The Love Hotel

Chapter 10

“This woman is your mother?” asked Rochelle. “What’s your mother doing locked up in a room like this, Bradley? What the hell is going on here? You had better have some good answers otherwise I am going to call the police, my contract be damned.”

“You probably have a lot of questions,” said Bradley. “And you are right to have so many questions. This is a very odd thing for anyone to see, especially someone that was not expecting it at all. Come, sit down. We should sit with her since she is lucid right now. I don’t think she is going to mind.”

Isabella was wandering around, clearly unaware that there were two people in the room with her. Rochelle eyed her apprehensively as she sat down. She didn’t know what she was getting into but she had a feeling that she was going to have to listen to a long story. She didn’t exactly mind, though. It was the kind of story that she would like to hear because it would involve all of the things that she had wanted to know after so long.

“So,” said Bradley, sitting down. “The first thing that you might be wondering is why my mother looks like this. I am thirty years old, yet my mother looks like she is about eighty. She isn’t. She is in her mid fifties. However, she has been through a lot, and the things that she has been through have taken a toll on her body as well as her mind. She is no longer the person that she had once been. No, now she is a shell of her former self. She is the type of person that needs to be taken care of. It all started when my father died. He killed himself, you see. He had always suffered from depression and when he finally took his life my mother went, for lack of a better word, crazy. She started to hurt herself, started to see things. She was okay for the most part and she was recovering, but her recovery was stunted by the fact that her brothers got in the way and made it difficult for her to be normal after all that had happened.”

“Her brothers?” asked Rochelle. “What do they have to do with anything?”

“Well,” said Bradley, “I was only six years old when my father died. Six years old is very young, and I did not really understand anything that was going on. The only thing that I really understood was that my mother was very sick and needed help. The only people that could help her now that my father was gone were her brothers. And they did not want to do that. They did not want her to become a burden on them financially even though they were all so rich. They ended up locking her away. They didn’t feed her, barely let her out at all. They turned her into their slave. They  made her work, telling her that if she wanted them to take care of her then she was going to have to put effort in and earn it. She was going to have to work for the care of her own brothers. Isn’t that utterly despicable? That was what was happening.”

Bradley sighed. Rochelle didn’t speak. She didn’t know what to say, as this was a very horrible story that he was telling her. At the same time, she did not want to interrupt his train of thought. She had a feeling that he had not told anyone this story in a very long time, and in the telling of this story he was getting some form of catharsis which was something that he sorely needed at this point in his life.

“So I did not know my mother,” said Bradley. “I was shipped off to boarding school and I even stayed there during my summer holidays. I started to forget that I had ever even had a mother. My uncles funded my education and hoped that I would not ask them about her. And I didn’t. I had been so young when all of this happened that I stopped asking questions very soon. But then, I remembered. I had a dream about her and everything came back to me. And so, ten years after all of this happened, when I was sixteen years old, I confronted my uncles and told them that I wanted to see my mother. They would not let it happen, and as soon as I turned eighteen they cut me off. Luckily, I had a large inheritance left to me from my father. I used that to establish my businesses and become a powerful man.

“And so, at the age of twenty, after already graduating with a degree two years earlier than most people manage to do it, I got myself a trustworthy housemaid and broke my mother out using the help of people that know how to do such things. I paid them handsomely for their efforts, of course, better than they had ever been paid in their lives. She did not know what was going on, of course, and the mental torture that her brothers had put her through had ended up completely messing her up. She had no idea what she was doing. She had no idea what was going on. She was completely out of it, and she remained so.

“My previous housemaid took care of her, but after ten years of doing it she simply couldn’t do it anymore. And so I set off to find someone else that would be able to take care of her, and I found you. You are so honest and caring and trustworthy that I just knew that you would be the right person for the job. I knew that you would be able to take care of my mother properly. And so I offered you the job. Initially, I just wanted you here one day a week. I wanted my mother to get used to the presence of someone she did not know in the home before I actually introduced you to her. She can always tell when there is someone she does not know in the home, that is why I never have any friends over. She is usually so quiet, but today something probably happened that made her feel uncomfortable in some way. It’s not your fault at all, rather it is something that was inevitable, something that I should have foreseen a long time ago. But all of that is beside the point. The point is that before you, the woman that you see, this is the reason that I have hired you.”

“So you want me to take care of your mother?” asked Rochelle. “You want me to make her comfortable, cook for her, clean her up and try to make it so that she can start to feel a little better?”

“That’s not all,” said Bradley. “It’s not that simple. It’s not just that I need you to take care of her. I will help you with that, of course, I will help you in any and every way I can, but at the end of the day I am going to need you to make the choice to keep her safe too. She is in a very difficult situation indeed, you see. She is in the kind of situation that no one wants to find themselves in.

“My uncles want her back in their custody. They want their slave back. They are so powerful that I cannot press any charges against them. They have an army of lawyers at their command. I am a very rich man, I know this, but I am not rich enough to go up against the likes of them. I am not rich enough to stand up to them and make them feel like they cannot do things like this anymore.