I leave Shane alone in the room while I go to grab some suture material. Everything I need is in the supply room except for the lidocaine to numb him up. Since that’s a medication, I’ll need Dorothy to dispense it. So I return to her office, where she again takes her sweet time telling me to come in.

“Done already?” she asks me.

I press my lips together. “I need to stitch up a forehead laceration. I need some lidocaine.”

“We’re all out.”

I blink at her. “Excuse me?”

She shrugs. “We carry a small amount of anesthetic, but at the moment, we’re out of stock.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Stitch him up without it.”

My jaw tightens. What is wrong with this woman? These men are human beings. How could she be so cavalier about their health? I have more reason to hate Shane Nelson than anyone else here, and maybe I should be happy for a chance to torture him a bit after what he did to me, but even I think he deserves to be treated with dignity. “It’s inhumane.”

Dorothy lifts her eyes skyward. “Don’t be so dramatic, Brooke. It’s a few needle sticks. I’m sure he won’t mind. Or you can glue it if you want.”

This laceration is too messy for glue, but Dorothy doesn’t care about my protests. And if she tells me I need to problem solve again, I’m going to scream. Even though that’s apparently what I have to do.

I return to the examining room, where Shane is still sitting on the table with his open head wound. He looks up when I come in, and a lot of the anger that I saw in his face when we first locked eyes has now dissipated. Maybe he isn’t as furious with me as I had thought, even though it was my testimony that put him in here. All these years, I imagined he was sitting in a prison cell, tattooing death threats against me on his body, but he doesn’t seem all that angry. Just… well, kind of sad. Beaten down.

“So here’s the situation,” I tell him. “I have the suture material, but we’re all out of lidocaine. So—”

“It’s fine,” Shane interrupts me before I can tell him his options. “Stitch me up without it.”

“Are you sure? Because—”

“Yeah, it’s fine. They’re always out of lidocaine.”

He does not seem at all fazed by this. I wonder how it felt to have that long jagged scar at the base of his throat sutured without lidocaine.

“All right,” I say. Let’s get this over with. “I’m going to need you to lie down.”