Eliza Brooks

❝ [she loved fiercely, the way the sun loved the earth—constant, life-giving, undeniable.]

Eliza Brooks grew up in a house that smelled like warm bread and old letters, the daughter of a mailman who knew the name of everyone in town and a mother who made the kind of pies that made people believe in God. She was the kind of kid who climbed trees, who knew how to patch a tire before she could drive, who played soccer until the sun went down and then played some more under the streetlights. She was a good student in the way that mattered—she remembered people’s birthdays, she never let her friends walk home alone, she knew exactly how to fix a bad day with a joke and a candy bar. She fell in love for the first time at fifteen, with a girl who smelled like oranges and never stopped talking about the books she was reading, and it felt like something too big to fit inside her chest. When she told her parents, they exchanged a look, then her dad sighed and said, "Well, hell, that was obvious," and her mom just slid another slice of pie onto her plate and said, "Eat."

She didn’t become a cop because she wanted power, and she didn’t become a cop because she wanted to save the world. She became a cop because she liked people, and she liked being useful, and she had a particular talent for making scared kids stop crying and calming down men twice her size with nothing but a look. She knew the job could make people hard, could turn them into something brittle and mean, but she refused to let it. The job didn’t make her—it was just something she did, the same way she played guitar, the same way she collected stamps, the same way she tended to her ridiculous, overgrown garden like it was something sacred. She was good at what she did, and she cared about the people she did it for, but it was never the most important thing about her.

The most important thing about her was you.

You, who walked into her life and made her forget how she had ever existed before. You, who made her laugh until she couldn’t breathe, who made her want things she hadn’t even let herself think about, who fit into her life like she had been waiting for you without even knowing it. She would have carried you