THE ORIGINAL NOVEL WAS WRITTEN IN SPANISH, I APOLOGIZE FOR THE TRANSLATION. IF YOU WANT TO READ IT IN SPANISH LOOK FOR IT UNDER THE SAME PSEUDONYM AND BY NAME "GIRO DEL DESTINO"

—Are you sure you want to do this? — he whispered in my ear while he was above me.

—Very sure. — I replied as I nervously slid my hand over his bare shoulders.

—I say it because I've know that the first time every woman is very important. —he said staring me in the eyes.

—I´m very sure Chris...very sure..

I woke up startled and sweating. I looked at the clock on the nightstand and it said 2:00 a.m. I got out of bed and went to the balcony to get some fresh air. I opened the balcony doors and lay down on the railing to think. The air and sounds of the city slowly began to relax me. After so many years, I don't know why I had dreamt of him just now, I hadn't seen him or known anything about his life for years.

Hundreds of nights I had gone to bed looking at the ceiling of my room thinking of him, but I had never dreamed of him as I had today. When you're 16, you don't understand anything about life, and because of fate you fall in love with the boy you grew up with and happen to be your neighbor. Six years had passed since then, and I had moved on with my life, and I assumed that he too. After finishing school in Newark, as the best of my class, I was awarded NYU and had moved to New York.

At this point I was no longer the naive 16-year-old girl who spent most of her time drawing. I was 21 years old at the moment, and had already finished the last senior year of university. Wednesday was graduation, and according to my academic results I had a good chance to do my internship at the MET. I had studied Fine Arts and had gone into the field of restoration. I had been very hesitant at first and tried everything: landscape, face, impressionism, sculpture-which I'm not good at-and in the end I decided to restore works because I could do a little bit of everything.

Although it was after 2:00 a.m. and I wasn't alone in the apartment, I didn't think it was convenient to wake up my roommate and best friend Katherine, although no one called her that, everyone knows her as Kate, and most likely she was accompanied, as she almost always is. The lights and sounds of the city distracted me for a moment but I wondered again why I had dreamt that. They say dreams have meaning but I was still wondering what mine meant. If only that night had ended well...but it was a disaster. One minute we were kissing and the next his cell phone rang and after answering and talking for just 10 seconds, he hung up his phone and apologized to me, put on his shirt, which he had so hard to take off and left me with hundreds of questions in my head and still fully dressed. That was the last time I saw him.

A few days later I found out that he and his whole family had had to travel to England because his grandfather was delicate. I waited patiently for him to come back or at least phone me, but that didn't happen. That skinny, gray-eyed boy had taken my heart with him. The years passed slowly, I changed, and with the change the desire to see him again disappeared. From Anastasia, the one everyone knew, there wasn't much left, my body had changed, I wasn't so small and thin, I had grown, not much but at least now I was 5'10", and my good body had gained a little weight, gaining some curves. I didn't wear braces on my teeth anymore and I didn't do those mopeds in my hair either. Nobody knew me any more from Anastasia, everyone called me Ana. But there were also some things that remained the same; like my long, dark brown hair, my brown eyes and my virginity.

When I turned 16 I knew perfectly well what I wanted as a gift, but unfortunately it was not fulfilled. Fate has a very curious way of acting and sometimes plays with you, as it has done with me over the years. Believe me, I am not a virgin because I want to, I have changed my status several times, but on several occasions, or rather on the occasions when I have had a stable partner and I have decided to take the step, something has happened. One of the accidents was the fire alarm that went off in the apartment, making us leave, another was Kate arriving at the right time, another was due to a leak on the top floor of the apartment, rather than a flood, after that we had to move to another apartment. Two years had gone by and I had given up trying things. I used to date a few guys, but that's all, because I knew that as soon as we walked through a door and were alone, something was going to happen, as usual.

At first Kate said they were my things, that it was just a coincidence, but after several failures, she came to the same conclusion as me: Fate was playing with me and apparently didn't agree that I should stop being a virgin. Although Kate and I got along very well, we didn't study the same thing. We had met in a group exhibition of paintings that we art students had done when I was a freshman. She had to do no more and no less than do a story for the university newspaper as she was studying journalism. And after doing the interview we exchanged numbers, and after several trips together we decided to move together.

We had already sent the applications for the internships to different places a week ago and this week we had the interviews. Kate had sent her applications to several television channels and newspapers including the New York Times, while I had sent her to a few museums and among them the MET, I was just waiting to be accepted into the MET.

Without even realizing it, it was about 3:00 am and I was still lying on the balcony of the apartment admiring the beautiful view of New York and thinking about too many things. I think it was best to go to bed and try to get some sleep, otherwise no one would wake me up tomorrow. At least it cleared my mind a little. I went back to bed, closed the balcony doors and passed the curtain, tucked in the pillow, put my head on and gave up on the moment.

The sound of the alarm clock seemed to me very insistent the next morning, I didn't know why but today I didn't feel like getting up. The clock struck 6:00 am and I felt like I had just gone to bed, had to get up or was going to be late for interviews. I got out of bed and left the room still half asleep on my way to the bathroom. I got undressed, opened the shower and went under the refreshing water until I felt completely awake and refreshed. I got out of the shower and after brushing my teeth, picking up my hair in a garter and putting on my sleeping clothes again, which consisted of a long, grey, old, faded T-shirt, I left for the kitchen to prepare breakfast, but they had already gone ahead of me. Kate was in the kitchen, she had already made the coffee and was making the toast, but that was not the strangest thing, the strangest thing was that she was alone.

—Aidan didn't come over last night? — I asked her about her boyfriend with great curiosity as she squeezed the juice out of the fridge.

She simply looked at me for a brief moment before continuing with the toast and answering.

—No. —she said very sharp, which only meant one thing.

—Did you or him? —I said as I put the juice on the bar, two glasses and sat down.

—Who do you think? —she looked at me with an eyebrow. He sat next to me and put the toast and a knob of peanut butter in front of us.

—I know the answer, I just wanted to confirm it. —I replied by taking a piece of toast and spreading peanut butter on it.

—Me. —she replied as she poured the juice into the glasses and smiled.

—And the reason this time was... —I said leaving the question up in the air.

—He wanted to have me all the time and I told him that if he didn't understand that I needed my space and my time too, then was over. —she said as she drank some juice.

—And how did he take it? — I asked while I was biting into a piece of toast and she was staring at me.

—As everyone takes it himself, he turns his back on me and goes away saying he'll find another one. —she said taken a toast.

—And you? —I asked looking at her from the side and over the juice glass.

—Another will come. —she said smiling as he drank its juice.

That was normal for her, there wasn't a boy in college who hadn't laid eyes on Kate, or who hadn't noticed her, it was impossible not to notice Katherine Kavanagh. Long black hair, a little taller than me, blue eyes, a body with much more curves than mine, editor-in-chief of the university newspaper...in short, the guy who didn't notice her was because he was blind, because even those who had a girlfriend when she got a little off track looked at her as if they wanted to eat her. We finished breakfast and headed to my room to get dressed for the interviews.

Kate and I had a lot in common, like musical tastes, and a taste for boys, as well as a taste for the same food, there was only one thing we didn't share and that was a taste for fashion. While Kate used to wear the latest in fashion...in other words, the shorter and tighter the better, not to mention the stiletto heels, the more I would go for jeans, shirts and tighter T-shirts and the closer my feet were to the ground the better, although there were exceptions. Today was an exception. I had worn a black skirt that reached a little higher than my knee and not very high heels — I must say it was one of the few skirts I had and I didn't wear it very often — and the heels were the ones I had for special occasions. On top I wore a white shirt, with a grey scarf tied around my neck and a black jacket that matched my skirt.

You should always make a good first impression and much more in a job interview. I put on some makeup, and my hair let it loose, falling in waves down my back and shoulders. I took a black folder with the necessary papers and documents for the interviews and left the room. Outside I met Kate who stared at me in surprise.

—You should dress like that more often, you look sexy and sophisticated. —Kate said as she examined me completely.

—Tell me I don't look sexy Kate, it's a job interview and not at strip club. — I told her as I looked back at the clothes I had put on.

—You look good like that. —she replied laughing and making me laugh too.

—We're leaving then? — I asked her excitedly.

—Come on.

We left the apartment and after taking the elevator and going down to the underground parking we went to our cars parked next to each other. Kate's was a Chrysler Grand Voyager and mine was a Mazda MX 5.

I still didn't understand how she liked that car, I thought it was too big for me. I liked small and convertible models better if possible, Kate was more of a big car where she could fit a lot of people. If it were her right now, I'd be driving a Hummer instead of the Chrysler.

—See you in the afternoon. —she said behind the wheel of her car looking at me.

—We have a long day ahead of us. —I said as I started my car and we both left the parking lot in different directions.

I hardly ever took the car out since we lived relatively close to the university, and the truth was that at least I liked to walk through Central Park. It was my favorite thing about the day, and on the way out I used to sit on one of the benches to do some sketches. What I really liked most was painting faces and people, even though I didn't know them, I would sit there and paint a bit of everything. I already had a few notebooks full of sketches of people in the park, both children and adults, and the funniest thing of all is that I didn't know any.

I drove through the city without even paying attention to anything, there was only one thing on my mind, the interviews, but I only cared about one thing, the MET. I spent most of the morning from one interview to the next and stopped for lunch at a small coffee shop near the MET where they made delicious hamburgers. As soon as I finished lunch I would go to the last interview, and I had saved the MET interview for last. As soon as I finished my lunch I took the folder again and walked at a steady pace to the MET entrance. I climbed the steps of the entrance as if it was my first time visiting him, when the truth was that I knew his halls and halls by heart. There were times when I would come up three times a week and stay almost until closing time. I still didn't understand what it was that attracted me here so much. Right there at the entrance to the reception desk, behind a huge black desk and with a computer in front of me, I was greeted by an old lady with glasses and some gray hair whom I had seen countless times during my visits to the museum and who already knew me.

—Good morning, how can I help you? —she said to me very nicely, looking up from the computer at me. —Oh Ana, it's you, I didn't realize, dear, visiting again? —she asked me smiling.

—Good morning, not today, I have an interview with the director of restoration works. —I said with my best smile on my face.

—Full name. —she said as he looked at the monitor screen.

—Anastasia Stelle. —I said as she typed on the computer.

—Yes, you´re here, Miss Stelle, please sit down, I'll let him know you're here and I'll show you in a moment. —she said, taking the phone in his hand.

—Thank you. —I replied as I sat on a huge sofa in the reception area.

Not even 5 minutes had passed when a girl dressed in the museum uniform arrived at my place and addressed me.

—Miss Stelle. —she said as I looked up to look at her.

—It´s me. —I answered by getting up from the sofa.

—Come with me, Mr. Taylor will see you now. —she said as he began to walk inside the museum.