Caleb's eyes are touched by some strange light at that; in the land of the lost and abandoned it's hardly unusual to find someone who doesn't want to talk about her family, but--it gets him, every time, and he's good at reading it in the smallest of gestures or glances: these bruises dealt by happenings far more subtle and far more damaging than they might seem on the surface: the people who raise you don't have to hit you to leave marks. They don't even have to touch.
So when he looks at her it's - perhaps unexpectedly - soft, even if that moment might be gone before it's even really readable. It's not pity, it's just--knowing what it is like to be homesick for a place a person has never even been. "Maybe. Abrupt is cool with me, though, so--you pick the subject, yeah? I promise to roll with it even if I'm totally making shit up."