Life for Stella Kennedy was perfect. Her parents, William and Marion, were loving and willing to give their daughters whatever they wished for. Not even the birth of Stella's younger sister, Margaret, changed that. In fact, the two became partners in crime the moment Maggie could walk. The Kennedy family was, in Stella's eyes, picture perfect.

That all changed in the fall of 1994 when Marion was diagnosed with breast cancer. At first, the family held out hope that she would be able to beat the disease, and it seemed their wish had been granted when she went into remission after a year of chemo treatments. Just when it all appeared to be taking a turn toward the better, Marion went into remission and passed away two years after her initial diagnosis. The damage to the family had been done long before that. William could not cope with the illness and, in denial that he could lose her, turned to alcohol to numb the pain.

His alcoholism worsened after Marion's death, which changed him entirely. Gone was the loving, hard-working father that would do anything for his daughthers. In his place was a man who resented them for looking like their mother. Not only did he beat the sisters, but he sexually abused them as well. Both, too afraid to report him for fear that no one would believe them, relied on other methods to cope with their home lives.

Stella's main agenda was to protect her sister. She first attempted to work in a diner so that they might escape their father, but it wasn't long before she realized that wasn't an achieveable goal. She resorted to shoplifting and petty theft in hopes of saving up the money to emancipate, all the while taking the brunt of her father's abuse so that her sister did not need to. The one silver lining she found in her father's condition was that he was often too inebriated to realize she was pilfering money from his wallet to add to her funds.

Once Stella turned 18 and began preparations for college – her mother's tragedy and low family income gave her plenty of options – she decided that she could not leave her sister unsupervised. She made the decision to report William, but things did not go how she pictured them. Stella blindly assumed she would be allowed to care for her sister, but because of her college aspirations and young age, CPS intervened and placed Maggie into a foster home. Though Stella was allowed to remain in contact with her sister, her foster family did not allow the two to see one another.

It wasn't until four years later, when Maggie turned 18, that they found one another again. Stella had just graduated with a degree in anthropology from New York University and was preparing to move to California in the fall to obtain her Master's. Though her sister was slated to attend Boston University in the fall, they reconnected over the summer and fell back into their old routines to make ends meet. Stella had discovered that archaeological digs were full of opportunities to make a quick dollar, which had ben a major factor in her career path of choice. It remained that way as they made their way through classes on opposite coasts, all the while keeping in touch and traveling to see one another whenever possible.

The two reunited once more when Stella returned to the east coast to begin work on her PhD, with Maggie moving to New York once she finished her psychology degree. They planned to remain in New York City permanently, both eventually earning well-paying jobs at New York University, but when a better opportunity for Stella arose, they made the decision to move back to their home city of Boston. It was not an easy choice, but the money and possiblity of tenure was something she could not pass up. So, in early 2015, the sisters packed up and returned to the city they feared. Knowing their chances of running into their father were slim at best, they made peace with it, and things have been going well enough for them so far.