Chapter 5 - DESPERATE MEASURES
Losing the court hearing shattered Daniela’s composure completely. The sophisticated facade she had maintained for years dissolved, replaced by a reckless, unbridled rage.
Deprived of the house and exposed in court, she moved into her parents' luxurious estate in the dominion, but the gossip in San Antonio’s tight-knit high-society circles had already spread. Hector’s colleagues on the hospital board were suddenly busy whenever he called. Rosa’s country club acquaintances whispered behind their hand towels near the tennis courts.
By early January 2026, Daniela knew she couldn't win in the courtroom of public opinion, so she decided to strike where it hurt Gabriel most: his career.
On a cold Tuesday morning, Gabriel arrived at his law firm to find two armed security guards standing outside his office door.
"Gabriel," Arthur Pendelton said, appearing from the main boardroom with a grave expression. "Step into my office, please."
Gabriel walked in, keeping his composure. "What’s going on, Arthur?"
Sitting at the oval table was not only Sarah Sterling, but also an investigator from the Texas State Bar Association.
"An anonymous ethics complaint was filed against you yesterday afternoon," Arthur explained, looking deeply pained. "The complaint alleges that you used firm resources and private client background-checking software to illegally track and monitor your wife’s personal financial accounts and digital communications."
Gabriel’s eyes narrowed. "I used our shared personal account credentials on a home computer. I never touched firm software for personal forensics."
"The complaint includes screenshots showing queries run under your firm login credentials," the Bar investigator interjected calmly. "If true, Gabriel, this constitutes a severe violation of client confidentiality and unauthorized access to proprietary law firm data. Pending a full forensic audit of your work computer, the firm board has voted to place you on unpaid administrative leave."
It was a masterstroke of malice. Daniela had used her knowledge of Gabriel’s firm login information—which she had secretly copied off his laptop months ago—to run searches on her father’s business entity from Gabriel’s work computer right before she was evicted. She had framed him for an ethical breach that could cost him his law license.
When Gabriel called me from his car outside the office building, his voice was lower than I had ever heard it.
"She got me, Mom," he whispered. "If the Bar suspends my license, I can't practice law. The partnership is gone. Everything I built..."
"Gabriel Morales," I said, my voice cutting through his despair like a trumpet. "You listen to me right now. You built your career on your talent and your honesty, not on her tricks. Pull your car over and come home."
When he reached my small house on the West Side, he looked exhausted. His eyes were bloodshot, his suit jacket wrinkled.
"We are going to fight this," I told him, placing a hot cup of manzanilla tea in front of him.
"How, Mom?" Gabriel asked, staring at the table. "The digital logs show my login ID. It’s my word against the server records."
"Then we don't look at the server," I said firmly. "We look at her."
I remembered something. Three weeks before Christmas, Daniela had come over to my house unexpectedly—one of the rare occasions she ever set foot on the West Side. She had claimed she was dropping off an old sweater Gabriel had left in her car. But while I was in the kitchen making tea, she had asked to use my bathroom.
My bathroom was at the end of the narrow hallway, right next to my small home office where Gabriel kept an old desktop computer he used when he visited me on weekends.
"Gabriel," I said suddenly, leaning forward. "Does your old computer in the spare room have the same passwords as your work laptop?"
Gabriel blinked. "Yes... I synced my browser profiles across all devices so I could access my bookmarks from your house."
"On December 8th," I recalled, my heart racing, "she was here for fifteen minutes while I was making tea. She said she was in the bathroom. But when I walked down the hall, the spare room door was slightly open."
Gabriel stood up so fast his chair almost overturned. He rushed into the small spare room, flipped the switch on the ancient desktop computer, and brought up the system audit log.
Because it was an older computer running a local operating system, it logged every local login attempt and USB insertion offline—something Daniela, in her technical ignorance, had completely overlooked.
There it was.
December 8, 2025 – 2:14 PM: USB drive inserted. Browser profile credentials exported. Remote access routine installed.
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"She didn't use my work laptop," Gabriel breathed, a look of profound disbelief transforming into absolute triumph. "She stole my login tokens from this computer, installed a remote access script, and ran those searches on my work account from her own IP address in Stone Oak!"
She had left her digital fingerprints all over the crime scene.
