I stared at her opposite me. She’d worn an all-white pantsuit, her strawberry blonde hair pulled back in perfect old Hollywood swirls and waves beneath the wide-brim white sunhat on her head.
Glamorous and proper with a well-crafted smile, that was my mother. All in an attempt to hide her true nature:
A jealous bitch.
“Work,” I replied, sitting back in the chair and crossing my ankle over my knee. “We have a large project going on right now.”
Aphrodite, or Phoebe as she was calling herself these days when she hosted self-love retreats and yoga-meditation havens for corporate outings, bachelorette parties, or random weekends through the year, whipped off her black cat-eye sunglasses and laid them on the table. She looked apprehensively in my direction, blue eyes appearing icy pale against her porcelain skin in the morning beach light.
“It’s more than that,” she said. “I’m your mother. I know these things. Is it a girl?”
“Do you genuinely expect me to discuss my love life with you?” I asked before taking a sip of my Bloody Mary.
“You run a dating app, sweetheart. I expect you have quite a few woman problems, and I can’t imagine the time it would take to go through all of them,” she sighed. “Why are you so hostile? What have I done this time?”
My mouth twisted as I stared at her, remembering my mother’s jealousy of Psyche’s beauty the first time and the way men turned to worship her instead of Aphrodite. She’d even sent me to ‘take care of Psyche’ as she’d done with so many things before, and since then.
Of course, that job had backfired in the best way, and I’d ended up finding my soulmate.
She wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t ordinarily hostile with her. We had actually had an amicable relationship over the last few centuries. But ever since talking to Persephone and realizing that Psyche had been erased from our history, my suspicion of Mother had grown.
Today, I was so bottled up with anticipated rage at what I was about to ask her that I couldn’t help myself. I tried to breathe and calm myself before the ugly monster I had once been portrayed as made its way to the surface.
“There’s something I want to ask you about,” I said.
She blotted her mouth and dropped the napkin. “Here I thought you just missed me,” she said with a bat of her lashes. “Fine. What is it? What has you so bent out of shape?”
“What is the last thing you remember about Psyche?”
Aphrodite choked on her mimosa. I didn’t say anything as she continued to cough, causing a scene almost as she looked around us and people stared to make sure she was okay. She brushed one man off who stood to check on her, and the man glared at me as though I’d done something wrong by not saying anything as she choked and sputtered.
I knew better.
“Are you finished?” I asked as she fanned her face and smiled at the other patrons, nodding to a few to assure them she was okay.
“My gods,” she said with nervous laughter. “Champagne up the nose. Never a good—are you out of your mind?”
Her persona changed in a flash. Everyone around us seemed not to hear the snap in her facade, and were suddenly so intrigued by the conversation around them that they forgot they’d just been concerned about her. She was leaning over the table, her voice a hiss, nostrils flared and a wild look in her dilated eyes.
“How dare you bring up that girl now,” she snapped. “After all these centuries. I don’t care how much she may have proved her love, the fact is she betrayed you. And then sheleftyou. And you expect me to do what, exactly?“
“What do you mean she left me?” I asked, sitting up in my seat.
“She ran away,” she said. “And I held your bleeding heart foryearsafter while you spent every countless hour trying to find her.”
My heart began to ache. I didn’t remember it. I barely remembered our time together, much less the pain of her disappearance, and if she had actually ran away?
That kind of pain… I should have felt it.
“Why don’t I remember?” I asked.
Aphrodite hesitated. She stared at me, her lips pressed into a thin line, and she sat back in her seat. That was a look I knew, and my fists curled at the sight of it.
“Mother…”
“I did what I had to,” she seethed. “I did what was needed to protect you from that pain.”
“What did you do?”
