He found the boy one evening in the hallway outside the door at the far end of the house.
The room that had been his wife's sewing room, and that he'd closed the door on 18 months after she died and hadn't opened since.
Caleb wasn't trying to get in.
He was just standing there looking at the door with those glasses slightly too big for his face and his hands clasped behind his back like a small professor.
"That room's closed," Gideon said.
Caleb turned around, unrattled.
"I know. I could tell."
"Then why are you standing in front of it?"
Caleb considered the question with the seriousness it apparently deserved.
"I wanted to know which room it was."
Gideon looked at him.
"Why?"
"Because you go by it every night on the way to check the back windows, and your footsteps change when you pass it. They go slower and then faster again right after. Like you don't want to stop, but you don't want to keep moving either."
The hallway was very quiet.
Gideon was a man who had spent three years making sure his face didn't tell people things without his permission.
He had worked at it.
He thought he'd gotten good at it.
Apparently, he had not.
"You notice a lot," he said.
"My mother says that too."
Caleb pushed his glasses up.
"She doesn't always mean it as a compliment."
Despite himself, something shifted in Gideon's expression.
Not quite a smile.
But not nothing either.
"What else have you noticed?"
Caleb tilted his head.
"You fix things yourself, even when they're small. The hinge on the second stair was loose, and you fixed it yesterday morning before anyone was up. The strap on Dermit's saddle was wearing through, and you replaced it without asking. You check the back windows at night even when the weather's fine."
He paused.
"You live like you're expecting something to go wrong."
Gideon looked at this 10-year-old boy with his sliding glasses and his careful observations and said nothing for a long moment.
"Things go wrong on a ranch," he said finally. "Winter doesn't ask permission."
"I know," Caleb said. "But that's not why you do it."
He looked up at Gideon with the kind of directness that only children and very old people had the unselfconsciousness to manage.
"My father was like that too after my sister died. Before he got sick. He checked things all the time. Things that didn't need checking."
Gideon felt the words settle into him somewhere they didn't immediately leave.
"I'm going to bed," Caleb said as though he'd simply finished a conversation about weather. "Good night, Mr. Voss."
"Gideon," he said without planning to.
Caleb looked back at him from the end of the hall.
"Good night, Gideon."
He went up the stairs.
Gideon stood in the hallway for another moment, looking at the closed door.
Then he walked past it, checked the back windows, which were fine, as they almost always were, and went to bed.
He lay awake longer than usual.
Miles, the eight-year-old, didn't say much.
That was the first thing Gideon noticed, and it took him longer than it should have to understand what that meant.
At first, he assumed the boy was just quiet by nature.