Crime

While Claudia is cleaning in the attic, she finds an old box with photographs that's been sitting there since the time when she moved into the house.
She grabs the photos and mix them with the new ones so she can seize the quarantine to finally organize them all.
She sees herself as a child, as a teenager and also as an adult woman.
But what draws her attention is that strange man in the back of lots of the pictures.

*

"What the-" Claudia chacked the photos again. "Who the-" she saw the same shady man in most of her pictures. One when she had soccer practice when she was 8, another one when she wore a beach hat and a bikini at age 13, and another one she was at a coffee shop after her college graduation. 

"Who is this guy?"

She noticed a pattern with the man on the photos, he wore a trench coat, a fedora, and sunglasses. She went down from the attic and showed her mom the photos. Her mom guffawed at some of them.

"Can't you see the man on the photo?" Claudia asked her.

"What man?"

Claudia used one of her manicured nails to point at the blurry man in the corner on one of the photos. "Him. Who is he?"

Her mom took the photograph and squinted at it. "I only see a small blotch." She admitted.

"What?! Can't you see the man on the background?!" She pulled 3 of the 8 photos that the man appears. "This stranger showed up at my soccer practice. At the beach! And at my college graduation. WHO IS HE?!?!"

Claudia's mother looked at the man on the photo when the shot was taken at a bowling alley. She saw the photo of the man that Claudia was talking about. The man had an angular jaw and dark sideburns.

Ugh, not him again. She thought.

"Oh that, he was your father's colleague. What was his name again? Harold?... Hugo?" She rubbed her temple. "Anyway, I wouldn't go near that guy if I were you, hun. That bastard put your dad in jail."

Yeah, she remembered. Claudia was only 9½ when her dad was sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit, drugs were found in the lawn and inside the car seats. She got picked on at her school because her dad got locked up, and for being black. Claudia was mestizo, black from her dad's side and latina from her mom's side.

Her mother implied that this man betrayed her father, but why?

How did she not notice that this man was following her since she was a child. A shadow that followed her family for years and she found out about it now? Damn!