David started to decline — Dad, really, you don’t have to — and I stopped him with three words.

“I’m not asking.”

An hour later we were in a quiet booth in a diner, and the boys were demolishing a mountain of pancakes with the single-minded joy of children who are, I suspected, genuinely hungry, while David held a mug of black coffee in both hands to hide the fact that his fingers were trembling.

I waited until the boys had drifted from the pancakes into their coloring pages, thoroughly absorbed, before I leaned across the table and lowered my voice.

“Start from the beginning,” I said.

“And don’t protect a single person.