She had not skipped that part.
She looked at the fleet above the city and picked out the vessels she recognized by silhouette, the bulk freighter running the Rigel II corridor that she had charted her second year, the courier that ran the inner system mail route that she had covered for three months when its regular navigator had taken medical leave, the distant running lights of something larger on the outer approach that was either a Federation transport or a Rigellian Defense vessel and that she would have been able to identify positively from a sensor console in approximately forty seconds. She knew this space. She knew it well enough to leave it.
That was the point. That had always been the point.
The dinner inside was warm and lit, the private table still set with the remains of the meal, the blue velvet chairs and the gold light and her family moving through the easy space of an evening that had not yet become what it was going to become. Her father was finishing a story she had heard before about a transit calculation he had made in 2361 that had saved a cargo run and that improved slightly with each retelling in ways that were specific enough to remain plausible and generous enough to serve the story, and her younger brother was half listening with the expression of someone who had heard it before and was politely not saying so, and her mother was watching the terrace door in the way she had been watching it since Lindsy had excused herself forty minutes ago, which meant her mother already knew something had happened and was waiting to find out what it was.
Her mother always knew.
It was one of the things Lindsy had found both comforting and occasionally inconvenient her entire life and tonight it was both simultaneously.
She turned away from the fleet and looked at the room through the glass and thought about the first time her parents had brought her here as a child and how large the viewport had seemed then, how the fleet above the city had looked like something from one of the navigational stories her grandmother used to tell, vast and full of directions she had not yet learned to name. The viewport was the same size it had always been. The fleet was the same fleet. She was simply not the same child and standing here now in the adult version of herself looking through the same glass at the same ships she felt the distance between those two versions of the same person as something specific and real rather than abstract.
She thought about her grandmother standing at this same railing at some point before Lindsy was born, looking at the same fleet with the frontier certification newly in her file and the deep range routes behind her and the estate ahead and the particular quality of someone who had been where she had been and come back from it and chosen to come home. Lindsy had asked her once whether she missed the frontier and her grandmother had looked at her for a long moment with the expression that meant she was going to say something true rather than something easy and had said that missing it and being done with it were not mutually exclusive and that she would understand that better when she came back from somewhere she had needed to go.
She was starting to understand it even before she had gone.
She thought about the contract in her PADD, the Tessivak approach and the variance zone and the three year initial term and the renewal options and the particular quality of a document that represented a direction rather than a destination, and she thought about what her grandmother had said about coming back and about what her mother's frontier quality actually was when you looked at it closely, not distance exactly and not hardness but a particular kind of clarity, the look of someone who had been somewhere that required them to know exactly what they were made of and had found out.
She wanted to find out.
She put her hand on the railing one more time and felt the cool of the gold trim under her fingers and looked at the ships for a moment longer and then went back inside.
Her mother looked up from across the table when she came through the door and read her face in the way she had been reading her face since Lindsy was old enough to have a face worth reading and something in her expression settled into the quality that was not quite pride and not quite grief and was probably both simultaneously in the way that the things that mattered most tended to be both simultaneously and resist being separated into cleaner categories.