Chapter 68: Meeting With Mrs. Harriet... Again!
The morning moved at its own pace and Liam let it.
After the call with Arthur he closed the laptop and gave himself an hour away from anything that required strategic thinking. He made a proper breakfast — eggs, toast, sliced fruit — and ate it at the counter without his phone, without the laptop, without the background noise of plans being assembled. Just food and the quiet of his own apartment and the particular satisfaction of a man who had hung up on someone powerful and felt entirely fine about it.
Arthur would make calls. That was what men like Arthur did when they felt the ground shift — they reached for their network, reminded people of favours owed, positioned themselves before the story could be told without them. It was predictable and it was coming and Liam had already factored it in.
Which was exactly why today mattered.
He washed the dishes, dried them, put them away. Made the bed with the efficiency of someone who had done it the same way for years. Wiped down the kitchen counter. Small things, domestic things, the kind that imposed order on a morning that could otherwise drift into nothing.
He settled at the kitchen counter with his laptop and a second coffee and opened the document he’d started earlier — the firm framework, still rough, still more outline than plan. He worked through it properly this time. Startup costs broken into categories: licensing fees, office lease deposits, insurance, basic staffing for the first quarter. He pulled up commercial real estate listings for Seattle’s mid-tier business districts, not the premium addresses he’d come from, but respectable ones. Places that said established without saying extravagant.
He found three worth keeping.
He noted them without committing to anything, closed that tab, and opened another. Bar association requirements for registering a new practice entity in Washington State. He knew most of it already but read through the full list methodically, the way he approached anything that mattered — not relying on memory, checking every detail against the source. There were two documentation requirements he flagged that Mrs. Harriet’s letter of recommendation would directly address.
The pieces were there.
They just needed the right sequence.
He thought about Vanessa again while he was reading. She kept surfacing whether he invited her or not — sharp, capable, already familiar with his working style across three years of being on opposite sides of conference room tables. The Instagram follow still sat unanswered and she hadn’t followed it with a message, which was itself a form of intelligence. She understood how to wait. She knew what the follow communicated and had left it there deliberately, which meant she was either very patient or very confident.
Possibly both.
He’d deal with Vanessa after Mrs. Harriet was settled. One thing at a time.
He closed the laptop around midday and moved to the sofa with a book he’d been neglecting for two weeks — a dense history of American corporate law that was relevant to exactly what he was building and which he’d been meaning to return to since the night Sara’s video had gone up and reorganised his entire life without asking.
He read for ninety minutes without interruption.
When he set it down he felt settled in a way that screens didn’t produce — the particular clarity that comes from sustained, linear thought rather than the fractured attention of tabs and notifications.
He picked up his phone.
The text option was cleaner. Easier. Required nothing from either of them in terms of real-time response management. He typed an opening line, read it back, and deleted it.
"No."
He needed to hear her.
Not the words — words came from texts too. He needed the half-second before the words, the way a voice arrived before it was fully controlled. The micro-adjustments people made when a call caught them either expecting it or not. That information didn’t live in a message.
He called.
It rang twice.
She picked up on the third — fast, faster than professional courtesy required, which told him she’d seen the name and decided quickly.
"Liam." Composed, as always. But present underneath it. Alert in a way that wasn’t purely professional.
"Mrs. Harriet. I hope I’m not interrupting."
"Not at all." A brief pause. "I’ve been expecting to hear from you."
"Then I’ll keep it short." He moved to the window. "I have things developing over the next few days that are going to limit my availability significantly. If we’re meeting again, today is the window on my end. Otherwise we’re looking at next week."
The pause that followed was shorter than any pause she’d produced in his presence before.
"Today works," she said.
No deliberation, no calendar consultation, no suggestion of competing obligations that needed rearranging. A clean, immediate yes from a woman who had made the decision before he finished the sentence.
"Eight o’clock?" Liam said.
"Eight is fine."
"I’ll send you the details."
"Liam." A beat. The kind that carries something the speaker hasn’t fully decided to attach words to yet. "Come alone."
"I remember," he said.
The call ended.
He stood at the window and let the shape of it settle. She had picked up fast. Agreed without friction. No counter-suggestion, no renegotiation. A woman like Harriet Harlan didn’t clear her evening at eight PM on the same day for a purely contractual conversation. Arthur had rattled something loose and she was moving before he could get there first.
Which meant Liam was sitting on more leverage than he’d started the morning with.
He opened a reservation app. Found a place that suited — quiet, considered, intimate without being presumptuous. Booked a corner table for two and sent her the name and address in a single message.
Her reply came back in under a minute.
[Mrs. Harriet: See you then.
He put the phone down and went to his wardrobe.
Charcoal suit. White shirt. No tie. He laid it on the bed and stepped back.
Clean. Considered. The outfit of a man who had arrived at this meeting entirely on his own terms.
He left it there and went to make lunch.
Eight o’clock would come when it came.