Details emerge now from the blurred crowd: a woman in the jury with a purple cardigan; a man scribbling in a notebook toward the back of the room. Auntie Rach’s curly mop and wide shoulders, Uncle Jack’s graying beard. And Nick, Nick . . . except it isn’t him, of course, it’s his brother, Richard, sitting bolt upright, like he’s on strings. The one who pushed for the case to go to trial.

I let myself glance again at Becca. Just long enough to see that her hair has grown and is scraped into a ponytail, that she’s gripping her elbows as she hunches behind the glass. How must she feel being the one on trial while I’m on the witness stand, called by the prosecution? She has stuck to her tactic of denying everything, meaning she’s never mentioned my involvement. There’s nothing I can do but keep to the same story, and hope. And surely, surely, they can’t prove that Nick didn’t just take those pills himself?

Except now that I’m here, a tiny dot in the eye of this massive courtroom, I’m gripped by the same powerlessness as when I feared Nick would kill my mum. It feels like anything can be proven in a place like this, with clever people steering the ship, people who know far more about cases and evidence than Becca or I.

The prosecutor stands. She’s wearing a swishy black gown that makes her look like a giant crow. She pats her wig and my questions begin.

—

Afterward, it’s like looking back on an exam and trying to work out whether I might have passed. I can’t remember exactly what my answers were. Can’t judge if they were the right ones.

The prosecutor was clearly trying to demonstrate that Becca was alone with Nick for a while during that Friday night, around the time “the pills were most likely ingested.” She probed for other things, too, asked whether there had been any “bad feeling” between Becca and Nick while she’d been staying with us. Becca’s lawyer yelled, “Objection,” and said the question was leading. The judge agreed, so the prosecutor rephrased it, asking what the relationship between Becca and Nick was like. But the idea of “bad feeling” was out there, and I wonder if the jury saw the heat in my cheeks.

—

Mum had told me earlier that I should go home after my bit was over. She wants me to stay away from the trial as much as possible, thinks it’ll be too stressful for me. But she’s not allowed into the courtroom until she’s given her evidence, so she isn’t there to stop me slipping into a corner of the public gallery and watching.