THE GANG’S ALL HERE: Gram, Mom, Dad, Maritza, Isaiah, Aunt Catherine, and Uncle Charles.

And Gram’s guy friend—whom she still swears is “just a friend” despite the fact that he brought her lilies today with a few red roses mixed in.

“Okay, so tell me about this guy,” Maritza says, her elbow perched on the white linen tablecloth as she leans in.

“What guy?” I reach for my champagne.

She rolls her eyes. “Don’t play dumb with me. The roommate.”

“The roommate?” I chuckle. “So is that what you guys are calling him now?”

Maritza laughs. “Gram insists he’s the one for you.”

“She met him once. Once.” I take another sip. “And trust me, he’s not The One. I don’t even believe in that stuff.”

I glance toward Isaiah, who’s deep in a conversation with my father, though his hand is still clasping hers under the table. They’re so adorable it’s disgusting sometimes.

“When can I meet him?” she asks. “Like I know we saw him at Gram’s that one day, but that was in passing. Can we stop by sometime?”

“Maritza,” I say, chin tucked and voice low. “He’s my roommate. He’s not my boyfriend. Therefore, you don’t need to come over to meet him.”

“Melrose,” she says, copying my intonation. “He’s your roommate, but clearly you like him. The second I brought him up, you got this smile on your face that you immediately hid with your champagne flute.”

I did?

“Whatever.” I take another sip, this time finishing the glass. Scanning the room, I search for another penguin-suited, tray-carrying saint so I can procure another.

Gram accepted her lifetime achievement award an hour ago, so now we’re all socializing and cocktail-ing while we wait for dinner to be served.

“Come to the bathroom with me,” she says, rising from the table, releasing Isaiah’s hold and linking her arm through my elbow.

“O … okay.”

We head to the ladies’ room in a hurry, and I get the sense that she has some major bombshell to drop on me, something she can’t mention in front of everyone else.

“Oh my God,” I say when we get inside. “You’re pregnant.”

Her nose scrunches and she swats at me. “No. God, no. We’re so not there yet.”

“Then why’d you yank me in here like a crazy person?”

Maritza turns toward her reflection in the mirror, smoothing her dark hair into place and straightening the vintage Tiffany and Co chandelier earrings she borrowed from Gram.

“You’ve never lied to me before,” she begins.

“Never.”

“You’re one of the most honest people I’ve ever known.”

“Where are you going with this?” I ask.

Maritza turns to me, one hand on her lanky hip. “I don’t get why you can’t be honest with yourself. That’s all.”

“And you had to bring me in here to ask me that?”

“I see the way your face lights when you’re around him, the way you try so hard not to smile when I mention him,” she says. “You’re holding back. You’re fighting your feelings. I don’t understand why. If you like him … why fight it?”

Dragging in a ragged breath of pine-and-bleach scented ladies’ room air, I lean against the counter and fold my arms.

Maritza is right.

She’s right about all of it.

“You know, Nick made the weirdest comment the other day,” I change the subject. “He said he missed me.”

My cousin’s head tilts and her mouth pinches. “This isn’t about Nick. Mel, I say this with nothing but love, but you’ve always gone for the guys you can’t have and you’ve done it your whole life. You’ve never wanted the ones who were easy, the ones who wanted you. You’ve always pined for the ones just a hair out of reach because that’s who you are. You love a good challenge. Nick’s been the biggest challenge of your life, and you don’t even like him. You just think you do!”

Her words resonate with weight, actual weight, and I find myself unable to move, everything paralyzed except my racing thoughts and a single question: what if she’s right?

The ladies’ room door swings open and a forty-something actress with a vaguely familiar face clicks across the tiled floor in her red-bottomed heels.

“They’re probably wondering what’s taking us so long.” Maritza eyes the door. “To be continued?”

I nod, following her back out to the banquet hall and asking myself yet another pertinent question: if Maritza is right … and I do like Sutter … do I only want him because I can’t have him?

I’ve never met anyone more unavailable than Sutter.

And evidently, unavailability is Kryptonite.