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with, he arrived with a rock star’s tousled brown hair, a dimple in each not well-shaven cheek, and homemade cupcakes. “For you. For later. I don’t want to overshadow whatever dessert you planned.” He also exhibited something of which we were in short supply lately: a sense of humor. As soon as he retold the picket-line-meeting story, with some new flourishes, I recognized that we might be getting some entertainment with our meals. He did a spot-on impression of Margot, how she’d led with her business card, cutting in and joining the picketers. I sneaked looks over at her to gauge any degree of offense she might be taking; she was not only enjoying herself. She was also laughing.
    I wondered if he was too cheerful for a man who’d lost his domicile and his job. But how to ask? He must have sensed that I was trying to be a responsible interrogator because he volunteered, “I haven’t told you everything. I’m divorced, and it’s embarrassing because what I did was a felony.”
    “Oh shit,” said Margot. “Not another.”
    “No, no, nothing homicidal. Not even what most people would consider criminal. I was doing a friend a favor. Actually, it was my Spanish tutor. I wanted to improve my Spanish and be the guy in the office they could send to South America. She was here on a student visa.” He shrugged. “I married her so she could stay.”
    “And now she’s divorcing you?” Margot asked.
    “Immigration and Naturalization took care of that. We didn’t convince anybody that it was a real marriage. They’re much better detectives than I gave them credit for. And I’m a terrible liar.”
    “And it wasn’t like a movie where you marry each other so she wouldn’t be deported, and then you fall in love?” I asked.
    “Ha! More like fell in hate. I had to get a lawyer and make a deal: tell the truth and save my own skin.”
    I said, “That was very generous of you to marry her as a favor.”
    “Actually, it was more stupid than generous. My mother is clamoring for an annulment. My friends thought the whole thing was moronic. The alleged bachelor party the night before the wedding was more or less an intervention. They threatened to rat on us, and I’m not so sure one of them didn’t.”
    “She must have been a great Spanish teacher,” I said.
    Anthony laughed.
    “She wasn’t?”
    “Sorry. I was laughing because I’ve never had such a compassionate question thrown into my fake-marriage confession.”
    Margot said, “What is it about men? Do they think about the people they’ll hurt? Are they such slaves to their sexual impulses?”
    “Actually,” Anthony began. “If there had been some of that, we probably wouldn’t have gotten caught.”
    I said, “I think my sister was talking about her ex . . .”
    Anthony’s face registered Do I ask?
    Margot said, “Gwen? Do you want to do the honors?”
    “Which honors?”
    “The abridged version. About Charles?”
    I said, pretty much in a drone, “Her ex is a physician whose patients came to him for artificial insemination, and a couple of times . . . it wasn’t so artificial.”
    “Unsafe, adulterous, brazen, fake inseminations!” Margot cried. “And do you want to know the worst part?”
    Anthony nodded.
    “Once a week, on his receptionist’s day off, I sat in that outer office while he did his dirty work!”
    I said, “You never told me that.”
    “I never tell anyone. The whole thing is humiliating enough without it having happened on my watch.”
    “You don’t know that!” I said.
    “ Did you know?” Anthony asked Margot.
    “I certainly did not! I’d have killed him! I couldn’t even go to his trial. I threw him out the minute the DNA results came back on the baby who came out of it. Who, by the way, is already a teenager. And guess what his name is? Charles! Named for the gifted physician who cured his mother’s barren womb.”
    I said, in the silence that greeted Margot’s outburst, “Her ex is in a