his mind go quiet for the last stretch of the drive.

The bar and grill came into view on the right side of the road as the navigation announced the final turn. He signalled, pulled into the parking area adjacent to the building, and found a space toward the back without difficulty.

He cut the engine.

Through the front windows of the bar, he could already see people inside, movement and warm light. He couldn’t make out faces from here but the energy of the place was visible even from the car.

He sat for a moment with his hands resting on the wheel.

Two years.

He got out of the car, locked it, and walked toward the entrance.