Maya didn’t think of her family as people at first.
She thought of them as numbers.
Six years. Three years. Zero.
It made everything easier to understand.
Aarav, her oldest brother, was six years older than her. That gap had always felt like a mountain when she was younger. When she was eight, he was already fourteen—already halfway into a world she couldn’t enter yet. He had friends she didn’t know, problems she didn’t understand, and a life that moved faster than hers.
But even then, he always slowed down for her.
He would sit on the floor with her when she was learning spelling words, even when his own homework was waiting. He would pretend her childish drawings were “art exhibitions” and hang them on the fridge like they mattered to the world. He made her feel like she wasn’t small—just… still growing.
Then came the twins, Rohan and Kunal, three years older than her. They were a package deal. If one spoke, the other finished the sentence. If one got in trouble, the other was usually nearby laughing about it.
To Maya, they were like storms you could predict. Loud, fast, impossible to ignore—but strangely comforting because they always passed.
And then there was Maya herself.
The youngest.
The one everyone looked at and thought: she’ll be okay because she has them.
And for a long time… she believed that too.
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