A careful observer notices what the confident description left outside the frame.

Confidence in an account is often bought by leaving things out. The tidy version is tidy because the parts that did not fit have been quietly dropped, and the dropping usually happens without anyone deciding to deceive. Careful attention is mostly a willingness to look at the edge of the frame. What is missing tells you more about a description than what is in it.

When something is explained to you unusually cleanly, ask what would not fit. Who is not in this account, what happened between those two steps, which case would break it. One such question, asked without hostility, gets you further than an hour of agreement.