Ruthie was the only person I wished was here. I wished she was wearing a forest green silk dress, her hair long and in the kind of natural curls people pay good money for. Though, if she were here—on earth, I mean, not at this party—my life would probably be entirely different. Who knows what decisions I would have made—we would have made—if she came home that night.

“You look incredible.” I feel Graham’s arm slide across my back and down my waist before I see him sidle up to me and pull me against him. Hard. Suspiciously hard.

I swallow the memory of Ruthie. I’m here. She’s not. She’ll never be.

“Sorry I’m late.” He smiles and eyes me like he wants to pull me into the nearest closet and rip my jumpsuit right off.

“Worth it.”

I squirm out of his grip and give him a kiss, long and deep, tasting him to see if my hunch was right. I break it off when an embarrassing and pathetic aww reverberates through the crowd from anyone within walking distance. We’re not Duggars. This was hardly the most exciting or passionate thing we’ve done.

The second I step away, looking up at my fiancé with the doe-eyed smile everyone in the room expects me to be wearing, I know I was right. He’d been drinking. I could tell from the second he touched me—a little too confident, too possessive, something only I would notice—but I needed the confirmation from a kiss. I could taste the bourbon. He didn’t even try to hide it.

“Where have you been?” I hear Ruthie’s voice echo in the back of my mind, the darkness of the small, cold bathroom creeping over me like a hurricane, slow and steady, until Lena crashes into me with a hug, and I realize it was she who’d said that, not my dead best friend in my own mind.

Lena, of course, looks better than I ever could. Lena is effortless. She doesn’t even look like she washed her hair but it falls in wispy strands around her face and down her back like someone who just paid two hundred dollars for a blowout. I fucking hate her for it.

“Eliza, this is Jess,” Lena begins, stepping aside for her girlfriend to appear, hand out and ready to shake. “Jess, this is Eliza.”

Jess is exactly Lena’s type in the same way I’m exactly Graham’s. She looks like the best of every single person Lena’s ever dated for as long as I’ve known her. She’s tall with long legs like the girl Lena dated who somehow orgasmed in a British accent, and she’s softball-player-strong with arms like the girl Lena fucked because she wanted to see how adult braces felt.