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“I went there to completely ream her out for it, and then I just,” I paused turning to look at her. Gray eyes sparked with sunshine yellow drank me in with round surprise. I smirked. “I kind of got tangled up.”

“Oh,” Mom put a hand to her chest, looking between us with a gooey, sentimental expression. “That is absolutely precious.”

Ruth kept her eyes glued to me for a beat. Then, shaking herself loose from her thoughts, she turned back to my mom. “Yeah. I guess you could say we sort of stumbled into this thing.”

“I love it,” Mom grinned.

The waiter came and took our drink orders. With the way my mom was eying Ruth—there was a definite baby-hungry glint there—I ordered an Old Fashioned. My dad gave me a reproving eyebrow raise over his glasses, which I studiously ignored. And truly, by the time our catch-of-the-day meal arrived, I was glad for the drink. It took impossible amounts of patience to run interference between Ruth and my mom’s probing questions.

“How old are you?” Mom asked.

Ruth hesitated. “Well… twenty-eight. Just last month.”

Mom made a surprised sound. “So young for a professional doctor. Was that by choice?”

“Mom,” I groaned. I finished off my drink, grateful for the buzz in my head. It had been a hot minute since I’d had a real drink. “Let her breathe.”

“I’m just asking,” Mom said with an unconvincing attempt at an innocent expression.

Dad made a sound of appreciation after taking a bite of the ceviche. “This is fantastic. Have you tried this?”

Ruth looked massively uncomfortable. It almost made me laugh, but I silently encouraged her to take a bite. She did, and then nodding, she said, “Oh, yeah. It’s really good. Very… toothsome.”

I snorted, coughing out ceviche. I grabbed for my napkin and noticed that my dad was trying not to laugh, and my mom was looking at Ruth like she’d never seen anyone more adorable in her life. “Sorry,” I choked.

Ruth sank her teeth into her bottom lip after swallowing. “I mean… it’s… salty.”

I laughed again, this time, not bothering to hide it. “Guys, I’m pretty sure Ruth hates the ceviche.”

Mom and Dad laughed in tandem, and then my mom reached across the table to pat Ruth’s hand. “Love, you don’t have to like the food. We promise you won’t offend us.”

Ruth grimaced apologetically. “I have a thing about raw meat. I mean, I know it’s not really raw,” she rushed to add, straightening. “But I can’t seem to convince my brain of that.”

“The nerve,” I murmured with heavy sarcasm, angling a smile down to her.

Ruth shot me a half-irritated, half-amused look in return.

“Why didn’t you say so?” Dad asked. “We can order something else.”

“No, no,” Ruth held up her hands. “I’m fine. Really. Cal fed me a ton of food on the way here,” she added with genuine amusement.

I chuckled. “You were eating chips for lunch when I found you.”

“Snooty,” she shot back with an eyebrow twitch.

“I’m a doctor. We’re all snooty.”

“I’m a doctor too,” she said before taking a sip of her water. “I guess some of us are just better behaved.”

“You earned that,” Mom said with a point of her fork.

I grimaced through another smile. “I did.”

After that, Ruth happily chatted with my mom about the sea lions in Newport, which my parents were usually proud to inform people about, and I proved that I truly wasn’t any smarter than Speed Date Ruth when I ordered another Old Fashioned and realized a little too late that my head was swimming.

“Should we go to the pier and get a closer look at the sea lions?” my mom suggested.

Ruth agreed readily, and after we paid—and my dad tipped with cash because he was nine million years old—we walked out onto the wood balcony that had a stairwell leading down to the pier. The sun had dipped almost all the way behind the horizon,and blue swatches of darkness stretched out from the railing and the glowing building behind us. I tried not to think about how tilted the world had gone. I’d only had two drinks. What the hell?