The crowd was completely silent. Blake lay on the ground, stunned and breathing hard. For a moment, the only sounds were distant traffic and the soft mechanical whir of Seth's camera, which had never stopped recording. Seth had moved sideways to keep Wyatt in frame. Professional instinct seemed to have overridden whatever he was feeling about what he had just witnessed.

Toby had not moved. He stood exactly where Wyatt had placed him, three feet behind his father, the skateboard now held against his chest with both hands. The crowd was looking at Blake. Toby was looking at Wyatt.

He stared at the back of his father's shoulders and at the steadiness that had come over him. The confusion on Toby's face when Blake started counting had been replaced by something more complicated, the expression of someone standing at the edge of a door he had never known existed. Wyatt turned and walked back to his son. Whatever he saw in Toby's face, he kept his own expression steady.

He checked the boy quickly, eyes, hands, the knee that had met the pavement. Nothing appeared serious.

"You okay?" Wyatt asked.

Toby nodded, but the nod was automatic. His eyes were still processing what had happened. Behind them, Blake was trying to get himself upright, first onto one elbow and then into a sitting position. He pressed a hand to his shoulder and clenched his jaw while the crowd began to release the breath it had been holding.

Someone near the back said something too quietly to hear. The person beside them gave a short, startled laugh and immediately tried to swallow it.

Seth lowered the camera to chest height. He was no longer filming Blake. He was watching Wyatt and Toby move toward the edge of the crowd. Something in Seth's face had changed. He looked like a man who had recorded something he was no longer sure he should possess.

Wyatt stopped near him and said it again. "Turn it off." This time Seth did. He pressed the button himself without checking Blake first. The red recording light went dark.

Then Seth looked down at the camera screen. After a long moment, he navigated to the saved file and deleted the recording. Wyatt had not asked him to do that. Blake certainly would not have authorized it. Seth deleted the file anyway and set the camera on a nearby bench as if he was suddenly tired of carrying it.

But the phones were still out.

Wyatt had counted four phones during the confrontation, and now there were at least six. Some were already lowered, but he knew they had recorded. On six separate screens, there were now different angles of the same few seconds, none of them under his control. One woman near the coffee cart was typing rapidly with both thumbs, her eyes moving between her screen and the scene with the focused energy of someone sitting on something that would travel far and fast.

"That's definitely going to trend," a man in a baseball cap said to no one in particular.

Wyatt looked at the phones and felt something shift inside him. It was not panic. Panic required a gap between what you feared and what was already happening, and there was no gap anymore.

He had made his choice when Blake refused to stop and the cameras stayed on. He had understood there would be a cost. That part was done.

The weight of the consequences still landed differently now that they were real. Eight months of careful, unremarkable existence. Eight months of scuffed boots, ordinary repair work, cash purchases, and a truck he deliberately never made memorable.

The operation was still incomplete. Somewhere in the next several hours, systems and people tasked with noticing unusual public exposure could flag footage of a supposed civilian handyman putting a trained fighter on the ground in under three seconds. There would be professionals whose entire job was to look at exactly that kind of anomaly and ask who the man in the worn gray Henley really was. Eight months of careful ordinary behavior could be undone by a few seconds uploaded from a stranger's phone.

Questions would follow. Questions were exactly what Wyatt's cover had been built to prevent.

Toby was watching his father's face.

"Are you scared of them?" he asked.

There was no accusation in the question, only curiosity.

"We need to go," Wyatt said.

He put a hand on Toby's shoulder and they started toward the north entrance.

Two steps later, Blake's voice came from behind them, louder than necessary and aimed as much at the remaining audience as at Wyatt.

"That's it? You sucker punch me and just walk away?"

Wyatt kept moving.

"I'm talking to you."

Blake's voice cracked with the effort of getting upright too fast. He was standing now, jaw set, one hand tight at his side.

"You hit me from inside. That's not a fight. That's a coward's move."

Wyatt stopped. Toby felt the hand on his shoulder tighten slightly, then release. Wyatt turned.

Across the plaza, Blake stood trying to rebuild a story. Wyatt understood it immediately. Blake needed a second act, something he could label a sucker punch, cheap shot, ambush, anything that repositioned him from aggressor to victim. It was the only narrative left to him.

"You grabbed a ten-year-old," Wyatt said. His voice carried without effort. "Because you thought he couldn't do anything about it. Then you came after his father because you thought the same thing."

The crowd absorbed the words. Someone near the pharmacy entrance folded their arms. Blake stepped forward once. His shoulder was bothering him enough that his movement had changed, and everyone could see it.