A Good Night's Sleep

Philippa Greer arrives on the West Coast with an M.A. in Film Studies, a portfolio of sharp, honest documentary work, and the kind of ambition that doesn't know yet what it's up against. When a high-stakes insurance video project lands on a brutal three-day deadline, she accepts help from two sources: the family physician who prescribes a sleep medication without asking the right questions, and a research doctor running a clinical study that promises focus, clarity, and industry connections.

For a week, both medications do exactly what she hoped. Philippa works with a precision and speed that feel almost supernatural-footage that resisted her for days surrenders in hours. She secures an extension. She finishes ahead of schedule. She believes she has finally broken through.

Then she wakes up in her stocking feet on the median of a four-lane highway at two in the morning, with no memory of how she got there.

The aftermath pulls everything apart. A subpoena. A deposition. Questions about the footage she edited during the nights she can't account for. Two physicians before their licensing boards. And a phone call from her attorney with a number-a settlement figure that would change everything she's been working toward-waiting for an answer she hasn't given yet.

A Good Night's Sleep is a taut, character-driven novella about ambition, medical trust, the fine line between help and harm, and the complicated arithmetic of deciding who is owed what when the damage is real but the future is still unwritten.