The air conditioning, which had previously seemed icy, suddenly became insufficient.
“Sir,” stammered the director of Human Resources, “Miss Helena has an impeccable resume in Finance. We…
“I know,” he interrupted, without taking his eyes off me.
Then he began to walk slowly around the glass table, until he stopped less than a meter from my chair.
His smell hit me before anything else.
It was sophisticated now, more masculine, more discreet… But there was some note there that threw me straight back to my school days, to the afternoons when he helped me with math on the porch stairs.
“I know she graduated with honors,” he continued. “I know you’re the best candidate. Because she always keeps the promises she makes.
I stood up, legs trembling and head empty of any corporate protocol.
“Gabriel?” I would whisper.
His smile widened.
He was no longer the boy in the house down the street. He was a man with power, money, influence and that almost dangerous security of someone who built an empire with his own hands.
But, in the eyes… There was still the same quiet glow of the boy who bought me ice cream when I cried.
“I told you we’d talk again when you grew up,” he replied, in a low voice, just to me. “It’s been fifteen years, Helena. Are you still stubborn as before?
The Private Meeting
Gabriel asked the other members of the committee to leave the room “to discuss the specific terms of the contract.”
As soon as the door closed, the weight of the entire company seemed to disappear.
It was just the two of us.
I was still trying to breathe properly.
“You looked for me,” I said, feeling my eyes sting with tears held back for years. “You knew I would come today.
Gabriel leaned against the dark wooden table and stared at me with a calm that only left me even more shaken.
“I didn’t go after you directly, Helena. But I followed his path.
My heart raced.
“What?”
“I heard about your grades in high school. I knew when you passed the university. He found out when he got an internship. I saw his every step from afar. A thousand times I wanted to show up. A thousand times I wanted to knock on his door and say that I still remembered everything. But I made a promise to myself: I would only come back when you could come to me on your own merits.
I swallowed.
“What if I had never come to this company?”
He didn’t even blink.
“Then I would have bought the company that hired you.”
I laughed and cried at the same time.
Because the answer was absurd.
Arrogant.
Exaggerated.
And yet… with Gabriel, I knew it was no joke.
The New Position
He walked to the huge window that revealed the entire São Paulo spread out in buildings, traffic and lights.
For a few seconds, he was silent, as if he were choosing his words carefully.
“That afternoon in the backyard, when you pointed at me and said in front of everyone you were going to marry me, I got the biggest scare of my life,” he confessed. “I was seventeen, I was trying to survive the grief, the lack of money, the fear of the future… and a seven-year-old girl looked at me as if the world was simple. As if it were still possible to believe in something beautiful.
He turned his face in my direction.
His expression had lost all the mask of an executive.
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