Chapter 3: Room Six
The neon sign of the Sagebrush Motel flickered in amber intervals, casting long, sickly shadows across the cracked asphalt parking lot.
Jax walked slowly, his heavy engineer boots grinding gravel. Cole walked two steps ahead, his canvas sneakers making no sound at all. Martha watched from the diner porch down the road, her apron removed, arms crossed over her chest like a sentinel guarding a border.
The door to Room 6 was pale green, weathered by decades of prairie hail. Cole didn't knock. He reached up, turned the brass knob, and pushed it open.
The room smelled of menthol, rubbing alcohol, and the faint, sweet scent of lavender soap—Clara’s soap.
A single floor lamp threw warm light over a queen-sized bed. Propped against two flat pillows was a woman whose skin had the translucence of fine parchment. Her auburn hair, once a wild mane that whipped across his chest on desert highways, was cut short, revealing the sharp, fragile architecture of her collarbones. Her hands, resting atop a faded floral quilt, were thin, the veins prominent and blue.
When the screen door clicked shut, her dark eyes fluttered open.
She didn't startle. She didn't gasp. She looked at Jax standing in the threshold—his leather cut, his graying beard, his hands hanging limp at his sides—and let out a long, fragile exhale that sounded like autumn leaves scraping concrete.
""You got old, Jax,"" Clara whispered.
Jax could not step forward. His boots felt rooted into the floorboards. The tough persona that had survived prison yards, barroom brawls, and thirty years of desert sun shattered into fine dust.
""Clara,"" he choked out, the name tearing at his throat.
""I didn't think you'd stop,"" she said, her voice thin, struggling for breath. ""Cole said you were sitting at the counter. Just like you used to.""
Jax looked from her hollowed cheeks to the small oxygen concentrator humming beside the nightstand. The clear plastic cannula looped around her ears, feeding life into lungs that were clearly surrendering.
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""What happened to you?"" he asked, falling to one knee beside the bed, heedless of the dust on his jeans.
Clara gave a faint, bittersweet smile that didn't reach her tired eyes. ""Time happened, Jackson. And the doctors in Billings don't know how to fix a heart that just got tired of beating.""
