“So are you two…”
Rather than answer, I looked to Sawyer. His hands were already busy buttering bread.
“The answer to that is kind of complicated,” he replied nonchalantly.
Sarah’s face scrunched, as her blonde eyebrows knitted together. It made her look even more like him.
“Bullshit,” she huffed. “Either you are or you aren’t. There’s nothing complicated about that.”
“Yes, but—”
“Don’t leave this poor young woman hanging, Sawyer,” his mother scolded him. “If this is the one you told me about—”
“He told you about me?” I couldn’t help but say.
Sarah turned to face me again, this time with a smile so pretty it was a little disarming.
“He’s talked about you nonstop, dear. In fact, he’s called me more over the past two weeks than he has in the past six months!”
“Mom…”
“How could you?” I elbowed him. “That’s terrible.”
“I know, right?” Sarah piled on. “First he goes traipsing all over the world, country after country, continent after continent. But now that he’s back? I hear from him even less than when he was, say, deep in Angola.”
“I was never ‘deep’ in Angola,” Sawyer protested. “We pulled into Luanda once, for a weekend, but—”
“Shush,” his mother hissed. “We girls are talking.”
She winked at me again, this time while holding a hand up to the side of her face so her son couldn’t see. I tried unsuccessfully to stifle a chuckle. Sarah, I could tell right away, was the type of person people were instantly drawn to.
“He told me you were pretty,” she went on, eying me up and down. “As usual, he was wrong. You’re stunning.”
“Umm... thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, thank your parents,” she smiled. “My son also mentioned you take care of animals. That you do volunteer work finding homes for them, down at a local shelter.”
She paused, expecting an answer. I nodded.
“That makes you kind-hearted,” Sarah went on. “And generous. And… what else did you call her? Confident? Independent? Emotionally mature?”
“Mom…”
“Supportive. Expressive. Affectionate, to the point of—”
“MOM!”
Sarah stopped, chuckled, and reached for her mostly empty glass of wine. With her other hand, she pulled the waiter over. A moment later, we’d all ordered some drinks.
“So I hear you’re a medical doctor.”
“No!” I nearly choked. “I’m a physical therapist.”
“But you heal people, right?”
“Sort of,” I shrugged. “I guess you could say I help them heal.”
“And you have a license?”
