The Night Nurse

Chapter 10 — Morphine

Priya knew Helen Voss’s routine the way she knew her own heartbeat.

It wasn’t sinister, knowing it. It was just — nursing. You worked alongside someone for four years, you absorbed their rhythms by osmosis. Helen arrived at 6:40 every morning, twenty minutes before shift change, because she liked to “commune with the unit” before the chaos started. She took her lunch at 12:15 in the break room, always the same Tupperware of lentil soup, always offered around — *”You look thin, sweetheart, have some.”* And at 2:30 every afternoon, she disappeared for ten minutes — to the locker room, to check her phone, to breathe, she’d once told Priya with a wink. *Even legends need to pee, sweetheart.*

At 2:30 every afternoon, Helen Voss’s locker stood unattended.

Priya told herself she wasn’t going to do it. She told herself this on the bus to the hospital, watching the city slide past in gray slabs. She told herself in the lobby bathroom where she changed into scrubs she’d kept from before the suspension — old ones, faded, with her name embroidered on the chest like a ghost of herself. She told herself as she walked the corridors with her head down, a surgical mask covering half her face, a visitor’s sticker she’d palmed from the front desk stuck to her chest, her heart hammering so loud she was sure the telemetry monitors could hear it.

She wasn’t going to do it. And then she was standing in the locker room, and it was 2:34, and her hands were moving, and the combination — Helen’s birthday, she’d seen her punch it in a hundred times without thinking, 4-17-68 — clicked open under her fingers like it wanted to be opened.

The locker smelled like lavender hand cream and old paper. Scrubs folded with military precision. A framed photo of Helen’s late husband — Thomas, dead six years, smiling in a fishing vest. A paperback with a cracked spine. A spare stethoscope, the tubing worn soft with use. A tin of mints.

And in the back corner, behind the folded scrubs, wrapped in a plastic glove—

A vial.

Priya’s breath stopped. For a moment the locker room went very bright and very far away, the way the world does right before you faint. She unwrapped it with trembling fingers. The label was unmistakable: **MORPHINE SULFATE 10 MG/ML**. Hospital pharmacy issue. The lot number matched the ICU’s stock. It was full, sealed, legitimate — and it had no business being in a nurse’s personal locker.

Her mind raced, throwing up explanations like sandbags against a flood. Maybe Helen had confiscated it from a patient or a visitor. Maybe she’d found it on a med cart and meant to return it to pharmacy. Maybe some confused float nurse had stashed it there by mistake.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

But nurses didn’t keep narcotics in their lockers. *Ever.* It was a firing offense at minimum, a criminal one at worst. Every nurse on earth knew that the way they knew their own name. You found a stray vial, you logged it, you witnessed it, you returned it — you did not wrap it in a glove and hide it behind your scrubs.

Priya stood there holding the vial, and the locker room tilted around her, and she understood with a cold, sickening clarity exactly what she was looking at.

She thought about the pharmacy logs — her badge, her credentials, draws made while she was in another room with another patient. She thought about the wiped security footage and the one forgotten camera with its red eye blinking in the dark. She thought about Mr. Harlow, dosed on a day shift in broad daylight, Helen the nurse of record.

She thought about Helen’s soup. Helen’s hand on her shoulder. *I believe in you, sweetheart.*

Her first instinct was to take the vial straight to Detective Ortiz. March into the precinct, slap it on his desk, and say: *Here. Here’s your killer. Here’s your proof.*

But even as the thought formed, she watched it die. A vial in a locker proved nothing. Helen would say she’d found it on a cart and forgotten to log it — sloppy, fireable, but not murder. Ortiz would ask how Priya got it, and Priya would have to admit she’d broken into a colleague’s locker while suspended and under investigation for those same murders, and Ortiz would look at her the way he had across the interview table — patient, certain, *pitying* — and the vial would become evidence against *her*, not Helen. The desperate suspended nurse, planting evidence, breaking in, lashing out.

Circumstantial. Explainable. Not proof.

Priya wrapped the vial back in the glove. She put it exactly where she’d found it, behind the scrubs, at the same angle, the label facing the same way. She closed the locker and spun the combination and stood there with her forehead against the cool metal, breathing hard through the mask.

She took nothing. She could prove nothing.

But she knew.

She *knew*, with the bone-deep certainty of a nurse who has watched a thousand monitors and learned to read what they don’t say — Helen Voss was behind this. The legend. The mentor. The warmest person in the building. The woman who had held her hand on orientation day and told her nurses run on facts, not feelings.

Priya walked out of the locker room on shaking legs, past the nurses’ station where no one looked twice at another masked figure in scrubs, out into the gray afternoon. She didn’t remember the bus ride home. She didn’t remember changing out of the scrubs. She came back to herself sitting at her kitchen table, the legal pad in front of her, the pen already in her hand.

She wrote one line at the bottom of the page, under all the facts:

*I know who it is. And I have no way to prove it.*

The pen hovered. Then she added three more words.

*Not yet, anyway.*