Chapter 4
The elevator at Monteiro Tech had thirty floors and a camera in the upper-left corner that blinked a red light every five seconds. Fábio knew this because he had counted. Three times. In the last forty seconds.
It was Friday, six thirty in the evening, and the building was almost empty. Fábio had stayed late adjusting the project prototype—the intelligent filter interface was nearly finished, and he wanted every button, every transition, every micro-interaction to be perfect before showing it to Lucas on Monday. When he finally closed his laptop and headed for the elevator, he thought he would be alone.
He wasn't.
Alexander Monteiro was standing inside the elevator when the doors opened on the twelfth floor. Alone. No briefcase, no tablet, just his phone in his hand and the dark suit he'd worn that day, slightly wrinkled at the shoulders, as if he'd spent the last few hours leaning back in his chair. His tie was loose. The top button of his shirt was undone.
Fábio seriously considered waiting for the next elevator.
But Alexander had already looked up and seen him standing there in front of the open doors like a deer caught in headlights, and not getting in now would be strange. Stranger than getting in. Probably.
He stepped inside.
“Good evening,” Fábio said, his voice surprisingly normal. He pressed the ground-floor button, which was already lit, and positioned himself on the opposite side of the elevator, leaning his back against the stainless-steel wall.
“Good evening,” Alexander replied without looking up from his phone.
The doors closed.
The elevator began to descend.
Fábio looked at the numbers above the door. Thirty. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Each floor took about two seconds. Thirty floors, sixty seconds. One minute. He could survive one minute.
He didn't look at Alexander.
He looked at the floor. At his shoes—his own white sneakers, with a coffee stain that had never come out, and Alexander's dark leather shoes, which probably cost more than the rent on his tiny apartment. He looked at the wall. At the camera with the red light. At the button panel.
He looked at Alexander.
Not on purpose. His gaze simply slipped, like water finding the path of least resistance. And there Alexander was, less than two meters away, phone in hand but no longer looking at the screen. He was staring straight ahead. At nothing. Or perhaps at their distorted reflections in the stainless-steel doors.
Fábio quickly looked away. His eyes returned to the numbers. Twenty-two. Twenty-one.
The elevator stopped.
Not at a floor. It stopped between the twentieth and nineteenth floors, with a gentle jolt that made Fábio stumble half a step forward. The lights flickered once, then returned to normal. But the elevator didn't move.
Fábio looked at the panel. No numbers were lit. The ground-floor button had gone dark.
“Is this…” he began.
“Normal,” Alexander said, slipping his phone into his suit pocket with a calmness that seemed rehearsed. “It happens sometimes at the end of the day. The system resets. It'll be back in a minute or two.”
“Oh.” Fábio swallowed. “Okay.”
Silence.
The kind of silence that had weight. That took up space. That made you notice every sound you would normally ignore—the low hum of the elevator motor, the distant click of some mechanism, your own breathing.
Fábio leaned against the wall again and crossed his arms. Then he uncrossed them because the gesture made him look defensive. He put his hands in his pockets. Took them out again. Finally, he gripped the straps of his backpack with both hands, like a child on his first day of school.
Alexander leaned against the opposite wall and crossed his arms. On him, the gesture looked natural. Like something out of a magazine cover.
Fábio hated that a little. He hated how Alexander managed to look comfortable in any situation, as if the entire world were a room that belonged to him. He hated how Alexander's cologne—that scent, always that scent—filled the enclosed elevator until there was no air left that didn't smell like him.
Twenty seconds passed. Or maybe two. Fábio had lost all sense of time.
“You stayed late,” Alexander said.
Fábio lifted his eyes. Alexander was looking at him now. Directly. Without a tablet to hide behind, without the distance of a conference room, without other people around to dilute the intensity of that gaze.
“The project,” Fábio said. “I'm adjusting the interface.”
Alexander nodded slowly. “Marina told me your prototype is coming along well.”
“She did?”
“She said you stay past your scheduled hours almost every day.”
Fábio didn't know what to do with that information. Alexander knew he stayed late. Alexander had asked—or Marina had mentioned it without being asked, but either way, Alexander knew.
“I like programming,” Fábio said, and it was true. “Once I get into the flow, I lose track of time.”
“I know what that's like.”
Fábio looked at him. “You program?”
The corner of Alexander's mouth moved. It wasn't the almost-smile from the café. It was something smaller, more private, like a pleasant memory passing by. “I used to. I started the company by programming. These days, all I do is sit in meetings.”
“Do you miss it?”
The question escaped before Fábio could think it through. Too direct, too personal—the kind of thing you didn't ask the CEO of the company where you were interning while trapped in an elevator between the twentieth and nineteenth floors.
But Alexander didn't seem bothered. He looked at Fábio for a second—a real second, not the polite half-second of a hallway interaction—and said:
“Every day.”
Fábio felt something shift in his chest. It wasn't his usual racing heart or nervousness. It was something quieter. Something that felt like recognition.
The elevator jolted again. The numbers lit up. Nineteen. Eighteen. It began descending once more.
Alexander pushed away from the wall and adjusted his tie—a habitual gesture, as if he were putting himself back together for the outside world. Fábio realized that, for one minute, Alexander hadn't seemed like a CEO. He'd seemed like just a guy who missed programming.
The numbers descended. Fifteen. Twelve. Nine.
“You're the intern who spilled sugar on my favorite coffee, aren't you?”
Fábio turned his head so quickly he nearly twisted his neck. Alexander was looking at him with an expression Fábio couldn't quite classify—something between curiosity and amusement, his hazel-green eyes narrowed slightly.
“I… technically, it wasn't in your coffee,” Fábio said, his voice coming out a little higher than he'd intended. “It was on the edge of the table. Which was near your coffee. But not in the coffee itself.”
“On the edge of the table.”
“Yeah. The edge. Just the edge.”
Alexander laughed.
A low, brief laugh. Almost a breath that turned into a sound. But it was a laugh—the first Fábio had heard from him in person, not in an Instagram photo, not imagined, not almost. Real.
The sound was deep and surprisingly warm, and it made something inside Fábio come undone in a way he knew he wouldn't be able to put back together.
Six. Five. Four.
“Fábio Reis, right?” Alexander said, and hearing his full name in that voice made it sound as though Alexander had said it before, rehearsed it, committed it to memory.
“That's right. Fábio. Reis. Me.” Fábio closed his eyes for half a second. “Yes.”
Three. Two. One.
The doors opened on the ground floor. The lobby was nearly empty—just the security guard at reception and the distant sound of traffic outside. The late-afternoon light streamed through the glass doors, warm and golden.
Alexander stepped out first. Two steps. Then he stopped and turned halfway back.
“Don't stay too late, Reis. The project is already good.”
And he left without waiting for a response. His leather shoes made a steady rhythm against the marble floor, his dark silhouette framed by the golden light streaming through the glass doors, the strand of hair that had escaped his carefully styled hair swaying with each step.
Fábio remained inside the elevator. The doors began to close. At the last second, he stuck his hand out to stop them and stumbled out, nearly crashing into the turnstile.
The security guard looked at him. Fábio gave him a meaningless smile and walked toward the exit.
Outside, São Paulo was noisy and hot and full of people in a hurry. Fábio stopped on the sidewalk and took a deep breath. The air smelled of asphalt, exhaust fumes, and fried food from a nearby street-food cart. It didn't smell of expensive cologne. It didn't smell of leather shoes. It didn't smell of Alexander.
Fábio put on his headphones and walked toward the subway.
Inside the crowded train car, squeezed between an older woman carrying shopping bags and a guy in a sweat-soaked suit, Fábio replayed every second in his mind.
The laugh. His name spoken in full. The “every day” that had sounded like a shared secret. The “it's already good” that seemed to mean something else, something Fábio couldn't translate into words but could feel on his skin.
He arrived at his tiny apartment. Dropped his backpack on the floor. Sat on the bed. Stared at the wall.
His phone vibrated.
Lucas.
So, did you survive Friday?
Fábio typed: The elevator stopped with Alexander inside.
Three seconds. Three pulsing dots.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE ELEVATOR STOPPED WITH ALEXANDER INSIDE
It stopped. Like, got stuck. For a minute. We were in there together.
FÁBIO REIS, IF YOU DON'T TELL ME EVERY SINGLE SECOND OF THAT STORY RIGHT NOW, I'M COMING TO YOUR APARTMENT AND DRAGGING IT OUT OF YOU.
Fábio laughed. He told him everything. He edited a few details—not mentioning the cologne, or the thing that had come undone inside him, or the fact that he could still feel Alexander's laughter vibrating somewhere between his ribs.
He told the safe version. The version that fit into a text message.
Lucas sent seventeen messages in a row, half of them in all caps, including HE LAUGHED AT YOU AND THAT'S A GOOD THING, HE KNOWS YOUR FULL NAME FÁBIO HE KNOWS YOUR NAME, and I NEED A RAISE TO DEAL WITH THIS LEVEL OF DRAMA.
Fábio put his phone down and lay back on the bed. The ceiling. The damp stain. The same old Italy.
But this time, Italy seemed smaller. The ceiling seemed closer. The world seemed to have shrunk until it could fit inside an elevator stuck between the twentieth and nineteenth floors, filled with the scent of expensive cologne and a low laugh that Fábio would hold on to for far too long.
He said the project is already good, he thought.
He laughed.
He knows my name.
Fábio turned onto his side, pulled his pillow close, and hugged it against his chest. He smiled in the darkness of his tiny apartment, with the sound of traffic drifting through the window and his heart beating at a rhythm that was no longer nervousness.
It was something else.
Something bigger. More dangerous. More beautiful.
Fábio didn't have a name for it yet.
But the elevator had thirty floors, and he was already falling.