Accidentally Aphrodite - Dakota Cassidy Page 0,58

to find her mother and everyone gathered at the table. Steaming bowls of food lined the center, just like the first night she’d come home after her initial bout with matchmaking.

Seeing all these people crammed into her apartment did exactly what it had the first night she’d witnessed it.

It made her smile. Filled her with warmth and friendship.

Until her mother just couldn’t let well enough alone.

As Archibald prepared to slice the roast—a roast surrounded by fat red new potatoes, roasted carrots so orange they glistened under the glow of the candles; a roast that looked as though it had been pulled from the pages of a cooking magazine—he struggled with Quinn’s one and only knife. A dull one that should have been sharpened long ago.

“So much for letting it sit,” her mother said with a sneer of ugly glee.

Nina nudged Helen with a roll of her eyes. “Aw, c’mon, Mini-Mom. Didn’t we just talk about this? Put your napkin in your lap, sit quietly, and behave.”

Helen shrugged, tugging on the ends of her shortly bobbed hair. “I’m just making mention, men know nothing…”

Her mother’s voice trailed off then, becoming a muted babble of sound. A sound that Quinn could no longer bear—and that’s when something inside her snapped.

The break was almost physical, cracking in her ears when she popped up out of her chair and pointed at her mother. “Get out!”

There was a hushed silence that followed, painful and without even one gasp.

Helen looked up at her. “Excuse me, young lady?”

Quinn pushed her chair out and grabbed the back of her mother’s, dragging it from the table. “I said get out! Get out now. Take your anger and your man-hate and your fury-filled rants about anything and everything you touch and quit shitting all over my life!”

Nina was the first to rise, putting a hand on Quinn’s shoulder and squeezing so hard, she almost buckled. “Kiddo, chill. Think about this.”

But Quinn brushed Nina’s hand from her shoulder, her own shaking. “No! No more thinking, Nina! No more endless, ungrateful, angry, hateful words! These people are here to help me, Mom. Me, during one of the hardest things I’ve ever gone through. But you wouldn’t know that because you didn’t even ask me how I was. Not from the moment you put your foot over the threshold of my home. They put their families, their children, their lives on hold just to help me, and I will not have you taking unfair potshots at them because you hate your life and men and an endless assortment of things I can’t even keep track of anymore. This is my home. Mine, and I don’t want it filled with your vitriol! Now, get—out!” she roared, stomping toward the door and opening it with a harsh yank.

For the first time in Helen Morris’s life, she didn’t say anything. She gathered her purse and her coat, thin-lipped and a face full of fury, and leave she did.

To the stunned surprise of everyone in the room.

Chapter 11

Quinn gasped for breath as she hung on to the doorknob and slammed the door behind her mother’s retreating form.

She closed her eyes, letting what she’d just done wash over her in wave after wave of sadness.

Khristos approached her first, his tall frame blocking everyone else out. He brushed the hair from her eyes.

But she shook her head, reaching for her own coat on the rack by the door, tears swelling in her eyes, her throat threatening to close up. “Don’t. I just can’t right now. I need…time. Just a little. Please.”

Nina dug Quinn’s phone out of her purse and put it in her hand as Marty gently wrapped a scarf around her neck and Wanda tucked her gloves in the pocket of her jacket. “Call. Call if you need me—or us,” Nina said. “We’re never far behind.”

She took one last look at Khristos before she ran up the stairs and broke into a light jog, ignoring her still sore ankle, ignoring the people she almost crashed into, ignoring everything but the need to flee her mother’s oppressive hatred.

As her lungs began to burn, and her foot began to throb, she slowed down near one of her favorite parks where a swing set sat, abandoned in light of the freezing weather and hour of the day.

A sob finally escaped her lips when she sat on the swing—one of the deepest sorrows she’d ever experienced. Her mother was toxic, unable to climb out of her pit of anguish mired in hatred,