Page 184 of Modern Romance May 2026 Books 5-8
He’d considered rescinding funding for her mother’s stay in Mykonos, but it felt a step too far. He’d have a discussion with Maria’s case manager regarding her current status and go from there. He hoped Ari choked on the help she was forced to take.
But he could not worry about that now. He had his own demons to fight.
The plane could not touch down near enough to Anovol to suit Zervou. He would have to drive nearly an hour to reach his mother. An hour of time spent thinking, stewing and dreading what his future looked like now that Ari would not be in it.
He supposed the one positive there was that it kept him from thinking about his mother.
Until his car pulled up to the tiny house—a cottage really. It was well-kept. He’d made certain of that whether she’d liked it or not. The nurse was paid by him, after all, so if she noted a leak in the roof or issues with the plumbing, she informed him. And he sent someone along to fix it, with instructions to ignore whatever protests his mother put up. If she got too insistent, he worked with the nurse to ensure Mother was in the village shopping when the repairs needed to be done.
Otherwise she would live in a hovel. Even with his grandmother, she would suffer. Just to fucking suffer.
He pounded on the door and waited for an answer. When the door creaked open, it was not a nurse, but his mother who answered.
Of course, she must do everything herself.
Lines sat heavy on her face. She was too thin. Always too thin. But her dark eyes registered something akin to relief to mix with the surprise. “Zervou,” she greeted. Her mouth curved—it was not a smile. He’d long since believed the gravity of his father’s death did not allow his mother to smile. But it was some expression of happiness. “You have come.”
“Not to hold anyone’s hand. To handle the arrangements,” he told her tersely. “Is the head nurse available? I’d like to speak with her.” He moved past his mother into the tiny, cramped kitchen. Everything neat as a pin.
His mother would have it no other way. She would have scrubbed that floor on her hands and knees after every draining day.
“I told you that I did not require yourassistance. I simply thought—”
“You thought I might like to scrape myself over the coals with you. I do not. What is the nurse’s name again? Penelope, wasn’t it?” He would move through the small amount of rooms until he found her. “Probably deserves a raise,” he muttered to himself.
“Yes, throw money at it. That is always your answer, is it not?”
He stopped on a dime. Turned to face his mother. She had always been so disdainful of the thing he had worked so hard to do. She had never once taken it as it was intended. To help. To ease. He had built his wealth himself, and she had no use for it.No one does.
“The money you resent so much has eased your life, your burdens,” he told her coldly. “It could do more, help more, if you would let it.” This was always the conversation, the argument. It never changed. No matter how old he got, how much he had, how hard he tried, they always ended up right back here.
He should never have come. Why had he let his anger eradicate that clear truth?
“Yes, it is my fault for wanting more from you.”
He snorted his derision. Childish, perhaps, but it was all he had in the moment. “You wantnothingfrom me.”
He had never said that. Never truly let himself think it, but it was true. Starker in this moment because he was forced to realize… Ari wasnotlike his mother. She had taken help, comfort. Offered the same right back. Not in everything, no, but in some things. In the emotional things.
He shook that thought away. This wasn’t about Ariadne. It was about his mother. But in the contrast, he saw things clearer. “You want nothing from anyone. You want to be alone in your misery and martyrdom.”
Mother gathered herself, straightened shoulders and lifted chin. She looked up at him with that icy glare he recognized so well from a childhood spent begging her to let someone, anyone, help.
Except then he’d been shorter than her, weaker than her. Desperate for her love, her comfort, when his entire world had been upended.
But she’d only seen her world. Then. Now. Amazing that even being a grown man could not fix this.
“I did notchoosemisery. Misery was done to me. I suppose you could never love so deeply that such a loss would leave a mark,” Mother said with such icy disdain.
Love. What was love but a disease? The loss of it—always inevitable—had turned his mother into this. And him into an aching wound he couldn’t seem to stop. Because here he was dealing with his mother and thinking of Ari.
But he refused to think of Ari here. He refused to think of love, because it had beenenjoyment. It had been simple. It had been give and receive.
Is that not what you want from love?
Didn’t matter. He hadn’t come here for any give or take. He’d come to ensure his grandmother’s move into the palliative care center some fifty kilometers away.
“I will move her,” his mother said, hurrying in front of him, like she would block his way. “I will handle this. You need do nothing except say your goodbyes.”
