It would have been easy, in the fury of finally seeing clearly, to let the story grow — to assume the worst about every half-remembered thing, to turn the studio into a horror it may not have been, to let my own confirmed pain become a license to invent other people’s.

I did not let it.

Neither did Lowell.

We gave the people whose job it was to weigh these things only what people had actually seen and actually remembered, and we said plainly when we did not know, and we refused to turn a suspicion into an accusation no matter how much the pattern seemed to invite it.

That discipline was not softness toward my mother.

It was the opposite.