“MY CO-WORKER KEEPS BRINGING ME COFFEE… AND ONE DAY I FOUND OUT WHY.”

I work at a small marketing office in Dallas, Texas, and almost every morning the same thing happens — the co-worker at the next desk places a steaming cappuccino in front of me. I think he likes me. I’m married, so I just smile politely, keep my distance, and consider the act of being cute a little too much.

Until one morning, I opened the lid of my cup and noticed a strange smell. Not medicine, not spoilage, but a faint metallic smell, like dried fish. I had the cup tested just to be safe, because there had been a few petty thefts in the building that week. The results left me on my feet: there were traces of a mild sedative in the coffee — a low-dose sedative.

I called HR, I called the police. My co-worker was summoned, but he denied it, saying he was just the one who brought the coffee. The office camera confirmed it was true: he put the glass down on my desk every morning… but he wasn’t the one who made it.

The one who made it was… the old security guard on the ground floor.
When I asked, he was shaking so much that he had to sit down. And then he burst into tears:
“My daughter went missing 8 years ago. She… is just like you. I just want you not to leave the office at night. It’s dangerous in this area.”

The police went through old files. And when they found a clue at 412 Maple Street, just 3 blocks from the office… the entire investigation team was speechless.

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The Cappuccino on the 14th Floor

I never learned to like coffee, but I learned to pretend. Every morning at 8:17 a.m., right after the elevator dinged, Caleb from the next cubicle would slide a cappuccino across my desk like a peace offering. Tall, extra foam, two raw sugars. Exactly how I order it when I’m too tired to care.

“Thanks, Caleb,” I’d say, polite but clipped, wedding ring flashing like a stop sign. He’d grin, earbuds already in, and go back to his spreadsheets.

I assumed he had a crush. Annoying, but harmless. My husband, Jonah, laughed about it. “Tell him if he wants to keep buying you four-dollar lattes, he better start paying part of our mortgage.”

Then came the Tuesday that smelled wrong.

I popped the lid to add more sugar and the steam hit me like a warning. Not hazelnut, not milk, something metallic, like pennies left in the rain. I froze. We’d had laptops stolen from the break room the week before, and paranoia was running high. I dumped the drink into a Ziploc, labeled it like evidence, and dropped it at a private lab on my lunch break.

The results came by text at 4:58 p.m.

Positive for zolpidem, 0.8 mg/L. Street name: Ambien. Dose: low but cumulative.

I stared at the screen until the words blurred. Then I called HR, then 911, then Jonah, who answered on the first ring and just said, “I’m already in the car.”

By the time the detectives arrived, the entire 14th floor of the Meridian Tower in Uptown Dallas was buzzing. Caleb was pulled into the conference room white as printer paper. He swore up and down he only picked the coffee up from the lobby counter every morning like he’d done for six months.

Security footage proved it.

8:03 a.m. every day: a stooped man in a navy guard uniform (Reginald “Reggie” Parker, 64, twenty-three years on the job) set a single to-go cup on the marble ledge by the metal detectors, exactly where Caleb grabbed it on his way up.

They never spoke. Reggie just nodded and went back to his stool.

They brought Reggie in at 7 p.m. He looked smaller out of uniform, shoulders curved inward like he was trying to fold himself away. When the detective slid the lab report across the table, Reggie’s hands started shaking so hard his glasses slid down his nose.

“I never meant harm,” he whispered. “I swear on my life.”

He cried without sound, the way old men do when the tears have nowhere left to go.

“My daughter, Lily, disappeared March 12, 2017. She was twenty-six. Worked late shift at a bar on McKinney Avenue. Walked to her car alone. Never made it home.” His voice cracked like thin ice. “You look just like her, ma’am. Same hair, same way of tilting your head when you concentrate. I saw you leave after 9 p.m. sometimes, walking to the garage by yourself. This part of Uptown… it’s not safe after dark. Never has been.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a worn photograph. Lily Parker, smiling in a graduation cap, dimple in her left cheek. My breath caught. The resemblance was eerie.

“I just, I just wanted you to feel sleepy, go home early. Take an Uber. Not walk alone. The dose was tiny. Never enough to hurt, just enough to make you tired. I’m so sorry.”

The room was silent except for his ragged breathing.

The detectives thanked him, cuffed him gently, read him his rights. Sedative tampering is a felony assault in Texas, intent or not. But no one in that room had the stomach to treat him like a criminal.

They kept digging, though. Because eight years is a long time, and missing girls sometimes stop being missing.

Two days later they served a warrant on the house Reggie had rented since 1998: 412 Maple Street, three blocks from our office, half a mile from where Lily was last seen.

The basement was soundproofed. Walls lined with cork tiles. A single mattress. A chain bolted to the floor.

On a shelf, thirty-seven driver’s licenses in plastic sleeves. Lily’s was in the front row, still shiny, like it had been touched every day.

And in the corner, folded neat as laundry, the navy security-guard jacket Reggie wore to work every morning for the last six years.

The medical examiner said the remains had been there since approximately March 2017. Dental records confirmed it an hour later.

Reggie confessed to everything the moment they showed him the photograph of the mattress. He didn’t fight. He just asked if he could keep Lily’s picture when they took him to Lew Sterrett.

He’d killed her because she wanted to move to Denver with a boyfriend he didn’t approve of. Kept her for three days. Then panic, then the basement, then twenty-three years of showing up at the same building every morning, watching the revolving door, waiting for her to walk back in.

He never touched another woman. Just drugged their coffee if they stayed too late, trying to keep the city from taking anyone else the way it had taken his little girl.

Caleb quit the next week. The Meridian Tower installed a Starbucks in the lobby with cameras that actually work. I started driving to work even though it added forty minutes each way.

Some mornings I still smell that metallic ghost when the elevator doors open. I take the stairs now, all fourteen flights, hand on the rail, listening for footsteps that never come.

Jonah meets me at the garage entrance every evening at 6:05 sharp, no matter what.

And every March 12, a single cappuccino appears on the security desk downstairs, lid sealed, note in shaky handwriting:

For Lily. Go home safe.

No one ever moves it. By morning it’s always gone.