From the time she was small, Cara always fell into that "anything you can do, I can do better" territory with both her brothers and just other kids at school. When her brothers started playing sports, she was right alongside them, enjoying little league and eventually soft ball where her team would become state champions two years in a row. She put a lot of pressure on herself as she grew into adolescence, in some way to perhaps "prove" to her father that she could (and would) be even better than he would have imagined for a first son rather than daughter. Even still, it never seemed to be a subject of discussion that she would learn to take on the family business. No, construction was not for women, he'd say, and even though her mother might protest his often times rude comments, he was not the sort of man to budge. Hey, she at least got her stubbornness from him, much to her annoyance.

There was a point in time when Cara honestly thought about going into architecture just to spite her father, but after a lengthy talk with her brother, she realized that it wouldn't have been a wise choice, not at all. Doing something for someone else, even to spite them wasn't the way to gain any sort of satisfaction. She had too much self worth and too much drive to allow herself to do something she didn't love, anyway. Still, as she finished high school, she wasn't entirely sure what she was going to do with her life. For a while, she thought of perhaps going into the police academy, but a recruitment event at her school took her into enlisting in the United States Air Force. It was such a simple moment for her: like everything clicked into place and she found exactly what sort of purpose she'd been looking for. She knew it was right for her when she thought on it, and couldn't' come up with a single reservation. After her basic training within the Air Force, she spoke with her commanding officer about taking advantage of the ROTC/SOAR program which would allow her to continue her training while attending school -- with scholarships from the Air Force. She knew that taking this path would take her longer to truly serve in the way she wanted to, but it was also very clear to her that the path would take her towards rising up within the ranks of the Air Force and put her on track to becoming an officer.

Staying at Boston University was just about the best case scenario for her to earn her degree and work for the military all at once. She graduated with honors, and was enlisted into active duty.

Odd as it may sound, Cara felt at home while deployed. She was amongst her brothers and sisters in arms, and people who understood her on such a fundamental level. Her job was dangerous, absolutely, but it was a kind of adrenaline that stuck to her, the kind that she could chase only because of the training she'd had and her ferocious dedication to what she was doing. Cara would spend the next six years in and out of a plane, on tours overseas and occasionally spending more than a couple of months home in Boston. She didn't like feeling like she was doing nothing when she belonged in the cockpit of her plane or assisting on the ground. After those six years, Cara had just been awarded her First Lieutenant rank, with plans to keep on her direct path until she was made Captain, Major, and so on. There's that saying about people planning and God laughing -- but she never thought the guy was that vindictive.

It had been a mission not unlike any other, where she and her squadron were running air defense. Intel was wrong, and that was all that needed to be said in the end. Three casualties out of the six pilots, shrapnel in her leg and a night spent wondering if she would bleed out in the sand. The rescue team was too late for three of six, including her lover of two years. The events that followed come in a haze, but it was by far the worst combat she'd seen. Death and destruction were products of war, but it reached a point that was just so personal, something in her didn't recover. Here all her plans to re-up with the Air Force and continue on a career path seemed to shatter in her hands. She couldn't cope, and after seeing a military psychiatrist, she was diagnosed with PTSD. An honorable discharge came as she decided not to sign the papers that would keep her enlisted. She was thanked for her service and sent on her way after five months of physical therapy to get her leg back to normal working order.

Cara floundered a bit in the year following her discharge. She wasn't sure what she would do, thought seriously about taking her mother's offer up and moving home for a while (god help her), and eventually decided that this would be no different than every other obstacle in her life thus far: Pick herself up, find a new path, and keep moving forward. But she couldn’t do that in Boston, so off she went to San Francisco, following a lead on a stellar physical therapist. The Veterans Association and their dedication to keeping Veterans not only employed, but thriving was to credit for Cara getting on another track. About a year and a half after her discharge from the Air Force, she was working on her exams to join the San Francisco Police Force. It wasn't something she thought she'd be doing, her mindset was trying to get her bearings, but it gave her this surge of purpose. She worked hard to get herself in shape, both mentally and physically before acing her training. At thirty years old, she was older than many other recruits, but she refused to let that hold her back.

Her time entering into the SFPD changed her, and all for the better. That sense of purpose it gave her only grew over her time as a rookie cop and being put on track for detective. Since beginning her new life as a police officer, she's felt increasingly more like herself. That time without such a sense of duty really kept her from growing, or feeling like she belonged anywhere. While she still has bouts of time that are harder than others in regards to her PTSD, she's mostly got it under control and feels for the most part to have learned to live with it. Her work is part of what keeps her focused on the positive, and moreover her friends and family do the rest. She made her father proud alongside making herself proud of her own work -- so there's always that to lean on. In late 2019, she took her detective exams and sailed right through, focusing her career in homicide. She makes sure she puts as much of herself into her work as she can, which sometimes becomes so singular a focus.