Those drafts were, in a way, worse than the photographs, and I watched the room understand it in real time.

An affair, people can file under weakness — a man who fell, who was carried away, who made a terrible human mistake.

The drafts were not weakness.

They were labor.

They were a man sitting alone at a desk, hour after hour, deliberately engineering the ruin of the reputation of the woman he was still living with, workshopping which lie would land best with which audience, editing for maximum damage. Tell my mother she’s been cold for years.

Tell the Hendersons she was drinking.