The M.I.L.F Rebate System: Every Woman I Spoil Makes Me Richer!

Chapter 89: Mrs. Harriet’s Busy Day! [FIXED!]

Harriet Harlan’s morning had started at 6:45 AM because she had a very busy day ahead of her. However, this didn’t make a difference nonetheless as she usually wakes up early regardless.

Not because it needed to — because it always did. The alarm was a formality she maintained more out of discipline than necessity, her body having long since decided that sleep beyond a certain hour was an indulgence the day hadn’t earned. She was dressed and reviewed before 7:30 AM, her first call taken from the back of the Ghost while the driver navigated morning traffic with the utter competence she paid him specifically for. He drove with a certain calm that earned him this position as she could easily have hired a much younger driver but the etiquette he had shown was gotten from years of service.

The first meeting was in Bellevue. Corporate restructuring consultation for a client the firm had held for eleven years — the kind of relationship that required her presence rather than a delegate, the kind that generated the revenue that kept Arthur’s more erratic decisions from becoming existential problems for the firm.

Mrs. Harriet handled everything with pose and grace, she had done this basically her whole life.

She handled it in ninety minutes. Clean, precise, the client leaving satisfied and her leaving with three action items she had already mentally distributed to the appropriate people before the car door closed behind her.

Mrs. Harriet didn’t look tired or exhausted nonetheless as the day was just getting started as she had a lot to cover right now.

The second meeting was downtown. A lunch that was functionally a negotiation dressed in social clothing — the other party believing the informality of the setting gave them an advantage, which was an assumption she had learned to use rather than correct.

She ate well, said less than they expected, and left with better terms than she’d arrived hoping for. This was the professionalism of Mrs. Harriet, she knew the words to use and when to be quiet to let the clients do all the talking as most of them liked the sound of their own voice.

She allowed them to talk so they could feel smarter than they were, their ego had to be satisfied after all.

She did not break a sweat at any point, even when things didn’t look like they would go in her favor.

This was simply another Tuesday to her.

-

The car moved through the early afternoon streets and Harriet sat with her tablet, working through correspondence that had accumulated during the morning’s back-to-back schedule.

Her assistant had flagged three items as urgent.

One was. The other two were urgent in the sense when things became urgent when the person prioritizing them lacked the perspective to distinguish between important and immediate.

She handled the genuine one and sent brief replies to the other two as it didn’t require her full attention.

Arthur surfaced in her mind, as he had been surfacing with increasing regularity over the past week.

However, it wasn’t because she was interested in him in that sense but simply found him fascinating.

Arthur was making inquiries. She knew this because she had her own way of gathering information and keeping tabs with most things that happened inside the firm’s internal ecosystem — not through direct information but through the particular texture of silence that surrounded certain topics when she entered rooms.

People who worked for Arthur behaved differently around her than they had six months ago. The difference was small and carefully managed but she had spent fifteen years reading rooms professionally and small differences were her speciality.

Arthur’s position was constrained and he knew it. Whatever moves he was making, he was making them within the boundary of the fact that she was married to his brother — a boundary he could approach but not cross without consequences that extended well beyond the firm. That didn’t make him harmless. Constrained men with resources and wounded pride were a specific kind of problem.

She thought about calling her husband but dismissed it.

Richard would involve himself in a way that resolved the Arthur problem and created three others, and she wasn’t ready to introduce that variable into an already complex equation.

She thought about Liam.

His message sat unanswered in her phone — we need to meet sooner than planned, something has come up — and she had left it unanswered deliberately.

Not because she was avoiding it but because she was thinking about what it meant that he had sent it and what it meant about how much he already knew.

He was too sharp to manage through silence for long. She understood that.

"Change the route," she told the driver. "I need to make a stop first."

-

The agency occupied the ground floor of an unremarkable building in Capitol Hill — the frontage communicated nothing about the business conducted inside, which was the point. The Ghost pulled up outside and Harriet checked her watch.

She was working with a limited time frame and knew that she only had five minutes to spare right now.

Ninety seconds later the man emerged.

He was mid-forties, compact, the kind of face that didn’t stay in memory as he had a very forgettable face.

He wore a jacket that had never been interesting and carried a file folder under his arm like some secret agent transporting routine paperwork rather than commissioned research.

He got into the car without further ado.

The driver raised the privacy partition without being asked.

"Do you have everything?" Harriet said.

"Everything you requested." He placed the folder on the seat between them.

"Full background. Financial history, professional record, personal associations, current activity over the past thirty days."

She opened it.

Liam’s face looked back at her from a surveillance photograph taken outside what appeared to be a restaurant. Candid, recent. He looked, she noted without intending to note it, entirely at ease.

"Summary," she said, turning the page.

"Clean professional record. Exceptional litigation history — the win rate is verified, not inflated. No criminal background, no civil suits against him personally." The man’s voice was neutral and efficient. "Financially he was stable until the termination. Current account activity shows incoming deposits that don’t match his former salary profile."

She looked up. "Meaning?"

"Meaning he has more money currently than his employment history would suggest. The source isn’t immediately traceable through standard channels. It could be investments, could be family money, could be something else." A pause. "He’s been active. Gym membership, restaurant visits, retail purchases. Not the behaviour of a man under financial stress."

Harriet looked at the page for a moment.

"Personal associations?"

"Two primary female contacts with regular interaction. One male contact, close — appears to be a longtime friend." He paused. "Nothing that creates obvious leverage."

"I’m not looking for leverage," she was quick to correct him.

The man accepted this without comment, which was why she used him.

"The termination," she said. "Did you find anything on the origin of the decision?"

He reached over and turned to a page toward the back of the folder. "The letter was processed through Arthur Harlan’s personal assistant. Not through standard HR channels. The legal review that would normally precede a senior associate termination wasn’t completed."

Harriet looked at the page.

She had suspected this. Suspicion and documentation were different things.

She now had irrefutable proof.

"Thank you," she said.

The man nodded, opened the car door, and was gone in the same unremarkable way he had arrived.

Harriet sat alone in the back of the Ghost with the folder open on her lap and the privacy partition still raised and the city moving past the tinted windows at its indifferent pace.

She looked at Liam’s photograph again.

Incoming deposits that don’t match his former salary profile.

She put that away and turned to the page about Arthur.

The decision to terminate Liam had bypassed every standard process the firm had in place.

Arthur had moved fast and without authorisation and had done it in a way that had left the firm exposed and this was the liability Liam had walked into The Metropolitan Grill prepared to exploit.

Which meant Arthur had a reason beyond the stated one.

She closed the folder.

"Continue to the firm," she told the driver.

She had a meeting this afternoon and, it appeared, considerably more to think about than she had started the morning with.