The private clinic on the western edge of Lethbridge, Alberta occupies a converted professional building where a small team of healthcare practitioners manages a steady caseload of patients seeking primary care, minor procedures, and ongoing chronic disease management. Within this clinic works a registered nurse in her early thirties, a practitioner who joined the staff after several years of acute care experience at a nearby hospital and who has developed a reputation among colleagues for competence under pressure and genuine rapport with patients navigating complex treatment regimens. She is raising 2 young children largely on her own, managing the demanding schedules of shift work, daycare logistics, and the financial pressures that accompany single parenthood in a mid-sized Alberta city where childcare costs consume a significant portion of a nursing salary. What her employer does not know, what her colleagues have not yet discerned, and what her professional liability insurer has never been asked to contemplate is that this nurse has developed a progressive opioid dependency that has quietly intensified over the preceding months, moving from the management of a legitimate injury through escalating tolerance and into a pattern of conduct that will soon place her nursing registration, her liberty, and her professional insurance coverage into simultaneous jeopardy.