Chapter 4: The Hospital Tag
I set the milk glass down without spilling a drop. The diner noise hummed around us—clattering silverware, the low rumble of country music from the radio, the chatter of locals—but inside our little red booth, it felt like we were underwater.
"I don't need your money," I said, remembering the exact words Sarah had practiced with me in her raspy, failing voice before the nurses wheeled her away. "And I don't want your bike. But Mom said a promise is a promise, even if it takes eight years to cash it in."
Jax’s fingers tightened on the back of the wooden chair until his knuckles turned the color of chalk. "Sarah didn't want anything to do with me when I packed my bags," he said, his voice dropping so low I had to lean forward to catch the words. "She told me I was dead weight. Said the road was all I was good for."
"She was mad," I replied simply, using the logic of an eight-year-old who had spent months interpreting adult heartache. "People say things when they're scared. But before she died, she gave me this."
I reached into my inner jacket pocket again—the one with the torn lining where I kept my most precious things—and pulled out a second piece of paper. It wasn't a photo this time. It was a small, folded hospital discharge slip, yellowed at the creases, bearing the stamp of the county medical center and a date exactly eight years and two months old.
Jax reached out, his hand surprisingly steady as he took the folded paper. He unfolded it with slow, deliberate care, his eyes tracking across the printed text, past the doctor's signature, down to the father's line where a blank space had been left deliberately unfilled by my mother out of stubborn pride, but accompanied by a handwritten note clipped to the margin in her looping cursive: He has your eyes, Jax. Whether you want to look into them or not.
For a long, agonizing minute, the big man didn't move. The rough biker veneer seemed to slip away, layer by heavy leather layer, leaving behind the tired, weathered face of a man who realized the past had finally caught up to him on a lonely stretch of highway.
"Damn it, Sarah," he whispered to the empty air between us.
May you like
He folded the paper back up with meticulous precision and slipped it into the inside pocket of his vest, right over his heart. Then he looked up at me, his hazel eyes—the exact twin of my own staring back at him—clearing of all defiance.
"All right, kid," Jax muttered, standing up and scraping the chair back. "Grab your jacket. We're getting off this highway."
