Now those few yards might as well have been a mile.
The pharmacy doors slid open behind them.
A store employee stepped out with a phone pressed to his ear.
“I’ve called the police,” he said.
The thief’s head snapped up.
“You don’t need cops,” he said quickly.
“Nothing happened.”
The woman beside Leo stared at him.
“Nothing happened?” she repeated.
“He tried to take her bag,” another customer said from the doorway.
“I saw him pull it.”
The thief looked from face to face.
The sidewalk that had seemed empty enough for an easy robbery was filling with witnesses.
His confidence returned for half a second, but in a different form now—louder, desperate, searching for a version of events that might save him.
“She grabbed me,” he said.
“Look at this.
She attacked me.”
Maya finally looked directly at him.
“You grabbed my bag while my child was standing beside me.”
“I was just asking—”
“You said, ‘Give me the bag.’ Then you pulled it.”
The woman by Leo shook her head.
“That’s exactly what he said.”
The thief cursed under his breath.
Maya’s attention moved immediately back to his trapped arm.
“Keep your other hand where I can see it.”
He froze.
For several seconds, the only sound was traffic at the intersection and the pharmacy doors opening and closing behind them as customers gathered inside.
Leo looked down at the receipt in his fist.
The paper was wrinkled almost into a ball.
Maya saw it.
“You still have it?” she asked.
Leo nodded.
His voice came out smaller than before.
“Yes.”
“Good job.”
That was all she said.
But the words did something to him.
His shoulders lowered slightly.
He stopped staring at the thief and looked at his mother instead.
The man on the ground noticed too.
Maybe until that moment, Leo had only been part of the opportunity—a small child distracting a woman carrying a bag.
Now the consequences of what he had done were visible in the boy’s white-knuckled grip around a pharmacy receipt.
The thief tried a different approach.
“Lady, I’m sorry.”
Maya said nothing.
“I made a mistake.”
Still nothing.
“I didn’t know your kid was—”
Maya’s eyes hardened.
“You saw him.”
The man stopped speaking.
Of course he had seen Leo.
That was part of why he had chosen her.
A woman with a young child, one hand occupied, attention divided, medicine just collected from the pharmacy.
To him, those details had looked like weakness.
