Daphne’s father was a maintenance supervisor for the Dobbs Ferry school district. He kept the boilers running, fixed the roofs, and drove the occasional snowplow in winter. It was a solid union job with decent benefits, but nothing flashy. They lived in a small three-bedroom bungalow with a slanted roof on a dead-end street. Mom worked part-time as a bookkeeper for a local landscaping company, smoked a pack a day, and was kind but quiet. Daphne grew up watching her dad come home covered in grease and sawdust, always tinkering. That practical, hands-on fixer energy stuck with her. She learned early that if something looked wrong, you didn’t complain; you measured twice and fixed it.

She babysat as a teenager on weekends instead of going out and spent what money she made on fashion magazines and clothes, which she learned to alter herself. Other than that, she spent most of her time at the library, for both school and pleasure. Her studiousness earned her a scholarship to Columbia, where she studied fashion and design, fell in with some old-money socialites, and quickly worked her way up from intern to CEO.

She studies power, strategy, and persuasion in secret—not because she has specific ambitions, but because she sees life as a game to be mastered for the fun of it.

Her deepest desire is to find an equal, either romantically or professionally. Her weakness is that she searches for that equal in dark places. She has observed that some of the most brilliant minds she encounters are psychopaths, and she views dark-triad personality types as a fascinating challenge. She deliberately puts herself in league with them just to see how they might sharpen or evolve her. This practice keeps her on her toes, and may one day be her downfall.