Not your ex-wife, not her family, not yourself, and especially not me.

I don’t want the version that makes anyone look good.

I want the whole thing.”

He looked at me for a long moment, and I watched him decide whether he could bear to.

And then, slowly, over the cooling coffee, with his sons coloring dinosaurs three feet away, my son told me how a stable, successful, thirty-one-year-old man had ended up sleeping in a car — and as he talked, I understood that I was not listening to a story about bad luck, or failure, or a marriage that had run its course.

I was listening to the anatomy of a demolition.