“Ooh,” I say, “you should keep that. It’s really expensive.”

“So, can you get me out of here?” he asks, looking around.

“First, I have a few questions I’d like to ask you,” I say. I fail to mention here that I can absolutely get him out of here. Right this minute, I might add. When I got to the Manhattan Detention Center, I met the prosecutor who’s holding him—an old friend of mine from law school who said she’d take care of this for me. Which is good, since I really just want to get Jay out and go—taking him on as an actual client would be a conflict of interest with my other, more important, more law-abiding client, Monique. So, I thank my lucky stars that the prosecutor is someone I know.

Do I have to invite another old law school friend to my wedding now? Under Jack’s strict orders, I’ve been trying very hard not to befriend anyone new, since I’d like to keep my wedding to a modest count of just under six hundred people.

“Whaddya wanna know?” Jay asks, looking around the visitor’s center.

“Well, it’s just that,” I start out. All of my stammering must have caught Jay’s attention—or annoyed him at the very least—because he turns to me and fixes his eyes on mine. I realize that it’s the first time that we’ve actually made eye contact and I don’t really like it. I divert my eyes downward.

“Did you get anything on Miranda Foxley?” I blurt out.

“She is one fun girl,” he says, leaning back in his chair. The phone cord barely extends as he flips his head back with a smile.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, trying not to look judgmental. Or jealous.

“She likes to indulge in a little activity known as the afternoon delight,” Jay says, rubbing his hands together.

Afternoon delight? What’s afternoon delight? Is that some sort of drug I haven’t heard of yet? Is that what all the kids are doing these days? Just when I figure out the difference between E and Special K, now there’s some other drug I need to worry about my future children getting peer-pressured into taking?!?

“She does drugs?” I say, sotto voce, leaning in to the double-thick glass. I’m hoping that by whispering, the guards who monitor the conversations in this room won’t notice that we are blatantly talking about drugs.

“Haven’t seen her do drugs yet,” he says, “but you never know what’s going on during those afternoon delights.”

“What?” I ask, “I don’t get it.”

Jay laughs and leans back toward me. “Sky rockets in flight…” he sings.

“Most people don’t really feel like a sing-a-long when they’re being held as a guest of the state at the Manhattan Detention Center,” I say, looking around to the other lawyers all gathered on my side of the glass. No other lawyer seems to be getting a serenade like I am.

“Gonna find my baby,” he sings, low and sultry into the phone, leaning closer into the glass as he does so, “gonna hold her tight…”

This is getting to be inappropriate. Surely in just a minute, he’ll make a play for the glass and try to escape with me. I’ll have to call the guards who will then call my emergency contact who is my fiancé, Jack. How am I going to explain how I got here? Well, let’s see: I’m planning our perfect wedding, honey, but along the way, I decided to have the wedding videographer spy on you for me, so I had to hire a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of my father’s, who just so happens to be a made man, who thinks I owe him a solid, who is now in jail, who is now inexplicably serenading me. Which really happens to brides-to-be more often than you’d think.

As Jay gets to the part in his song about rubbing sticks and stones together, my cell phone begins to vibrate. I’ve got it set to vibrate since you’re not allowed to bring cell phones into a detention center and I used Jack’s little inside pocket trick to sneak it in. I excuse myself to run to the ladies’ room for a minute, and answer the phone.

“Where are you?” my mother says. “You sound like you’re in a mental institution or something. Why is there an echo?”

“Long story,” I whisper into the phone. “My wedding videographer got arrested and I’m bailing him out.”

“You have time to bail your wedding videographer out of jail, but you don’t have time to come wedding dress shopping with me?” she asks.

I have no response to this.

A few minutes later, I come back to the glass partition and Jay is busy laughing and joking with his fellow inmates.

“I’m back,” I say, “sorry about that.”

“No problem,” he says, “we were all just talking about how much we could use an afternoon delight right now.”

“Do you really think you and your fellow inmates should be talking about drugs while you’re in the slammer?” I whisper into the phone.

“This ain’t the slammer, lady,” Jay says, “this is a detention center.”

“Whatever,” I say, “the point is—”

“An afternoon delight is sex in the middle of the afternoon,” Jay says. “It has nothing to do with drugs. Unless, of course, you’re into that sort of thing.”

“Which I’m not,” I quickly say, looking around to the guards, so that if any of them have overheard the conversation, they’ll be able to see how innocent and law-abiding I look.

“Perhaps your friend Miranda is,” he says, leaning into the glass. “Every afternoon at around three, a town car is waiting for her outside of the Gilson, Hecht offices. She hops in and goes up to the Upper East Side—a dingy little walk-up on 91st Street between 1st and York.”

“To do what?” I say, riveted by Jay’s tale of the seedy underbelly of the city.

“Play chess,” he says, as I stare back at him with my mouth hanging open. “What do you think she’s doing?”

“I don’t know!” I say. If he thinks that I’m the sort of woman who would know what people are doing when they go to dingy little walk-ups on the Upper East Side in broad daylight, then I need to seriously reconsider my entire wardrobe. Possibly my makeup, too.

“Lots of men who work in the city keep little apartments uptown so that they can sneak out of work during the day and meet up with their girlfriends.”

“They do?” I ask and Jay shakes his head knowingly. “Married men?”

“Grow up, Brooke,” Jay mutters back into the phone. “Just grow up.”

“Who was she meeting?” I ask.

“I didn’t get the chance to find out yet,” he says.

“Thank God my father always worked on Long Island,” I say under my breath.

“Your father’s the best,” Jay says, breaking into a smile. “I love that man’s chops.”

“I’m partial to the sirloin,” I say, “but his chops are quite good.” Jay nods his head in agreement.

How confused are the guards who are monitoring our conversation right now?

“By the way,” Jay says, “I never asked you. Where’s your honeymoon?”

“I don’t know yet,” I say, “but we’re thinking Hawaii. Why?”

“If you make it Mexico,” he says, looking around at the other inmates to make sure no one is listening, “I could make it worth your while.”

“Um, what?” I say. And then, so as not to appear rude, I add: “No, thank you.”

“Won’t you want some honeymoon video footage?” he asks, gesturing with his hands. “I’ve got some errands to run down there and I could do both at once.”

How dare this man invoke my honeymoon! Doesn’t he know that the honeymoon is the most sacred part of the entire wedding? Screw the ceremony—the honeymoon is where couples have their true religious experience! And he wants to besmirch it with his mob errands? This I cannot abide.

“I have a right mind to leave you in here for a while to stew in your own juices,” I say, pursing my lips, “and think about what you’ve done wrong.”

“Okay, okay,” he says, “honeymoon’s off the table. But are you actually trying to threaten me?” He’s leaning in and looking me dead in the eye as he says the word threaten.

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