My co-worker gave me drumsticks every day, and I gave them all to a stray cat. My colleague, Fabiana, arrived every morning punctually with the coxinhas. She said they were freshly made, coming straight out of her mother’s kitchen, as a proof of affection.
I kept looking at the message until the letters stopped looking like letters. “Today’s coxinha… Did the cat like it?” No one in the office knew about the cat. Or so I thought.
Gustavo, my husband, was in the living room with the television on, but he no longer looked at the screen. He looked at me through the dark reflection of the window. “Who texted you?” he asked. His voice was quiet. Too quiet.
I closed the phone. — Spam.
He didn’t say anything, just turned off the TV and went to the bathroom. Then I heard the sound of the kitchen drawer. The same drawer where we kept the gloves, bags and small keys.
I got up slowly. When I arrived, Gustavo was in front of the open refrigerator, looking at the freezer. He didn’t touch anything. I just stared.
“Are you looking for something?” I asked. He got a little scared. “Water. “The water is below.
He closed the freezer and smiled, but the smile did not reach his eyes.
That night I didn’t sleep. I waited for him to snore and took out the frozen coxinha. I put it in a double bag and kept it in my bag. If I was crazy, the next day I would find out. If she wasn’t crazy, Gustavo would have just turned himself in.
The next morning I didn’t go straight to the office. I first went to the police station and asked to speak to the officer who had interrogated me. Her name was Rocha. When I handed her the coxinha, her face changed. Not surprisingly. Confirmation.
“Does anyone know you brought this?” he asked. I denied. “My husband almost messed up last night.
The officer looked up. “Does your husband know Fabiana?”
I wanted to say no, but I remembered a small, silly detail: a greeting at the end of the year party, Gustavo saying “does she work with you?”, Fabiana lowering his eyes, him smiling as if he already knew her name.
The officer showed me a printed photo. It was from the construction site, before they surrounded it. Among disturbed earth, dry roots and black bags, one could see a blue cat collar with an oxidized bell.
I felt my throat close. “We haven’t found the cat,” she said. “But we found food scraps with the same smell you described. And something else.
He showed me another image: an employee’s credential, broken in half, dirty with dirt. The woman in the photo was called Juliana Mendes. I knew that name. She had worked at my desk before me and, according to Fabiana, she had resigned without warning because “it was too unstable”.
When I arrived at the office, Fabiana was already there. On my desk there was a coxinha wrapped in a napkin, still warm. She looked at me with her usual shy smile. “I brought you the sweets, your favorites.
I felt nauseous. I didn’t touch it. I sat facing her and looked at her hands. It had a broken nail, with dark earth underneath.
“I’m not hungry today,” I said. Fabiana stopped smiling for a second. “But you always eat. “Sometimes we pretend to eat things we don’t want to so as not to hurt someone.
The phrase fell between the two of us. She lowered her gaze, but didn’t look sad. She seemed annoyed.
By mid-morning, police had entered the building. They did not make a scandal. They went straight to HR, asked for all the cameras and access lists. Fabiana got up to go to the bathroom, but Officer Rocha was already waiting for her in the hallway.
From my seat I could hear: – Fabiana Oliveira, we need you to accompany us.
Fabiana turned to me. I no longer had shyness in my face. He had hatred.
That afternoon I learned what they found under the flowerbed. It wasn’t a whole body, as my head had imagined in the worst-case scenario, but a metal box with stained clothes, torn credentials, empty jars, and spoiled food mixed with chemicals to speed up decomposition. Juliana was not there, but she had left traces. And in the old cameras she appeared, months before, feeding the same cat on the same stairs. Just like me.
Officer Rocha told me that maybe Juliana would also receive coxinhas. Perhaps he also pretended to eat. Perhaps he had also noticed something and wanted to speak. Then he showed me the last piece: calls between Fabiana and Gustavo, many, for weeks. My husband. My house. My work. My breakfast. Everything was connected.
When I returned to my apartment with a car at the door, Gustavo was no longer there. I had taken clothes, money and my notebook. But he left something on the table: a napkin stained with dough with a handwritten phrase. “Ask Fabiana what she did to Juliana before worrying about the cat.”
At that moment my cell phone vibrated. Another unknown number. She only said: “Your husband has just arrived. Say you’re next.”
PART 3
I showed the message to officer Rocha and for the first time I saw her lose her temper. He didn’t scream, but his jaw tensed. “Don’t answer.” Do you know where Fabiana lives?
I nodded. She already knew too. Ten minutes later we were in a car without a siren, with another unit behind. I had my hands cold on my knees and a single fixed idea: Gustavo was with her.
My husband, the man who told me I overreacted, who made tea when he saw me nervous, who kissed me on the forehead before bed, had rummaged through my freezer as if he were looking for proof, not food.
When we arrived at Fabiana’s building, the lights on the third floor were on. Rocha asked me to stay underneath, but from the sidewalk I could see a shadow moving behind the curtain. Then I heard a blow. Then another. And a man’s voice. Gustavo’s. “Tell me where you put her, Fabiana!”
The officer ran up with the agents. I didn’t obey. I climbed up behind, my legs shaking. The door of the apartment was ajar. Inside it smelled like sweet drumsticks, but rotten, mixed with chlorine.
Gustavo was near the table, pale, with a backpack in his hand. Fabiana had blood on her lip and held a kitchen knife, but she didn’t seem scared. She seemed offended. “You brought her to this,” he said to Gustavo. “You said she ate everything. You said it was easy.
Rocha disarmed her before she could get closer. Gustavo raised his hands, stammering that he had gone to get answers, that he was also a victim.
I looked at him and didn’t even feel surprised. Not anymore.
On the table were small jars with scratched labels, napkins, bags of dough and a notebook. On the first page was my name. In the second, Juliana’s. Underneath each date there was a note: “Ate”, “Did not eat”, “Taken”, “Cat”.
I had to hold on to the doorframe. They were not breakfasts. They were tests. Fabiana wasn’t giving me affection. I was measuring how much poison reached my body, and the cat had been my salvation without knowing it.
“Why?” I asked.
Fabiana looked at me with calm hatred. “Because you sat in my place. That table belonged to Juliana. Then it was going to be mine. But the perfect lady has arrived, the one that everyone greets, the one that the boss listens to, the one who has a husband, a house and the face of someone who owes nothing to anyone.
“And Juliana?” asked Rocha.
Fabiana smiled slightly. “Juliana also asked a lot of questions.
Gustavo tried to speak. “She looked for me first. I said I wanted to help you, that you were very stressed. I didn’t know it was poison.
A lie.
Rocha opened Gustavo’s backpack and took out my notebook, money, an external hard drive and a folder with documents from my life insurance. There I understood the other half. Fabiana wanted my position. Gustavo wanted me to be absent. Two different miseries had met in the same corridor.
“How long have you been talking?” I asked. Gustavo lowered his gaze. “It wasn’t like you’re thinking.
I laughed, but there was no laughter. “Of course.” It’s never how we think. It’s always worse.
Fabiana shouted that Gustavo had promised to leave me, that he said I was weak, that I took sleeping pills, that no one would suspect if one day I got sick slowly. Gustavo yelled at her to shut up. Officer Rocha didn’t even have to ask many questions. They began to give themselves away.
They met Juliana that same night. Don’t live. She was buried far from the flowerbed, in a vacant lot on the outskirts of the city. The box in the flowerbed was just a bait, a place where Fabiana kept things that could blame others if someone got too close. Juliana had discovered the bottles, had seen the messages between Fabiana and Gustavo, and wanted to denounce them. There was no time.
The blame fell on me anyway. I had occupied her chair, I had accepted her drumsticks, I had fed the cat that maybe ate what was meant for me.
The cat appeared two days later, thin, sick, hiding under a staircase in another building. They took him to the vet. He survived. I cried more than I imagined when Rocha called me to tell me. It wasn’t just a cat. He was the only one who had tasted evil before it came to me.
Gustavo asked to see me before being transferred. I went, not because I wanted to listen, but because I needed to look the lie in the face one last time. He was behind a glass, with a grown beard and swollen eyes. “I didn’t want you to die,” he said.
I kept looking at him. “How curious. You planned everything around my death, but without wanting much.
He pressed his mouth together. “I felt trapped. “Me too,” I replied. “But I didn’t put poison on anyone.
He said nothing more. I think I expected screams, charges, tears. I didn’t give anything. Sometimes the last punishment is not to surrender even the pain.
I returned to the office weeks later. Fabiana’s desk was empty. Juliana’s had a white flower. No one spoke loudly. Everyone walked as if the ground could open.
I was offered to change areas, but I stayed. Not because she was brave. Because I was tired of the culprits deciding which places could still be mine.
The cat, who I ended up calling Coxinha, recovered and now lives with me. Don’t eat anything I don’t give. Me neither.
The first morning I prepared my own breakfast, I stared at the plate for a long time. I thought of Juliana, of her torn credential, of the dry bed, of all the times a woman feels that something is not right and forces herself not to look exaggerated. I no longer want to be polite with what scares me.
Rocha called me months later to say that the case was solid. Fabiana spoke. Gustavo too, although just to blame her. The two were sinking into different versions of the same cowardice.
I left the forum without relief, but with an air. At the entrance, the cat was waiting for me in the carrier, meowing as if to scold me for taking too long. I took him in my arms and felt the new bell hit my chest.
It was not a pretty ending. Juliana did not return. My marriage didn’t either.
But that night, as I closed the door of my house, I understood something simple: sometimes we survive not because we were smarter than the danger, but because a little life that no one looked at decided to eat first.
And since then, every time Coxinha sits with me in the kitchen, I serve his dish before mine. Not out of habit. By memory.
Thank
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Thank you very much.
