The first time Leo saw Clara again, he walked into her room with Captain clutched to his chest and the compass in his pocket, shoulders squared like someone stepping onto a narrow bridge over a long drop. He didn’t cry. He didn’t freeze. He simply held out the compass and said, “I’ve been practicing. Even in a small backyard.” Her laugh—my seventeen-year-old summers, his six-year-old safety—broke the antiseptic hush. “I know you have,” she said. “I could tell.”

In the weeks that followed, we made those visits our own small constellation of time: Leo’s careful stories about blue bedding and model airplanes, Clara’s thin hands smoothing his drawings, my quiet presence in the chair, listening to the two people who had carried different versions of me back to myself. When she died, Leo kept the compass without ceremony; it was already his. Now, at nine, he navigates forests and school hallways and the fragile work of trusting permanence with that brass circle warm in his palm. “It found where it was supposed to be,” he tells Daniel, as if explaining gravity. The needle settles, unhurried, always north. On Leo’s desk—under Clara’s sketch of Captain, beside our camping photo—it points past what we lost, through what we almost missed, toward the ordinary, miraculous fact of us at the breakfast table. Whatever direction we turn, we can orient. We can find our way. Clara was right.