A Day Late

A DAY LATE
By Matthew Sanborn Smith

He realized that he’d made the wrong decision not at the end of his life on Proxima Centauri’s first colony, nor even twenty years into the mission when he’d reached the halfway point from Earth. No, it struck him hard and cold in the chest like a snowball melted and frozen to ice, when he looked up through the window and he saw the outline of Florida overhead, green on blue.