lydia was the only child born of leslie kaiser and adrian delgado. the couple had only been married for about a year when they brought their little bundle of joy home with them. what should have been a happy time for them quickly turned into insults and abuses that came from adrian, a high powered and high profiled businessman in new york city. he had taken over the family business at a young age because of his father's passing and it caused him to drink and drink a lot. obviously that causesd a lot of friction in his marriage and he would lash out at his wife when his newborn daughter wouldn't stop crying. there had been many attempts to leave him but adrian always threatened to keep lydia from her, telling her that his lawyers would see to that.

leslie did what she needed to do and she hired nannies to stay with her young daughter while she went out and had affairs when her husband was away on business. the two would continue to bicker and argue all the way through lydia's toddler years and when she got to school age it was a relief to not have to listen to the arguing as much. when she was able to read she would escape in books so she could pretend that she was somewhere else and not in a home where her parents clearly didn't like each other and were constantly abusive toward each other. she loved reading but she especially loved science and the earth and reading up on it. but she kept her love of science under wraps because she wanted to fit in and didn't want to be bullied so she quietly got good grades while still maintaining her cool status. she had also escaped with dance classes, taking ballet from a young age and potentially wanting to become a ballerina when she was older.

every single summer the delgado's would spend their time in the hamptons instead of in their lush upper west side penthouse suite. the summer of 2008 was no different and they had been returning home from a party at another house in late june when adrian was speeding down the road with his wife and daughter in the car. leslie had been yelling at him to stop and lydia had threatened to call the cops when he had drove off the road and into a ditch, the car flipping several times before his daughter could try and call the police on her father from her mom's blackberry. adrian was killed instantly and leslie was in a medically induced coma. lydia had suffered a broken rib, a broken arm and internal bleeding that kept her in the hospital for a month. after two months of waiting to see if leslie would ever wake up, she was taken off life support and declared dead.

now an orphan, lydia went to go and live with her uncle marcus in boston. marcus had been leslie's twin brother and they had often gone to visit him whenever they could, although leslie always kept her affairs and the abuse a secret from him. lydia had come to him pretty broken and it was clear that the teenager was suffering from ptsd and depression. she was still a good student but the blossoming high schooler turned to sex, drugs and alcohol to help to cure the demons inside of her head. she developed a pretty severe oxycodone addiction and would sometimes sell the drug to other kids in school. she had also continued dancing after her arm had healed up enough, although she was never going to be as good as she was pre-accident. depsite the fact that she had a lot of other things going on, lydia maintained her grades pretty well, was able to graduate early and decided that she wanted to go to boston university and study geophysics and decided that campus life would be for her.

being on her own for the first time was freeing at first and then lydia started to fall back into bad habits. halfway through her freshman year she had to get her stomach pumped when she had mixed her medication and too much alcohol together. she had managed to keep that incident from her uncle and from most of her professors but she knew she needed to be more careful. she tried to keep focused on her studies but living on campus was a recipe for disaster and she became a functional alcoholic and addict by the time she had graduated with honors.

after graduation she knew that she needed to either find a job or continue her schooling but there was something she needed to do first. college had been hell and she had been dependent on pain pills for the better part of seven years and needed to change her life. she had approached her uncle about quietly checking her into a rehab facility and had told most of her friends that she had gone to travel the country while she had managed her addiction. it was during her stay in rehab that she was also diagnosed with clincial depression and bipolar disorder, though she hasn't told anyone except her uncle about either diagnosis. to this day she has yet to take her bipolar medicine and instead flushes it down the toilet because she can't deal with that information.

after coming out of rehab, she had decided that she was going to go back to harvard and study medical anthropology. she still has a huge drinking problem and a lot of issues with her mental illness but she tries to get by the best that she can. she can come off as aloof and cold sometimes but she has a problem opening up. she also has some trust issues but when you get into her good graces you are there forever.