It breaks people. People who were sure they were prepared. He wasn't trying to scare her. He was trying to give her an accurate picture. It seemed like the honest thing to do.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "What broke the last person? " He felt that land. He hadn't expected it. "The winter," he said, because it was the shortest version of a truth that was much longer and not something he was going to explain to a woman he had met 40 minutes ago. "Just the winter. " She didn't press it.
She looked at her hands on the leather bag and then she looked back out at the road and they traveled the rest of the way to the ranch in a silence that had changed slightly. The way a room changes when someone has said something true in it. Elsie was waiting on the porch. She had been told twice to wait inside where it was warm and had agreed both times with the particular sincerity of a 5-year-old who has no intention of complying. She was standing on the top porch step in her coat with her red scarf wound twice around her neck and her dark eyes fixed on the approaching wagon with an intensity that made Gideon's chest do something complicated.
She was the only good thing he had managed in the last 3 years, maybe in longer than that. He pulled the wagon to a stop in the yard and got down. And before he could say anything to Elsie, she had already launched herself off the step. Not toward him, which was what he'd have expected, but toward the woman on the wagon bench who was just beginning to climb down. "Are you her? " Elsie demanded.
"Are you the one coming to live with us? " Vivien had one hand on the wagon side and one foot on the wheel spoke, and she stopped mid descent to look at the child addressing her. Something in her face shifted in a way that Gideon had not yet seen. The composed mass cracked sideways for just a moment, and what came through it was not sentimentality exactly, but something genuine and a little unguarded. I am, she said. Are you Elsie?
Papa said you were coming from far away. Elsie studied her with the complete absence of social filtering that belongs exclusively to small children. You're pretty. Is that your trunk? It's very big.
What's in it, Elsie? Gideon's voice carried the warning note. It's all right, Vivien said. She stepped down from the wagon and crouched to Elsie's level in a single easy motion. There was something practiced about it, Gideon noticed.
The way you crouch when you're accustomed to speaking with children. The trunk has some things I've kept for a long time. Important things. Like what? Elsie asked.