Page 13 of Finding Gideon

He held out his hand. I shook it, feeling the faint roughness from years of handling animals and equipment against my palm.

“Good,” he said. “You’re hired.”

Chapter 5

Malcolm

I should’ve told him I’d think about it. The smart move would’ve been to sleep on it, call a couple of references, maybe give it a week. That’s how you hire someone when you’re running a clinic.

But I’d seen Gideon with that injured dog—blood on his hands, pressure on the wound. You can teach someone how to mop floors or restock syringes. You can’t teach that. And before I could talk myself out of it, the offer was out of my mouth.

That wasn’t like me. At all.

Jess had been a walk-in too, sure, but it’d taken me two months to let her do more than answer phones. And even then, I’d triple-checked everything she touched. Trust was earned in increments, not handed out with a handshake. At least, that was how I’d always done it.

So what the hell was I doing?

Gideon was in the next room, sorting supplies into the cabinets. I could hear the soft shuffle of boxes, the muted click of drawers opening and closing. He worked with a kind of deliberate focus—checking each label twice before setting something in place.

I leaned against the doorway, arms crossed. He was wearing one of my older clinic t-shirts, the one I’d handed him earlier after the morning’s chaos. His hair was a little mussed from work, a faint smudge of iodine on his forearm.

“You’re in the wound care section,” I said.

He glanced at the antiseptics in his hand, then back at the shelf. “Yeah. I saw the label—just making sure everything’s in the right spot before I move on.” His voice was calm, unbothered, like the kind of person who’d rather do a job right than rush through it.

“You don’t have to do all that right now,” I told him. “Take a break.”

“I don’t mind.”

That was the thing—he didn’t seem to mind any of it. The cleaning, the learning curve, the quiet I kept wrapped around the place like insulation.

And that silence—that was the part that threw me. I was used to it, relied on it. But now, every time I walked into a room after him, there was some small trace he’d been there. A coffee mug set neatly by the sink. The faint scent of his soap lingering in the air—clean, woodsy. Not much, but enough to register.

I told myself it was just me adjusting to someone else in my space. That was all. But it didn’t have the sharp edges of a disruption. It felt… easy. And that was the part I wasn’t sure what to do with.

“Have you ever handled a ferret?” I asked suddenly, more to distract myself than anything.

Gideon blinked. “A what now?”

I pushed off the doorframe. “Come on. Time to meet Jasper. He’s a regular.”

In the back room, the little bastard was already hissing from behind the bars of his carrier. Seventeen inches of fury, teeth, and drama. His owner had warned me he’d missed a dose of hismeds yesterday, and it showed. He was bouncing off the sides like a rubber ball.

“Let me guess,” Gideon said, peering in. “That’s the client.”

“Jasper,” I confirmed. “And he bites.”

Gideon crouched, getting eye level with the ferret. “Yeah? You and me both, buddy.” He spoke low, calm. “What’s the plan?”

“Hold him still so I can check the leg. I’ll show you how to scruff him. He’s got a minor fracture we’ve been monitoring, but if he’s still limping, we may need to?—”

I didn’t finish. Gideon reached in—slow, deliberate—and Jasper froze. Not like the sedated kind of still, either. Alert, but watching him. Gideon’s hand moved in without flinching, smooth and sure, like he’d done this a hundred times.

“You’ve done this before,” I said.

“Not with a ferret,” he said, lifting Jasper with surprising ease. “But I’ve handled enough scared strays to know the trick is moving like you’re not a threat. This guy’s just… smaller. And faster.”

When we were finished with the exam and Jasper had settled again, Gideon latched the carrier, stood, and glanced around like he needed something else to do. A moment later, he started reorganizing the supply shelf—methodical, quiet, like order was its own kind of comfort.