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Lia wasn’t surprised to see her mother standing in the doorway. But the outfit...that did catch her off guard. Her mother, usually dressed to the eights if not the nines, was wearing black yoga bottoms and a white T-shirt.
“What are you doing, Mum? Why are you dressed like that? Did you lose a bet?”
She had concerns this was a bizarre sex thing involving her father, but she was too curious not to ask.
“I thought if I put on exercise clothes I might accidentally do some exercise.”
“Exercise? What happened? You aren’t dying, are you?”
“I stepped on the scale.” Mum patted Lia on her cheek. “Word of advice—stay young as long as possible, then immediately get old. Skip right over being middle-aged. It’s hell on the metabolism.”
“Don’t be melodramatic, Mum. You’re beautiful and you know it. Men throw themselves at you all the time.”
She snorted a laugh. “They throw themselves at your father’s bank account and hit me on the way there.” Lia didn’t believe that for one second but she didn’t say anything. “So...are we seeing our Greek god tonight?”
“We are,” Lia said. “But if you’re here to interrogate me about him, you know where the door is.”
“Oh, fine. I’ll keep my questions to myself. Although... I do like him for you.”
“I like him for me, too,” she confessed. She smiled as she stretched her back. Her mother came and stood behind her sewing stool and rested her chin on Lia’s shoulder. She peered at Lia’s tapestry.
“My daughter is very talented,” Mum said. “Sometimes I wonder how you’re mine. I can’t sew on a button.”
Lia rolled her eyes but not unkindly.
“You could if you practiced,” she said, and then realized she sounded exactly like someone she knew—her own mother. Her mum ignored that comment and started nosing through the books on her side table.
“What’s all this?” she asked. “Planning a new tapestry?”
“Maybe,” Lia said, though that wasn’t true. But she was hardly going to tell her mother she’d been thinking about other erotic adventures she wanted to go on with August.
“Poseidon and Aethra,” her mother said, looking at the page Lia had left open on her sewing table. “I know Poseidon, but who was Aethra?”
“The mother of Theseus,” Lia said.
“Ah, you know better than that,” her mother said. “Who wasshe? Not who did she give birth to or who did she marry. Believe it or not, I’d had my own life and adventures before I met your father and you were born. Some that would turn your hair white.”
“I actually do believe that, Mum. You have adventuresnowthat turn my hair white. This is a wig.”
“It’s flattering.” Her mother tugged a curl of Lia’s hair. “Who was Aethra?”
Of course Mum wasn’t going to let it go.
“She was...a mystery,” Lia said. “She’s known for having had sex with her husband and a god in the same night and being impregnated, somehow, by both of them. That’s the story I was reading.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. I assume Poseidon was the god? Who was the husband?”
“A king named Aegeus. He came to visit her father, King Pittheus. Aethra’s fiancé had just been exiled from the country for murder. Pittheus must have wanted to foist her off on someone else, fast. He got King Aegeus pissed on undiluted wine and sent him to his daughter’s bedroom to shag and sleep.”
“Parenting was very different in those days,” her mother said.
“Mum, you gave me a vibrator for my eighteenth birthday.”
“There wasn’t a drunk king attached to it.”
“Anyway...” Lia continued. “King Aegeus and Aethra slept together. Maybe they hit it off so well because they both had names starting withAe. Whatever it was, they shagged and fell asleep after. They were sound asleep in bed when the goddess Athena appeared and woke Aethra. She said Aethra needed to hie herself over to the Temple of Sphaeria. Why? Athena didn’t specify. But Aethra went, presumably after cleaning the royal sperm off her legs.”
“A wet flannel works best,” her mother said. Lia ignored that comment.
