PART 2
The silence in the meeting room of the Almeida Brasil Group became so heavy that it seemed possible to touch it.
The other three interviewers exchanged terrified looks, as if they did not know if the CEO had gone crazy for good or had just blatantly flirted with the most brilliant candidate in the selection.
I felt as if the chair disappeared from under me.
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.
There, in front of me, was not only the powerful man of Faria Lima.
The boy was alone who one day also needed hope.
“The night I left, after my grandmother died, I had almost nothing. But I took one thing with me.
Gabriel opened the drawer of the table and took out a small piece of paper, folded carefully.
It was already yellowed by time.
The worn edges.
He put it in my hand.
My chest froze.
It was a note written in childish, crooked handwriting, full of errors and erasures.
“Gabriel, don’t leave. Today I studied a lot. I like you.”
My vision instantly blurred.
“You left it under my door the morning I left,” he said. “I carried this note with me for fifteen years. In every important meeting. In every failure. In every victory. When I thought I wouldn’t make it, I looked at him and remembered that, somewhere in the world, there was a girl who believed in me without demanding anything in return.
I put my hand to my mouth, unable to stop the tears.
“I thought you had forgotten me…
Gabriel took a step forward.
“I could forget my own name before I forget you.”
The Final Proposal
He stood before me and held my hand.
His fingers were warm. Firm. Real.
– So, Dr. Helena… The position of financial director is yours, because you have earned it with every night of study, every test, every resignation and every step you took alone.
My heart felt too small for what I was feeling.
He shook my hand lightly and continued:
“But there is another position… the one you offered in the backyard of the village, so many years ago. This one remains vague. And the CEO is an extremely demanding man. He only accepts a single candidate.
I laughed through tears, wiping my face with my other hand.
Then I lifted my chin, regaining the old stubbornness that had defined me at the age of seven.
“Well, Mr. CEO… I hope the benefits package is really good, because I’m a difficult employee to keep.
Gabriel smiled in that way that always dismantled all my defenses.
“The contract is for life.
And before I could answer anything, he shortened the distance between us and sealed with a soft kiss the promise that time could never erase.
At that moment, I understood something with absolute clarity:
I hadn’t gone to that interview just to get a job.
I had gone, unknowingly, to get back the most beautiful part of my childhood.
And Gabriel…
Gabriel had been waiting for me for fifteen years.
