Chapter 1: The Challenge

I was halfway through a mouthful of Aunt Jo’s sweet potato casserole when Jason pushed his chair back, the scrape loud enough to cut through the laughter. The kitchen was rich with the scent of baked ham, cinnamon, and something sweet bubbling from the oven, but Jason’s restless energy seemed to chill the air even before he spoke.

He slapped his BMW car keys onto the table and challenged, “Anyone here brave enough to put their money where their mouth is?”

The keys landed with a metallic clink, silencing even the TV football game in the background. His smirk was pure show-off—he wanted everyone to know he was the alpha at this table tonight.

I knew he was just showing off his new BMW.

He’d even posted a story—#BMWlife, leather seats gleaming, captioned: ‘Ohio never looked so good.’ The rest of us still drove beat-up trucks or hand-me-down sedans. Jason wasn’t gambling—he was reminding us who’d made it out of our blue-collar corner of Ohio.

Everyone was startled. Hands shot up, waving off the idea. “Hey, this is just for fun, none of us are crazy enough to go there,” folks said, then they started showering him with praise—how impressive it was to drive a BMW at his age.

Even Aunt Jo, who never cared much about cars, piped up about her neighbor’s son dreaming of driving something half that nice. The mood tried to slide back to light, but the nervousness in the laughter was impossible to miss.

I hesitated, because I was holding three Kings.

My heart thudded, palms sweating against the battered deck. That kind of hand didn’t come often, but Jason’s swagger made even a sure thing feel risky. I looked around—my dad chewing his lip, my uncle already calculating what would happen if this blew up.

Jason, soaking up compliments, was about to shuffle the cards again when I quietly placed my Ford keys on the table and said, almost under my breath, “I’ll match your bet.”

For a second, I remembered being twelve, losing at Monopoly and hearing Jason laugh. But this time, I kept my hand steady as I laid down the scratched, blue Ford key fob. It wasn’t much, but it was mine. My voice was low, but it landed like a thunderclap.

The room went dead silent.

You could feel the tension snap—the kitchen went from Christmas-card cozy to courtroom cold in a blink. For a split second, even the old cuckoo clock above the mantle seemed to hold its breath.

Everyone stared at me in disbelief. Jason’s eyes widened, and for a moment, his bravado flickered as if he wasn’t sure if I was crazy or just calling his bluff. My hands stayed steady, but inside, my stomach churned like a winter storm rolling across the fields outside.

Gone were the jokes and the easy teasing—suddenly we were two boxers circling each other in the ring. The kitchen lights seemed harsher, shadows stretching across the table. The smell of turkey and cinnamon rolls faded; all I could sense was the cold sweat at my neck.

But I didn’t regret it. He was the one who put up the BMW keys first.

There was a slow burn in my chest—a stubbornness I’d inherited from my dad. If Jason wanted to play this game, I wasn’t going to be the one to blink. Not tonight.

If he could be so cutthroat with his own relatives, I didn’t see any reason to worry about his feelings anymore.

I remembered every Thanksgiving and Fourth of July when he’d lorded his success over us, using his fancy degree and fat paycheck like a cudgel. Tonight, I wasn’t going to let him walk all over me in front of everyone.