They looked no older than seven. Dressed in matching beige coats with perfect hair bows and polished shoes, they seemed completely out of place among the noisy playground crowds. Yet what caught my attention wasn’t their appearance. It was the way they looked at me, calm, observant, and strangely certain.
“What did you say?” I asked.
The girl standing in the middle pointed directly at my forearm. “That compass. My mom has the same one. Hers is on her shoulder.”
My stomach tightened instantly.
The tattoo wasn’t something anyone would recognize by accident. Eight years earlier, I had sketched that broken compass on a napkin during a wild night in Seattle. A woman named Camila had laughed at the design and insisted we both get matching versions before sunrise. We called it a broken compass because neither of us knew where our lives were heading.
Since then, I had never seen another tattoo like it.
“What’s your mother’s name?” I asked carefully.
Before any of the girls could answer, a woman in a gray nanny uniform hurried toward us. The panic on her face appeared long before she reached the bench.
