The Compass Stone

Maya found the stone on a foggy beach in Galway. Smooth, dark green, veined with silver — shaped like a compass rose, though worn by time.
She kept it in her pocket through years of wandering: silent border crossings, narrow escapes, sudden storms at sea.
Once, it slipped from her coat during a monsoon in Jakarta. Days later, a boy knocked at her door in a different city, holding it out with a grin. “You dropped this,” he said, then vanished into the crowd.
She never tried to explain it.
On the morning her grandson left to chase his own horizons, she pressed the stone into his palm and whispered, “It always pointed me home.”