Chapter ELEVEN
THE TRUTH IN COURT
In those eight months, the case became public in ways Mei hated.
Local news stations covered Daniel's arrest and later the homicide charge.
Most reports did not name Mei because she was a minor, but that protection was imperfect in a town where people could connect surnames, school rumors, and old social-media posts.
Grandma locked down her own profiles. Alex deleted his entirely for a while. Tiana's mother reminded both girls not to answer messages from strangers, even if the stranger claimed to be a journalist, a victim advocate, or somebody who "just wanted to understand."
One account sent Mei a message saying, Your story could help people. Another said, Your father deserves to tell his side. Mei blocked both. Dr. Sato helped her separate public interest from personal obligation.
"Something can be newsworthy and still not belong to strangers in every detail," she said.
Mei wrote that down too.
At school, her circle got smaller but stronger.
She stopped explaining herself to classmates who treated her life like true-crime content.
She spent more time with Tiana, a quiet boy from art club named Mateo, and two girls who cared far more about whether Mei had finished the poster for the winter dance than what had been said at a pretrial hearing.
That normal pressure helped. So did preparation. Andrea took Mei into an empty courtroom weeks before trial. She showed her where the judge sat, where the jury sat, where Daniel would sit.
"You can ask for a break," Andrea said. "The judge decides, but asking is allowed."
"What if I cry?"
"Then you cry."
"Does that make me look like I'm lying?"
"No. It makes you a human being. But do not try to cry, and do not try not to cry for the jury. Just answer."
"What if I get mad?"
"Pause. Breathe. Answer the question instead of the feeling."
Mei sat in the witness chair when the courtroom was empty. It looked smaller than television made it seem.
"I thought it would feel scarier," she said.
Andrea smiled. "Wait until there are forty people in here."
"Not helpful."
"Sorry. Occupational honesty."
By the morning trial began, Mei had walked through the building enough times that the metal detector no longer made her flinch.
Almost.
The trial did not feel like a final chapter while Mei was living through it.
It felt like waiting in rooms. Waiting in a victimwitness office while lawyers argued over what jurors could hear.
Waiting in a hallway while a bailiff checked whether Daniel had been moved.
Waiting for adults to stop saying "a few minutes" when they meant forty-five.
The courthouse itself was disappointingly ordinary.
Beige walls. Fluorescent lights. A vending machine that ate Alex's dollar and became, for ten minutes, the family's most emotionally manageable enemy.
"I am appealing," Alex announced after the machine refused to return his money.
Tiana, allowed to attend only parts of the proceedings with her mother, said, "Take it to the Supreme Court."
The jokes kept Mei from floating away. When she testified, the courtroom seemed both huge and too small.
Daniel sat beside his attorneys in a dark suit.
Mei had spent months imagining what it would feel like to see him again.
She expected terror.
Instead she noticed details. A loose thread near his cuff.
Gray in his hair she did not remember. The way he kept a yellow legal pad perfectly straight on the table.
He looked like a man trying to control the position of every object within reach.
Mei focused on prosecutor Andrea Bell. They had practiced the process, not the answers.
If she did not understand a question, ask for it to be repeated.
If she did not remember, say so. Do not guess.
Do not look at Daniel unless she wanted to.
Andrea began with easy facts. Name. Age. Family. Then the night Grace died. Mei described waking to raised voices, leaving her bedroom, seeing her parents near the basement stairs. She described Grace trying to move away. Daniel grabbing her. The lamp falling. The movement toward the stairs.
"What did you see next?" Andrea asked.
Mei's mouth went dry.
"My dad pushed her."
The defense objected.
The judge overruled. Mei continued.
"She fell backward. I couldn't see all the stairs from where I was. I heard her hit them."
"What did your father do?"
"He looked toward the hallway. I hid. Later he came upstairs and asked if I had been asleep."
* * *
The months before trial taught Mei how many versions of one story could exist at the same time.
There was the police version, arranged in timelines and evidence numbers.
The prosecutor's version, built around what could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
The defense version, which questioned memory, interpretation, chain of custody, and motive.
The news version, compressed into ninety-second reports.
The internet version, which treated human beings like characters released weekly for discussion.
And then there was Mei's version. The one that had started in a hallway. Dr. Sato helped her keep that distinction.
"A trial is not a competition to decide who owns your memory," she said. "A jury decides whether the state proved a criminal charge. That is important. It is not the same as deciding whether you are allowed to know what you experienced."
Mei wrote that down.
She wrote down a lot that year. Her sketchbook became half drawings, half sentences she wanted available when fear made her forget them.
I can say I don't know. I can ask for a break.
A question is not an accusation. Someone doubting me is not the same as me being wrong.
The week before trial, Andrea Bell brought Mei into an empty courtroom.
"Sit anywhere," she said.
Mei chose the back row first.
Then the witness chair.
The chair was smaller than it looked on television.
"Where will he be?"
Andrea pointed to the defense table.
Mei looked at the distance.
Too close.
"Can I not look at him?"
"You do not have to look at him unless a question requires you to identify him, and we can handle that carefully."
"What if he stares?"
"Then he stares. The judge controls conduct in the courtroom. You do not have to manage his face."
That sentence joined the sketchbook.
You do not have to manage his face. For years, managing Daniel's face had been half of Mei's childhood.
Was he annoyed? Was he embarrassed? Was he about to yell?
Did her answer make his jaw tighten? Court made that habit useless on purpose.
The first day of trial, reporters waited outside behind a designated line.
Grandma took Mei through a side entrance.
Tiana texted continuously from school.
TIANA: sending elite vibes
MEI: what are elite vibes
TIANA: better than regular vibes obviously
MEI: thank u i think
TIANA: if any lawyer annoys u imagine them with tiny hands
Mei put her phone away before Lena saw the message and asked questions. Jury selection took longer than expected. Mei did not attend most of it. She waited in a small room with Grandma, Alex, and a box of puzzle books Lena had provided.
"I am too old for word searches," Alex said.
Ten minutes later he was aggressively circling BASKETBALL.
The waiting was almost worse than testifying.
Nothing happened, so Mei's imagination volunteered.
What if the judge excluded the phone? What if a juror recognized Daniel from the flyers?
What if Mei forgot a detail? What if the defense found some contradiction that made everything collapse?
Andrea came in during lunch.
"Stop trying to predict the trial from this room," she said.
Mei stared. "Did Grandma tell you?"
"Your face did."
"Everyone keeps saying my face tells things."
"Occupational hazard of having one."
Andrea explained that evidentiary rulings had gone both ways.
The judge allowed portions of Grace's audio memo and the final phone clip.
Some later prison-related material obviously did not exist yet; the school and break-in evidence would be limited depending on the phase of trial.
The anonymous flyers were mostly excluded from the homicide case because prosecutors could not prove Daniel personally created them strongly enough for the purpose they wanted.
"But he did it," Mei said.
"Maybe. Maybe someone acting for him did. Maybe not. If I cannot establish the connection reliably, I do not get to ask a jury to fill the gap because it feels right."
Mei sighed.
"Evidence is annoying."
"Extremely."
During the trial, Grace became visible in ways Mei had not expected.
Her coworker described her sense of humor.
The storage manager remembered Grace apologizing for taking too long at the counter because Mei had been asking for snacks.
The retired attorney described the dates of consultations without revealing privileged legal advice beyond what the court allowed.
A financial analyst explained Grace's separate savings account.
The case was about her death, but piece by piece the courtroom reconstructed a woman trying to live.
That mattered to Mei. One afternoon, the defense introduced photographs of Daniel and Grace smiling on vacations.
Mei felt anger rise immediately. They had been happy sometimes.
Of course they had. The defense used the photographs to argue the marriage was more complex than the prosecution's picture of control and fear.
On a break, Mei told Grandma, "I hate that they get to use happy pictures." Lillian took her hand. "The pictures are true too."
"That sounds like you're helping them."
"No. It sounds like I refuse to lie for either side. Your mother laughed with him. She also planned to leave him. Both can be true."
Mei stared at the courtroom doors. That was the deepest mystery of the family, she realized.
Not whether Daniel had killed Grace. Mei knew what she saw.
The mystery was how a person could be loved and feared, funny and controlling, ordinary and capable of something terrible.
There would never be one piece of evidence that explained that.
* * *
"Were you asleep?"
"No."
"Did you tell police what you had seen that night?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Mei looked at the jury. "Because I was scared of him." Cross-examination was harder.
Daniel's attorney was not cruel. That surprised Mei. He was