MY MOTHER'S HOME IS a small, unseeming building of sun-dried clay and red roof tiles. Built, like most of the houses here, around a central courtyard, it's intertwined with our neighbors' vineyards, the sole building in a sea of green vines. They seem to have ripe fruits year-round, and the scent of grapes half-baking under the hot sun always lingers at the back of your throat. It's situated far enough from the water that you'd have to climb to the roof to see it, but you always know it's there by the roar of the sea and the rank of all that saltwater and fresh fish.

I find her inside, sitting in front of the hearth, weaving. During this time of year, it goes unlit more often than not. Today is no exception. All it is is gray ash and old blackened logs.

"Mom?"

She startles and turns to look at me, cheeks gaunt and eyes hollow, movements slow. Her skin is loose against her skeletal frame. She hasn't been eating enough.

"Antigone? Is that you?"

A dam breaks inside of me. My mother, my mother, my mother. There'd been a part of me convinced I'd never see her again.

Tears gushing out, I throw my arms around her and bury and bury my face in her neck. The hug is of the sorts that blocks out everything else around you, when all there is is you and the person that you're hugging.

"Oh, baby. Oh, my baby. Oh, my sweet girl." She rocks me side to side, rubbing her hands against my bare arms, crying. "Where the hell have you been?"

So much has changed since the last time I saw her and yet everything is still exactly the same, somehow. Her hair is the same, her eyes are the same. The way she hugs is the same.

"Let's sit." I gesture at the foot of the hearth. Both of us are still sniffling. "It's a—it's a long story."

***

"I NEED YOUR HELP."

I finish my story with this statement, this plea. I don't know what I'm doing. Part of me still feels like a child, so young and so inexperienced, blindly fumbling through what I have to do with no real grasp of what's going on.

"Of course, sweetie." My mother grabs both of my hands and holds them tight. "Anything for you."

"So Apollo thinks that either Ezra, Marisol, or Dahlia is his child. We've already ruled Ezra out, since he's my—he's my brother." The word lays strange against my tongue. "It's either Marisol or Dahlia. It has to be. He told me that I have three days to figure out which one it is, and kill them, but I—Mom, I can't. So I told him that I'd prove to him that neither of them are his child. And I'm going to—I'm going to do something. I'll figure out another way, I don't know. There has to be a way out of this where no one dies. But I need your help, I don't know what to do, I don't know what I'm doing."

"I know where Evadne lives." Evadne, the mother of Apollo's bastard child. My own mother smiles softly at me, just the tips of her lips pushing upwards, rubbing her thumbs over mine. "We can start with her."