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He sat in the courtroom like he sat in the psychologist’s office, like he sat in the jail cell, like he sat in Oz Vessalius’s room covered in Oz Vessalius’s blood—that is to say, he sat in the courtroom quietly, eyes wide and haunted, and he dug his nails into his wrists and waited for Oz Vessalius to come back for him.
Oz didn’t, of course. He hadn’t come back to his bedroom after that thing with the knife, and he hadn’t come when Gilbert was arrested, and he hadn’t come when the psychologist was asking him questions about his parents and his adoption and his relationship with Oz Vessalius and the gash on his chest. He wouldn’t come now, either. The grown-ups said it was because he was dead. Gil thought that it was just because Oz’s bastard of a father had decided it would be great fun to keep Oz away. Oz couldn’t be dead. He’d never die like this. It was completely unlike all the times he’d tried to die before. For one, the body was unrecognizable when it was found; for two, people were saying that Gil had killed Oz. Oz would never die in a way that Gil was blamed for. He had always said that he wanted Gil to be safe and happy; he wouldn’t have gone off to die if it would put Gil in danger.
That wasn’t what the lawyers were saying, though. It wasn’t what the police said either, or the judge, or the Vessalius family. When Gil had said that if anyone had murdered Oz it was his father he had been told that Xai Vessalius had been with Bernard Nightray all day; when Gil had said that if Oz had died any other way it had probably been suicide, he had been told that he was lying to hide the murder he had committed. Nobody believed that he hadn’t done it. Not even Mr. Oscar and Ada had come to see him since the police took him away.
This was especially strange because Oz wasn’t dead. Not by suicide or murder or anything else. That body they’d found wasn’t Oz’s; it didn’t have the strange pocket watch he’d found earlier that day on it, and its eyes had no contact in them, and it didn’t have any kind of note for Gil with it. Oz wasn’t dead, he was just missing, and nobody at all was looking for him. Gil couldn’t; when he tried they said he was “fleeing from justice” and “skipping bail” and he got in even more trouble. Nobody else seemed interested in looking at all. They all believed that Oz was dead—or if they didn’t, they weren’t talking to Gilbert about it.
He sat in the courtroom like he sat in the psychologist’s office, in the jail cell, in Oz’s bedroom. He sat and he waited and he listened to people he didn’t know say things that were wrong about Oz and hoped that Oz would come home soon. Not even Gilbert could come find him now; nobody trusted that that was what he was really doing, and so wherever Oz was, whatever was keeping him from coming home, there wouldn’t be anybody who could help him.
If only anybody at all believed Gilbert. If only anybody trusted him. If only there were anything, anything in the world he could do for Oz—
They called him to the witness stand. They accused him of lying under oath. They accused him of not trusting reality, which was a joke, because Gilbert was the only person in the whole entire courtroom who actually knew what was real, and what was real was that Oz wasn’t dead, he was just missing.
The lawyer the Nightray family hired for him started talking about an insanity defense. Gilbert dug his fingernails into his arms and tried to imagine where Oz was now. Maybe he was happy. Maybe he was safe. Maybe he’d just decided to run away, and this all was a huge misunderstanding. Maybe he’d come home soon.
The trial dragged on. The “murder victim” was the eldest son of the Vessalius family; the “murderer” was in the process of being adopted by the Nightray family. Everyone seemed to be milking the situation for all it was worth, though Gilbert didn’t care about any of that. He didn’t like the reporters sticking their noses and microphones into his and Oz’s business; he didn’t like the Nightray family taking advantage of the chaos to take potshots at Vessalius; he didn’t like the way Mr. Oscar didn’t look at him anymore, the way Ada had been crying so much. He didn’t like that Oz was still missing, that nobody believed him or even listened anymore when he said they had to find him. It wasn’t fair. Even when he was declared innocent on the basis of not enough evidence to prove him guilty—it wasn’t fair. Even when he was officially adopted by the Nightray house and got to meet his brother Vincent again—it wasn’t fair. None of it was fair. Oz was still missing, everyone still said he had died—and Gilbert was beginning to doubt himself too. Maybe the body really had been Oz’s. Maybe he really had just been in denial all along. What was real? What wasn’t? Gilbert couldn’t tell anymore. Maybe he never had been right in the first place—
And so the first of ten long years passed.