She didn't miss that part.

She viewed the fleet floating over the city, chose out the ones she could see by their silhouette - the bulk freighter that ran the Rigel II corridor that she had plotted her second year of college; the courier that ran the inner system mail route that she had substituted for when the regular pilot took medical leave for three months; the dim running lights of something much bigger further along on the outer approach that was either a Federation transport or a Rigellian Defense ship and she would have known for sure within 40 seconds if she'd sat down at a sensor console. She knew this space. She knew it too well to leave.

That was all there ever was. All there ever will be.

Inside was warm, and lit. Private table still set with the remnants of dinner. Blue velvet chairs and golden light and her family making their way through the easy space of an evening that hadn't yet become what it was going to become. Her dad finished telling a story she'd heard many times before about a transit problem he had solved in 2361 and told again with small improvements each time to make it sound slightly more impressive and also give him credit for the story and her younger brother listened half-heartedly with an expression of "I've heard this before" without saying it and her mom watched the outside terrace doors with the same intent expression she'd been watching them with for 40 minutes now, meaning her mom already knew something was wrong and was waiting to find out what it was.

Her mom always knows. It has always been both comforting and sometimes annoyingly invasive throughout Lindsy's whole life and right now it is both again.

She turned from the fleet and saw the room through the glass and thought about the first time her parents brought her here as a kid and how huge the view port was compared to everything else (she couldn't really think about anything other than the view) and how the fleet above the city looked like something from one of her grandmothers' navigation stories, just so big and full of directions she wouldn't learn to name until later. The view port hasn't changed. The fleet is still the same fleet. I am just a different person from when I stood here as that little girl and from standing here now as my adult self gazing at the same glass at the same ships that I can feel that difference between those two people is actual, tangible, not abstract.

I thought about my grandmother standing at this same railing sometime before I was born, looking at the same fleet with her Frontier Certification brand new in her file and all the deep-range routes behind her and this place ahead of her and whatever it was that gave someone who had been to wherever she had been and come back from it and decided to come home a certain quality. I asked her once if she missed the frontier and she looked at me for a long time with the expression that means she was going to answer truthfully instead of easily and said no, she didn't miss it. Missing it and having nothing left to do with it are not the same thing and she'll understand that when she comes back from somewhere she needs to go.

She started to get it before she left.

She thought about her contract in her PADD, Tessivak approach, variance zone, three-year initial term, possible renewals, etc., and she thought about what her grandma said about coming back and what her mothers "frontier" quality really is when you take a closer look, not distance exactly and not hardness, but a certain type of clarity -- the look of someone who had to figure out exactly what they're made of because they had to be somewhere that made them realize that and did.

She wants to figure that out.

She put her hand on the railing one last time and touched the coolness of the gold trim underneath her fingers and looked at the ships for another minute or so, then headed back inside.

When she walked through the door her mom glanced up from across the table, read Lindsy's face in the way she's been reading Lindsy's face since Lindsy was old enough to have a face worth reading, and something in her eyes settled into something between pride and sadness, and possibly both at once - as is often the case with things that matter most, especially when they refuse to fit neatly into clean boxes.