Marina Lopes walked into the interns’ room at nine on a Monday morning with the kind of energy that made everyone sit up straighter in their chairs.
“Good morning.” She placed her laptop on the table, folded her arms, and looked at the six interns as if she were assessing a platoon. “You have three weeks.”
Lucas raised his hand. “Three weeks for what?”
“To impress me.” Marina flashed a smile that was more of a challenge than a friendly gesture. “And, more importantly, to impress Alexander.”
Fábio felt his stomach do a somersault at the sound of the name.
Marina explained that Monteiro Tech had a real problem: its customer service system was slow, bureaucratic, and constantly drawing complaints from users. The interns would be divided into pairs, and each pair would have to develop an innovative solution. The best project would be presented directly to the CEO.
“Directly,” Marina repeated, as if the word needed extra weight. “In his office. With him sitting right in front of you.”
Lucas leaned toward Fábio and whispered, “You just turned white.”
“I am white.”
“Whiter. Like paper.”
Fábio and Lucas ended up on the same team—which was both a relief and a potential disaster, because Lucas had brilliant ideas and absolutely no filter when it came to presenting them. They spent the rest of the morning discussing approaches, sketching flowcharts on the whiteboard, and filling the trash can with empty coffee cups.
But it was in the afternoon, after the others had left and the room was nearly empty, that Fábio finally found his rhythm.
He sat down in front of his computer and started coding. Not the prototype yet—just the structure, the logic, the skeleton of the idea. His fingers moved quickly across the keyboard, and for the first time since arriving at Monteiro Tech, Fábio wasn't nervous.
He was in the place where he felt most like himself: inside the code, where everything made sense, where every problem had a solution if you thought about it long enough.
He stayed until eight that evening. The floor was deserted. The automatic lights had already switched off in half the corridor. Fábio only realized how late it was when his stomach growled loudly enough to compete with the sound of his keyboard.
He saved the file, closed his laptop, and stretched. His back cracked. He looked out the window. São Paulo glittered below, a carpet of lights stretching as far as the eye could see.
Beautiful, in an exhausted sort of way.
In the elevator, descending alone, he thought about the project. The presentation. Alexander sitting across from him, listening, evaluating.
He thought about those hazel-green eyes.
He shook his head. “Focus, Fábio.”
When he got back to his tiny apartment, he heated up a cup of instant noodles in the microwave and sat on his bed with the bowl in his lap and his phone in his hand. He opened Instagram out of habit and scrolled without really paying attention. Then, without planning it or consciously deciding to do so, he typed into the search bar: Alexander Monteiro.
The profile appeared as the second result. Verified. The profile picture was understated: Alexander in a dark suit, arms crossed, looking off to the side with a serious expression. A short bio: CEO of Monteiro Tech. That was it. No motivational quotes, no emojis, no attempt to seem approachable.
His profile was just like him: direct, reserved, and without excess.
Fábio clicked on it.
There weren't many photos. Alexander at corporate events, always in a suit, always with the same impeccable posture. One showed him onstage, giving a presentation, one hand in his pocket and a giant screen behind him. Another showed him sitting at a conference table, laughing at something someone outside the frame had said.
Fábio stopped at that one.
Alexander laughing.
Not the almost-smile from the café. A real laugh. His eyes crinkled, lines appeared around his mouth, and his teeth showed.
He looked like a different person.
He looked like someone Fábio desperately wanted to get to know, with an urgency that frightened him.
He stared at the photo for far too long. He zoomed in on Alexander's face. Then he realized what he was doing and dropped the phone onto the bed as if it were burning him.
“What am I doing?”
The noodles went cold in the bowl. Fábio stared at the ceiling—the damp stain, the same old map of Italy—and tried to organize his thoughts.
He was stalking the CEO of the company where he interned. The man who was his boss. The man who was seventeen years older than him. The man who probably couldn't even remember his name without looking at his badge.
Except he did remember it. He'd said, “Good morning,” at the café. He'd almost smiled.
Fábio picked up his phone again. He reopened the photo of Alexander laughing and stared at it for another ten seconds or so. Then he closed Instagram, locked the screen, and placed the phone facedown on the mattress, as if hiding the screen would solve anything.
He ate the cold noodles. Washed the bowl. Brushed his teeth. Lay down.
He didn't sleep.
He kept thinking about the project. The solution he was building. The interface he wanted to design, clean and intuitive, the kind of thing that would help any user understand what to do in just two clicks. He thought about how he would present it, how he would organize the slides, how he would keep his voice from trembling.
He thought about Alexander watching.
He imagined Alexander saying, “Good job, Reis,” in that deep, calm voice.
He turned onto his side. The pillow was warm. He turned over again.
His phone lit up in the darkness. A message from Lucas.
Dude, I had an idea for the project. What if we used AI to categorize complaints before they reached the customer service agent? Like an intelligent filter.
Fábio smiled and typed back: I was already thinking about that. Tomorrow, we'll build the workflow.
Knew you'd still be awake. Go to sleep, Fábio.
You're awake too.
I'm watching a show. You're thinking about the project. We're not the same.
Fábio chuckled softly in the darkness of his tiny apartment. He sent a thumbs-up emoji and put his phone down.
He closed his eyes and tried to think only about the project. The code. The logic. The three weeks ahead of him.
But the last image that crossed his mind before he fell asleep wasn't a flowchart.
It was Alexander laughing in that Instagram photo, his eyes crinkled and his face relaxed, looking like someone Fábio didn't know yet but already wanted to make laugh like that.
He buried his face in the pillow and sighed.
Three weeks. He had three weeks to create the best project Monteiro Tech had ever seen.
And if, in the process, Alexander looked at him with something other than professional courtesy—well, that would just be a bonus.
A bonus Fábio wasn't going to admit he wanted.
Not to Lucas. Not to the ceiling. Not even to himself.
Not yet.