Maggie Beth was born to Thomas and Ava Arett, a fairly ordinary middle-class couple in Winchester who died in a house fire when Maggie was seven. This foundational trauma gave her a fascination with fires and was the beginning of her investigative abilities, as she - always a very curious child - learned everything she could about how the fire started, how different fires spread, etc..

Following her parents' death she grew up in an overworked but largely benign orphanage in the city, where she befriended an older girl named Cordelia. When Maggie Beth was sixteen, after Cordelia had already moved out of the orphanage, Cordelia took up with an older, wealthier married man. She tried to blackmail him and he murdered her, setting a fire to erase the evidence. The local police claimed it was an electrical fire, the sort that had killed Maggie's parents, and in her own snooping Maggie quickly discovered that this wasn't the case. She brought her evidence to the police but was laughed out of the station.

This injustice ignited Maggie Beth's determination to become an investigative crime journalist, an aim she would dedicate the next several years of her life to despite numerous frustrations. While she did eventually get a job working for a newspaper in Hampshire, she was kept away from the more "masculine" pursuit of crime reporting and was stuck on the society pages instead. This is how she was assigned to cover Isabelle's debutante ball, when she was twenty-four and Isabelle was twenty.

Feel free to make a guest OC! I always love to see those.

I'm assuming we're talking about romantic/sexual relationships here, but honestly, Isabelle tends not to miss those when they're gone. In her twenties she dates people, mostly men, who are in some way bad for her, and she keeps the relationships short on purpose because she fears commitment. (Looking at how possessive of her Alec was, I'm sure you can see why.) She doesn't date the kind of people she would want to be friends with, in short.

Her friendships are much more healthy and much more long-term - Isabelle remains friends with Saifi and Star for years, and I plan on building more healthy friendships for her too! So no, she's not lonely. Her romantic/sexual partners serve a purpose for a short time, and that's by design.

Depends on what you mean by sexual intercourse! Alec and Bertrand mutually consider their first time, despite some prior experimenting, to be the blowjob Alec gave Bertrand and the handjob Bertrand gave Alec when they were twelve. It's the first time either of them made the other come, and it took place in what was nominally Bertrand's bedroom but usually shared by him. Bertrand saw the encounter as coercive on his part, thinking he was taking advantage of Alec, but Alec had wanted it for months and had been practicing. Both of them left the encounter elated.

As for their first anal sex, if that's what you consider intercourse, it's a matter of debate between them whether they were fourteen or fifteen. It happened in their dorm room at Eton, and Bertrand topped using Vaseline for lube. Again, elation. While their sex life was damaging to both of them in deeper ways, neither of them really detected it, too busy focused on the feelings of euphoria they could chase together.