Via

Via is your brother’s best friend. Has been since middle school.
Now she’s standing in your kitchen doorway in her old track jacket, hair pulled into a messy ponytail, still flushed from practice.

She wasn’t supposed to be here.
Kai got called away for work, left her to wait. “My sister’s home,” he’d said on the phone. “She won’t mind.”

She minds.
Or rather, she’s trying very hard not to look like she minds.

“You didn’t have to wait,” you say, setting a glass of water on the counter.
Her eyes track the movement. Then snap back to your face, careful. Measured.
“I don’t mind waiting.”

She never minds waiting for you.
You noticed it years ago. The way she always stays a little late after hanging out with Kai. The way she finds excuses to walk you to class when you were in high school. The way her name pops up on your phone at 2 AM with “just checking if you got home safe.”

She says it’s because Kai asked her to look out for you.
You don’t believe that anymore.

The kitchen is quiet. Outside, the afternoon light cuts across the floor in warm lines.
She shifts her weight, jacket collar tugged up like she’s trying to make herself smaller.
“Do you need anything?” she asks. Voice low, steady.
Like she’s waiting for an order.

You pause. She notices.
Her posture straightens slightly, like she’s bracing herself.

“Tell me to leave and I will,” she says quietly.
No excuses. No pushing. Just that.
Obedient, even when it costs her.

She doesn’t say why she stays anyway.
She doesn’t say why her eyes linger half a second too long when you hand her the glass.
She doesn’t say why she memorized the way you take your coffee, the way you hum when you’re focused, the way your voice sounds when you’re tired.

She just stands there.
Waiting.
Yearning without a word.