Because Liliana Hearts isn’t just a name. It’s a verb. It’s a way of moving through a world that forgets to be tender. She hearts the broken, the forgotten, the in-between. And one day, she hopes, someone will heart her back.
At night, she walks home under flickering streetlamps and composes valentines to strangers. To the man who always returns his shopping cart: you are a quiet hero. To the girl crying on the bus last Tuesday: you are not too much. She never mails them. Instead, she folds them into hearts—the kind you learned in third grade—and leaves them wedged between fence slats or tucked under windshield wipers. Liliana Hearts
She runs a tiny café on a street that rain seems to love more than most. The chalkboard menu changes daily, but the constant is her name: Liliana’s , with a hand-drawn heart beneath it, always slightly lopsided. The regulars don’t just come for the cardamom latte. They come for the way she remembers their sorrows—the divorce, the sick cat, the job that broke their spirit. She pours their coffee and adds a heart in the foam. Not always on purpose. Sometimes it just appears, like a reflex. Because Liliana Hearts isn’t just a name
She pauses, coffee pot in hand, and for the first time in a long time, she doesn’t correct him. She just touches the heart on her wrist—faint now, almost faded—and whispers, “Maybe it is.” She hearts the broken, the forgotten, the in-between
One afternoon, a customer notices her name on the receipt: Liliana Hearts . He smiles and says, “That sounds like a promise.”
Her own heart? That one, she keeps in a locked drawer. Not out of coldness, but out of preservation. It’s been cracked before, taped back together with poetry and stubborn hope. Liliana Hearts loves like a gardener in winter—quietly, underground, trusting that something will eventually break through the frost.
Liliana Hearts doesn’t sign her name with a flourish—she stamps it. A small, worn rubber heart, smudged pink, pressed into the margins of library books, the corners of love letters she’ll never send, and the back of her own wrist when she’s nervous.