When Helaine Sawyer and George Bristol met, she was a nineteen year old Harvard student studying archaeology, and he was a twenty-three year old graduate student at the business school; both in serious relationships separate from one another, but the chemistry was so immediate and apparent that after only a few weeks of having known each other, they had left their respective partners and began seeing each other instead. That immediate whirlwind, however, was where the fairy tale stopped. Despite the very apparent connection they shared, they fought more often than not, given their clash in both backgrounds and personality. Helaine came from a lower class family in london and was only able to attend Harvard on a very generous scholarship, George came from a real estate empire with old money that could rival the Rockefellers and grew up having everything in his life handed to him (including, it would turn out, his acceptance into Harvard, which his father had had to pull some strings to get). Where Helaine was careful and detailed, George was brazen and careless, and this left them constantly at each other's throats. When Helaine found out she was pregnant shortly before her twenty-first birthday, George proposed -- while the logical thing to do would be agree to raise the child separately and part ways given their volatile personalities, Helaine was so blinded by the idea of marriage and children and a beautiful house that she immediately said yes. As one might expect, this did not end well.

While the pair did do their best to make things work after Cressida was born, including moving out to Palo Alto, California in order for Helaine to pursue her PhD at Stanford, it became slowly evident that they brought out the worst in each other. They were both argumentative and violent, and Helaine eventually began to realize that that was no environment to raise a child in. Shortly after Cressida's seventh birthday, she filed for divorce, and George did not fight her on it, making the move back to New York to take over his father's company. Making the shift to being raised by a single mother was not something that ever truly phased Cressida; it was just simply the way it was. George would send her presents and a card on her birthday, occasionally make a phone call to check in, but those became less and less frequent the older she became. By the time she was ten years old, he no longer spoke to her. She had a doting, supportive mother, however, and being ignored by a man who did not show much interest in her to start with was not something that phased her. However, being both an only child and the daughter of a single parent meant Cressida latched quickly onto anyone else in her life that showed her even remote interest. She was a very needy child, and this is not something she has grown completely out of. She liked to be surrounded by people, making her something of a social butterfly in elementary and middle school.

By the time she entered high school, she was walking the thin line of popular-unpopular; while she was incredibly bubbly and outgoing and participated on the dance team (barely a step down from cheerleading as far as popularity goes, she was quick to point out to her skeptical mother), she was also very bookish and something of a (huge) know it all. She was never the first to be invited to parties or outings, but she was never not invited, either. When she was a junior, her mother finally remarried; Dr. James Roth was a neurolinguist she had met while working at Stanford, and everything that Cressida had ever wanted in a father figure. He was kind and supportive, never overbearing but always willing to listen and offer advice. Shortly after the wedding, Cressida got the first of what would be three of four calls a year from George, attempting to mend fences -- if she were a bigger person, she might have allowed it, but the resentment she felt at it taking him seven years and her mother's remarriage to do so prevented her from ever returning his messages.

When the time came to apply for college, Cressida knew exactly what it was she wanted to study -- classics. She had always been a fan of the ancient world, inexplicably drawn to Greek literature in particular, and while she knew it may not be the most practical of degrees to earn, she had always been of the belief that you had to study what you enjoyed, not what was expected of you. She briefly considered colleges in the California area, mostly for the sake of Asher Kidd, her best friend since they were youngsters, but after she and her mother took a weekend away to take a campus tour of Harvard, she knew that was where she was meant to be. She flourished in such a heavily academic setting, earning two bachelor's degrees (one in classics, one in anthropology) before continuing onto graduate school. She earned her master's in 2015, and while she considered stopping at that, she was deep enough into academia that she figured she may as well continue. That, and she finally had a setting where she felt truly included, whereas she had floundered in lower level education, and she wanted to hold onto that feeling for as long as possible.

She is currently pursuing her DPhil, and loving every moment of it, though it has made her even more high strung than usual. She currently lives with Asher Kidd and Ivy Worth; a set up that she is quick to say she enjoys, but there is admittedly more butting heads than she would like to admit, mostly due to her need to control everything. She recently started seeing a therapist as a way to try and deal with her anxiety and overwhelming desire to be in control of all situations, but she has not seen much of a difference yet (because she cannot expect things to immediately work, her mother is quick to point out).