Page 27 of The Challenge

The three of us had a pretty quiet dinner, considering my daughter usually liked to run off at the mouth during meals. But she loved Chick-fil-A so much that she barely came up for air.

Almost as soon as I’d had that thought, though, the questions started.

“What’s something fun you guys used to do when you lived with Chloe’s parents?” Effie asked.

I looked over at Chloe. “Actually, you reminded me, Effie, that I have a waffle maker in my truck that Chloe and I used to make homemade waffles back in the day. We should make some this weekend.”

“Yay!” She bounced in her seat. “I love waffles.”

“I know you do. We just never make them from scratch, only the frozen ones.”

Effie turned to Chloe excitedly. “Will you still be here this weekend?”

Chloe nodded. “I think so…yeah.”

“She will,” I added.

“I will?” Chloe arched her brow.

“You’re not going anywhere. Not that soon, at least. I feel pretty confident in that.”

“You’re probably right.” She flashed me an impish grin. “I can think of something else fun we used to do. At least it started out that way.”

“What are you getting at?” I narrowed my eyes.

“The Challenge.” She smirked.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that she’d bring up our little game. It’d been a huge part of our lives back then.

“We used to play this game, Effie. We called it The Challenge, and it was a little competition we had going.”

If this was her way of trying to break any remaining ice between us, she’d just taken a sledgehammer to it. But while that old game was partly what bonded us, it was also what had ended us.

“A little competition is putting it mildly.” I sighed as I looked up at the ceiling. “That game was…something else.”

Effie looked between us. “How do you play?”

“We’d leave each other challenges on bright pink notes. Pretty simple. But we took them seriously.”

“Very seriously.” I chuckled. “Too seriously.”

“It all started when your father took a sticky note from our kitchen drawer and passed it to me one night during dinner. It said, Enter the contest. I’d been talking about how I was afraid to enter this photo contest because I didn’t think my pictures were good enough.”

Effie’s eyebrows shot up. “What kind of photos?”

“I used to take photos of horses for fun. My family always told me they were really good, but I never believed them.”

“They were really good,” I said. “I remember the one of that horse stealing the other horse’s food.”

Chloe blushed. “Anyway, I ended up entering the contest.”

Effie leaned in. “Did you win?”

She shook her head. “No. But it was good practice in learning how to put myself out there and accept failure.”

“So how did it become a game?”

“Well, after that, I left him a note with a challenge of my own,” Chloe said. “And so it went from there. He technically started it, but I was the one who made it a thing. Some of the challenges were really simple. But over time, they got a little more…advanced.”