The Romantic

They greeted each other with an embrace. Joshua felt his heart drum feverishly when they took their seats. He struggled to steady his breathing, and at that precise moment he thought of Hadriel. The song Hadriel had composed, “I Miss you the Most,” echoed in Joshua’s mind.

After the pleasantries and brief small talk, Gabriela Martinez-Alvarez revealed that she had called Joshua, because she caught wind of his new client.

The ambitious daughter of a little known musician from her native Puerto Rico, Gabriela Martinez-Alvarez had established herself as a shrewd businesswoman with an eye for talent as an executive in the film industry. She spoke English well with a hint of her island accent that stayed with her despite having come to America at the age of fifteen.

That was when she met Joshua, her next-door neighbor, her best friend, her first love. She would be thirty-six in December, a divorcee who immersed herself in her work to distract her mind from the memories of a failed marriage.

In the wake of romantic ruin, she remembered Joshua.

But she wouldn’t risk calling him out of the blue. Not without a reason.

Not after the way she had hurt him for the third time. When he asked her to marry him, she had confessed her affair with another man. The same man she had left Joshua for in their youth.

Several years later, she felt as though fate had played a cruel joke at her expense when she learned of Joshua’s engagement to Sophia. With a tinge of jealousy Gabriela Martinez-Alvarez set out to see who Sophia was. “What makes her so special that she was offered the heart that belongs to me?”

Determined to win him back, she needed a ploy. When word reached her that Joshua had a talented songwriter as a client, she knew she had found her in.

After several days of contemplation, after several days of reliving the regret, a new project came across her desk and fate had intervened on her behalf.