The first ten years of that life had been shared with Sam’s father, but he’d died of cancer just before Sam’s eleventh birthday. I learned in our initial talk, as we walked through the house, that she had lived here all of Sam’s life. Her living room was dark and cozy, even in mid-afternoon when I arrived. Levin touched her hand to a copper mezuzah with a small Star of David engraved onto its surface, affixed to the right side of the door frame. Anna Levin, Sam’s mom, pushed open the screen door into the house and stepped outside as I walked up, welcomed me with a small handshake and let me inside. The path from the driveway was hidden by a fern whose broad leaves had to be pushed aside to walk forward, revealing a small porch set back from the road, deep in the shade and surrounded by mosquito nettings. It didn’t look untended, it didn’t seem cluttered, but it was uncontrolled in a way that wove the plants and bushes on the ground into the low-hanging limbs of the trees spread above them. Her home in North Nashville was hidden behind a yard filled with wild-garden growth. She asked me to come visit her to tell me the rivers of hidden life beneath what I knew about Sam. She knew instinctively as a mother what good defense lawyers take years to figure out, the best way to defend a terrible thing is not to try and excuse it, but to ground it, to let a fact-finder see the decisions made through the lens of a narrative, one that makes sense and one that brings real emotional weight with it. She wanted to do what all mothers that have lost try to do with the memories of their children, she wanted to help me understand him, to contextualize his actions, to humanize his decision…she wanted to make him live again. She didn’t want to “set the record straight” or scream at me for defaming her son. I was surprised and relieved to find out that she wasn’t angry at me for what I wrote. Not the one I imagined and pitied, as if I knew her, but his real mother, the one who had read my article, then read her son’s book, then called to invite me to her home. It was a search engine alert and a phone call that brought me back to the story of Sam Lewis, and I’ll start with the phone call, since it follows from the end of my first article, standing over Sam’s grave in a Jewish Cemetery, worrying about the hurt I imagined learning her son wrote an anti-semitic novel would do to Sam’s mother, but then, she called me shortly after my article was published.