The Night Nurse

Chapter 2 — Suspension

The conference room on the fourth floor had no windows.

Priya sat at the long table with her hands folded and tried not to notice that the chairs across from her were all empty, while the chairs on her side were full — full of people who had come to decide what to do about her. Dr. Margaret Holloway, the chief of staff, sat at the head of the table with a folder that had Priya’s name on it. Beside her was a man from Human Resources whose name Priya hadn’t caught, and a woman from Risk Management whose name Priya wished she could forget.

“Ms. Sharma,” Dr. Holloway said, “I want to start by saying this is not a finding of wrongdoing.”

Priya’s shoulders dropped a fraction. Then Holloway opened the folder, and they rose again.

“Three patient deaths in seven weeks. All during your assigned shifts. All with toxicology reports pending that suggest elevated morphine levels.” Holloway didn’t look up from the page. “The board has voted to place you on unpaid suspension, effective immediately, pending the outcome of an internal investigation.”

The word *unpaid* landed like a slap. Priya’s rent was due on the first. Her student loans didn’t care about internal investigations.

“Dr. Holloway, I didn’t—” she started.

“I’m sure you didn’t,” the woman from Risk Management said, in a tone that suggested she’d said it many times before. “That’s what the investigation will establish. In the meantime, you’ll surrender your badge and your locker key today. You are not to enter any patient-care area of this hospital until further notice.”

The HR man slid a letter across the table. Cream paper, hospital letterhead, her name typed at the top in a font that looked too calm for what it was doing. Priya picked it up and read the words *administrative leave* and *pending review* and *cooperate fully*, and her hands started shaking, so she put it down again.

“How long?” she asked.

“As long as it takes,” Holloway said.

The locker room smelled like disinfectant and other people’s shampoo. Priya’s locker was on the end of the row, the one with the sticky hinge that she had meant to report for two years and never had. She turned the key for what she hoped wasn’t the last time, and the door swung open with its familiar tired creak.

Inside: her spare stethoscope. A pair of compression socks, still in the wrapper, that she’d bought and never worn. A photo taped to the inside of the door — her and her mother on the steps of their apartment building on Devon Avenue, Meera’s arm around her shoulders, both of them laughing at something the camera would never explain. Priya peeled the tape back carefully and folded the photo into her palm.

She was reaching for her spare scrubs when she felt someone watching.

Helen Voss stood in the doorway of the locker room, her silver hair pinned in its usual immaculate twist, her navy cardigan buttoned over her scrubs. Fifty-eight years old, thirty of them at St. Mercy, and the hospital might as well have been built around her. Nurses half her age asked her advice; doctors deferred to her judgment. She was the kind of nurse they named awards after while the person was still alive to be embarrassed by it.

“Oh, honey,” Helen said softly. She crossed the room and didn’t hesitate — she just pulled Priya into a hug, right there among the lockers, and Priya, who had not cried in the conference room, felt her throat close up. Helen smelled like lavender hand cream and the faint antiseptic ghost of a thousand shifts. “I heard. I’m so sorry.”

“They think I killed them, Helen.”

“Nobody thinks that.” Helen held her at arm’s length, hands on her shoulders, and looked her in the eye. Her gaze was steady and kind and absolutely certain. “Three tragedies happened on your watch, and the board has to be seen doing something. That’s all this is. Bureaucracy with a pulse.”

“You don’t know that,” Priya whispered.

“I know *you*,” Helen said. “I’ve watched you work for two years, Priya. You check dosages twice. You sit with the frightened ones after your shift ends. Nurses like you don’t hurt people. They just don’t.”

Priya wanted to believe her so badly it felt like a physical ache. She stuffed her scrubs into her tote bag, and the spare socks, and the protein bars she kept for the nights when the cafeteria closed. Her locker stood empty and accusing. On the inside of the door, four pale rectangles marked where the photo and her shift schedule and her nursing license copy and a laminated prayer her mother had given her had hung. She peeled the prayer off last and slipped it into her pocket.

When she turned around, Helen was still there, watching with an expression Priya couldn’t quite read — something between sorrow and a kind of terrible understanding, as if she’d seen this exact scene before, with a different nurse, in a different decade.

“Go home,” Helen said gently. “Rest. Let the process work. And Priya — if you need anything, anything at all, you call me. Day or night.”

Priya nodded, because her voice had left the building. She shouldered her tote and walked past Helen toward the door, and Helen’s hand came up, light as a moth, and rested for just a moment on Priya’s arm.

Priya kept her eyes on the floor tiles and counted them all the way to the elevator — thirty to a square, the way she used to count compressions. She was still counting when the doors slid shut on the fourth floor and took her down to the lobby and out into a gray Chicago morning that smelled like rain.

She didn’t open the letter until she was sitting in her car. She read it twice, the words blurring the second time. *Administrative leave. Effective immediately. Pending review.* At the bottom, in Holloway’s tight, slanted hand, a single handwritten line:

*The police have been notified as a matter of protocol.*

Priya sat very still. The rain started, freckling the windshield. Somewhere behind her, in the hospital she’d just been escorted out of like a stranger, a code alarm began to sound — that two-tone wail she knew better than her own heartbeat — and she realized, with a lurch like a missed step on the stairs, that this time she wouldn’t be running toward it.

She was the one they were running from.