She just died in her sleep from an enlarged heart. Immediately when I heard she died, I thought, “Wow, she overdosed or something,” and the coroner says she didn’t have no drugs, no alcohol in her system. When I am 16, my mother died and that was the worst news I could ever hear.

And he ran to the door to let me in and I ran off. I went to my aunt and uncle’s and I was laying on the porch, and I must have made a lot of noise because my little brother looked out the blinds and yelled my name. And I remember one time I ran away and I didn’t have nowhere to go and I found myself doing the same thing my mom did. The next day when the school bus came, I realized my mom slept on the porch just to give me a hug before I got on the bus. And I look at my grandma, she’d be in the dining room, and she’ll say, “Don’t open the door.” So I have to sit there and talk to my mom through the mail slot. I used to be sitting in the living room watching cartoons, and the mail slot will open and it’ll be my mom at the door. She wasn’t there for us like a mother should be. I was raised by my grandmother, then my aunt and uncle, because my mom was in the streets.

I grew up in Seattle, in the central area near Capitol Hill. It was the culmination of a long and tortured relationship with the criminal justice system. Fair was arrested and spent the next nine years in jail, proclaiming his innocence through two trials, numerous motions, and drawn out judicial delays. Nearly two years later, detectives charged then 26-year-old Emanuel Fair, one of the many revelers who visited Jinaga’s apartment over the course of the evening. On the night of October 31, 2008, 24-year-old software engineer and motorcycle enthusiast Arpana Jinaga was raped and murdered in her bedroom after co-hosting a Halloween party at her apartment complex in Redmond, Washington.

Unfaithful by Elisa S. Amore