He took another step. Wyatt answered with a single step of his own, not threatening, just closing the distance enough to make his intention clear. Blake stopped. It was not the stop of a man making a clever tactical choice. It was the stop of a body that had registered something the mind was still trying to argue with.

The crowd saw it. Someone near the front laughed quietly. The sound was brief, but once it existed it could not be called back. Two more people lowered their phones and began checking what they had captured. Blake stood where he had stopped, eyes moving between Wyatt and the people around him.

The man in the worn gray Henley had not raised his voice. He had not changed his expression. He had done nothing Blake had a framework for because everything in Blake's framework assumed the other person was performing, too. Wyatt was not.

There was no posture to match and no reputation to challenge. There was simply a man in a plaza who had somewhere else he needed to be. Seth picked up his camera from the bench. He held it at his side without raising it. He looked at Blake once, long and level, then lowered his eyes.

Wyatt's phone vibrated in his pocket. He did not reach for it yet. He watched Blake make the only decision left to him, the decision not to come any closer. Then Wyatt turned, put his hand back on Toby's shoulder, and walked toward the parking structure.

When they were clear of the crowd, Wyatt took out the phone.

The secure message was brief and designed to disappear after it was read. Wyatt needed only a few seconds to understand it: identity exposure possible. Abort current cover. Wyatt put the phone away.

Toby walked close beside him, skateboard under his arm now, his shoulder almost touching Wyatt's. The boy had been quiet since Blake hit the ground, and that silence had weight.

They reached the truck. Wyatt unlocked it. Toby got in on the passenger side and laid the skateboard across his knees. Wyatt got behind the wheel, started the engine, and pulled away without speaking.

They had gone two blocks before Toby finally said, "Back there, the part where you..." He stopped, reconsidered, and tried again. "How did you know what he was going to do?" Wyatt kept his eyes on the road. "Experience."

Toby looked out the window. A long silence passed, long enough that Wyatt wondered if the boy would fold the question up and save it for later. Toby did that sometimes. He had probably learned it from watching his father.

Then Toby turned back toward him.

"Dad, who are you really?"

Wyatt's hands stayed where they were on the wheel. He let the question sit between them and take up the space it deserved. It was not a small question, and it had not been a small day. His son had earned the right to have it treated seriously.

Outside the window, the plaza was already three blocks behind them. On several phone screens, the footage was already moving. The question remained in the truck the way certain questions do, not fading and not pressing, simply present. Wyatt drove.

The traffic light ahead turned red. He stopped, and in the stillness of the intersection he became aware of the sound of his own breathing, Toby's silence beside him, and the skateboard resting across the boy's knees like something Toby had forgotten he was holding. Wyatt looked at his hands on the steering wheel. They were completely still.

He had noticed that about himself after dangerous work years earlier, the way his hands stayed level when everything else had been chaos. He had eventually decided the quality was useful, and that usefulness carried a cost he had never fully understood. Looking at those hands now, in the cab of a truck on a Tuesday morning with his ten-year-old waiting for an answer, he understood a little more of the cost.

The light changed. Wyatt drove.

"Dad."

Toby's voice was not impatient. It was the voice of someone who had decided the question was worth waiting for, but not worth pretending he had not asked.

Wyatt took the next right, adding a couple of minutes to the route home. He did it without any strategic reason. The road was quieter, and he needed whatever those two minutes were worth.

"I was in the Navy," Wyatt said. "You know that part."

"You said you used to be."

"I said I used to serve. That's not exactly the same thing."

Toby absorbed that with the careful attention he gave to things that mattered. He was not a dramatic kid. He did not reach for a reaction before he had finished processing. Wyatt had always respected that about him. It also made conversations like this harder because there was no excess emotion to deflect.

"So you're still..." Toby said.

It was not quite a question. It was a space he was holding open.

"I do work I can't talk about in detail," Wyatt said. "It's important work. It takes time, and it requires that people don't know I'm doing it. Which means it also requires that I look like someone who isn't."

The truck made the low rattle it always made on that stretch of road, somewhere under the body where no mechanic had ever quite found the source. Usually Wyatt barely heard it. Now it sounded very loud.

"That's why you never fixed the truck," Toby said.

Wyatt glanced at him. "What?"

"You fix other people's things all day, but you never fixed ours." Toby kept looking ahead. "I always thought it was because you were tired. But it wasn't that."

Wyatt did not answer immediately because Toby was exactly right. The kid had apparently carried that observation quietly for a long time. The realization sat in Wyatt's chest without any useful response.