At the age of 7, Jo's parents divorced after a tumultuous relationship following her birth. Her father blamed her for all the troubles that he and his wife were going through and looked at her with nothing but resentment all the time. Her mother took her away from the psychological abuse being injected into her life and did her best to assure Joni that no matter what her dad said, she wasn't a mistake. This , of course, would be the golden paved road down many years of wasted therapy, trust issues and erratic behavior.
By the time she was 12, her mom thought it was a good idea to patch things up with her father and the two of them would eventually travel back and forth to the UK for Jo to visit her dad and paternal grandparents. Though their relationship was always rocky, it was at least nice to have a father figure in her life and someone to teach her the things a single mother like her own was unable to. By the time she was in high school, she was able to travel back and forth between the states an the UK on her own and began spending more time there, connecting with her dad in a way she wasn't able to when her mom was with them. During the holidays, she'd choose every other Christmas to go spend with him, but every summer, she found herself on a plane to England to explore for the next two and half months.
Being so far away from home, she was using this as an opportunity to find herself. While her dad was busy most days and many nights, Joni took it upon herself to befriend some of her neighbors and spend weekends in the city with them. She went through a litany of stages in her teens and into her early twenties, a few that were more questionable than others. She experimented, went of on her own, tried different personalities on for size and realized that no matter who she became, she wouldn't be any better as someone else than she was as her own person. After several months living abroad with her father, she decided that as fun as this entire experience had been, she was better off living at home with her mom, finding herself in a land she was more familiar with overall. Her dad was too busy to have her around for the most part and most days, she had rarely seen him, whether he was working at home, or in the lab, he was hardly present and when he was, he wasn't the easiest to deal with and be around.
Upon arriving back in the states, she found herself a job at a nearby coffee shop and used that as her social outlet, while living with her mother. Most days, they butted heads over the dumbest things; whether or not the towels were folded properly, whether or not the table was set the right way, or whether or not Joni spoke to her in what her mother considered a disrespectful tone. This was her realization that she needed to save up and move out as soon as possible if she had any plans on saving her relationship with her mother and going onto better things. Another thing she was constantly hounded about was whether or not she would go to school and get an education so she could fend for herself in the future. Jo had always fully believed that a piece of paper didn't define who she would become in the future and always had some sort of rebuttal up her sleeves and was ready to shoot off at any given point when it came down to whether or not she was going to follow the foosteps of both of her parents and find herself in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of student debt in order to appease them and lead a life that was equally as miserable of their own.
Eventually, she moved out and found an apartment nearby, supplementing her income on the side by picking up a job at a local attorneys office to help afford her new quarters. She took to the new job and moved there full time, helping them with background checks and keeping an eye on the current civil investigations that went through the office. Realizing there may have been some sort of future in this, she went on to train as a private investigator, staying with the company that gave her her start in the field. Her specialties remained civil investigations, but she also used this as an opportunity to become better at surveillance, too. A few times over the last several years, she considered the possibility of going into fraud, inusrance or even corporate investigation, however Joni knows she doesn't have a place in those fields knowing that the people she would be up against would have ten times the education and time under their belts than she does.
Currently, Joni works as the chief information officer at Wainwright Industries, a job which she was lucky to get into, but one she can unleash her full spectrum of talent at.