She glanced south where the last military transport became a bright dot and then nothing at all. “I suspect,” she said, “Europe could use a hand.”
That night, Portland went back to being itself. The planetarium turned the stars to winter mode. Deering Oaks shook out the grass. The Old Port bars erased “Thank you, troops” chalkboards and replaced them with pumpkins and puns about gourd-geous cocktails. A fisherman tied off his skiff and said to his kid, “Remember the week the Space Force came for the lighthouse?”
“They were nice,” the kid said — which was true.
“What’s Poland?” he asked.
“Somewhere we should learn about,” the fisherman said. The kid nodded. And the tide kept doing what tides do: coming in, going out, like an answer that was always there if you looked in the right direction.