Angel Bradstreet was born to a single mother. Whenever Angel asked about her father, her mother said she would tell her when she was older.
     Her mother became ill when Angel was in high school, and they didn't have the money or the insurance to get Angel's mother proper medical attention. Angel worked, in order to help her mother out financially, but soon Angel's paychecks were their main source of income. Angel tried to do well in school, despite working and caring for her mother, but when she nearly failed her junior year, she didn't bother finishing school.

     Just before Angel turned eighteen, her mother died. Her mother's will left her everything her mother owned, which was mainly the stuff in the house.
     Angel continued working, and she was making a decent wage, especially considering she only had to provide for herself now. She sold the house, which still mostly belonged to the bank anyway, and she got an apartment in the city of New Orleans. She sold any furniture that wouldn't fit in her apartment, and packed the rest of her mom's things, planning on going through them after she was settled in. She started taking night classes, determined to get her GED so she could go to college. Her mom never had, and had always wanted Angel to.

     About a year after her mother's death, Angel found what she had been seeking all her life: information about her father.
     His name was Henry Bonham, and he owned the Bonham Foundation, the third largest privately owned corporation in the United States. She delayed meeting him for months, worried he wouldn't accept her, or that something else awful would happen. Finally, though, she worked up the courage to contact him.
     They spoke over the phone a couple of times, as he was too busy at the moment to meet with her; finally, they arranged to send DNA samples to a lab to which the Foundation donated money. Bonham insisted on taking her to lunch when the results came back
     A week later, Angel met Henry Bonham at a restaurant she couldn't afford, and found that the results of the paternity test were positive.

Story

     Life changed for Angel then, and the constant struggle she had felt all her life, and especially since her mother became ill, faded somewhat. Henry had married once, but divorced some years after, and never had any children, and he insisted on having Angel inherit everything. He also insisted on helping Angel out a little, financially, with school and taking care of the necessities. He wasn't able to help her as much as he would have liked, because she had a fiercely independent streak, from taking care of her mother, and then herself, and she would only let him help her a little. She wasn't entirely comfortable inheriting everything from her new father, especially since he seemed to have brought it up out of nowhere.
     But Angel found her Nirvana in the Bonham Foundation. Henry's grandfather, Angel's great-grandfather, had risen from nothing to create the beginnings of the Bonham Foundation. The Foundation owned several companies, which funded the Foundation's many social programs and charitable donations. The Foundation funded schools, research labs, shelters for battered women and the homeless, and had created several grants for writers and artists.

     Determined to honor her father's legacy, when Angel started attending college, she concentrated on social work and business, and started thinking about how to help the people who fell through the cracks of the system, like she and her mother had.
     Angel quit her old job, and started working for the Bonham Foundation, after her father realized how passionate she was about the social program aspect of his company. She loved it, even if she wasn't doing quite what she wanted, simply because she was learning so much about her father's company.

     Shortly after she started working for the Foundation, Angel's life started falling apart again. Her father told her he had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and that he had about six months more to live. He admitted that he had known about it for a while, but hadn't wanted to tell her right away, so soon after the death of her mother.
     The cancer metastasized quickly, and four months later, Angel lost the father she had just been getting to know. She had just turned 21.
     Shortly after his death, it became apparent that that was not all she stood to lose. Henry had been the sole owner of the Bonham Foundation, but when he was diagnosed with cancer, he and his brother, Jack, decided that the best thing would be for Jack to start working with Henry, to take more and more responsibility, so that Jack might inherit the Foundation when Henry died, and be able to run it, as Henry had.
     When Angel came into Henry's life, and he suddenly found he had an heir, he stopped Jack from taking over any more of the company, but at that point in time, Henry and Jack had about 50% control of the company each.
     Furthermore, despite Henry's insistence that Angel would inherit everything, Henry had died before finalizing the new Will. His old Will had stated that his brother would get everything, and prior to his death, Henry had written up a new Will and spoken with his lawyer about changing the recipient of his legacy from his brother to his daughter (who had, sometime in the last year-and-a-half, changed her name from Angel Bradstreet to Angel Bradstreet Bonham, keeping Bradstreet as a middle name), but the new Will had not been signed, which was enough to allow Jack to argue it. And he did.