I failed my mother and sister, Returned as a Billionaire

CHAPTER 4

A small, almost playful look crossed her face despite everything.

"And also, don't make me wait too long, Kevin Hale. I have been waiting three years already. Your future wife is not a patient woman.”

He nodded once, and then he was moving.

The streets blurred past him. He ran when his legs let him and walked fast when they wouldn't, and the whole way there the only thought in his skull was a single word beating like a second pulse. Mom. Mom. Mom.

He reached the house in forty minutes. Olivia's house. 

The house his money had put the down payment on, the house his mother had scrubbed the floors of when Olivia was too busy building her empire to notice the woman on her knees in the kitchen.

The front door was unlocked.

The living room smelled like lavender candles and new leather, and the television was playing something loud and stupid. 

Olivia's mother was sitting on the white couch in a silk robe, spooning high-end collagen supplements into a crystal glass. 

The kind that cost three hundred dollars a jar. The kind Kevin's mother could never afford because every dollar she ever earned went into someone else's mouth.

"Oh, look who crawled in." Mrs. Reed did not bother turning her head. She stirred her drink with a long silver spoon and sighed like a woman who had just discovered a stain on her favorite tablecloth. "The jailbird. I told Olivia to change the locks. But does anyone ever listen to me? No."

"Where is my mother?"

"Your mother." She laughed, a wet, lazy sound that sat in the back of her throat like phlegm. "That old cockroach? She's in the back somewhere. I stopped checking days ago. The stench from that room is enough to make a person vomit. I told the maid not to go near it. I am not paying someone to clean up after a dying street dog."

Kevin's chest locked up so tight he could not breathe for two full seconds.

From the corner of the room, a young man in designer sweatpants and a headset glanced up from his gaming chair without pausing his match. Tyler Reed. Olivia's younger brother. Twenty-two years old, never worked a day in his life, and soft in every place a man should be hard.

"Relax, bro." Tyler popped a chip into his mouth and chewed with his lips open. "She's just an old woman. Old women die. That's literally what they do. Save yourself the hospital bill and just let nature handle it. When she finally croaks, I will call someone to drag her out. We can wrap her in the tarp from the garage. Same one we used for the dead raccoon last spring."

"She is a human being," Kevin's voice came out low, almost a whisper, the kind of quiet that comes right before something breaks.

"Is she, though?" Mrs. Reed finally turned to look at him, and her face held the same expression a woman wears when she finds an ant in her sugar bowl. "Because from where I am sitting, she looks more like a stray cat that wandered in and forgot to leave. I have seen healthier animals at the pound, Kevin. At least those ones get put down. Yours just keeps hanging on. Stubborn old thing."

"You fed her, right?" Kevin's voice was shaking now. "You gave her medicine. You at least let her sleep in a bed."

Tyler snorted without looking up from his screen. "A bed? Bro, we don't even let the gardener's dog sleep inside. Why would we waste a bed on her? She has a corner. She has a blanket. What more does a woman like that need? She should be grateful we did not throw her out on the curb with the recycling."

"She's my mother."

"And that is your problem." Mrs. Reed took a long sip from her glass. "Not mine. Not Olivia's. Your mother is a burden, Kevin. She always was. A whiny, needy, worthless little flea that attached herself to my daughter's life and sucked whatever she could. I told Olivia from the start, marrying you was like adopting a stray mutt and getting the fleas for free."

Kevin controlled his anger, and  walked past both of them without another word.

He ran to the storage room at the end of the hallway, behind the water heater, in a space no bigger than a closet. 

The door was half open, and the smell hit him before the light did. Rot and sweat and something sour that told him infection had already set in somewhere beneath the skin.

His mother was lying on the bare concrete floor with one thin blanket twisted around her waist. 

Her eyes were closed. Her skin burned to the touch when he knelt beside her and put his hand against her forehead. Her legs were swollen and cracked, the bedsores deep enough that the flesh around them had gone dark and soft, leaking fluid into the filth beneath her.

She had not been moved in days. Maybe longer.

"Mom." His voice broke on the single word. "Mom, I'm here. I'm here now."

She did not open her eyes.

He felt like a loser at that time, like something heavy had been put on his chest.

HOW COULD DO THIS TO HER?