Etienne Cadeaux wanted to live in America from the moment his father had started grooming him to take over the family’s import/export business with his brother. He wasn’t naïve. He knew that living there would not be some dream. There was no expectation to fall into the lap of luxury or become a strapping Hollywood hero. He knew that there would be a lot of groundwork to cover before he could boast about the success of his business. No, his desire to move was much simpler than that – more primal. He believed that with an accent and the drop of the occasional foreign word, he could get more women to fall in love with him than he ever could in France. And Etienne was very much a lover.

It would be a few years before he would make it out there permanently. 35, to be exact. His father was weary of American businessmen, and his brother was pre-maturely exasperated by the financial strain that branching out internationally would create. Eventually, Etienne would make the right connections that would ease his family’s hang-ups, by finding a partner that had the network to help them make a name for themselves across the pond, and by getting the investments from outside sources that would make the move relatively easy. He needed to be thrifty, but with help, he would manage.

Denver, Colorado was a beautiful place to live. It also helped that at the time of the move, the commercial real-estate market was on the side of the buyers. Etienne and his partner found a small warehouse they could work with and began making tracks with their business. Of course, Etienne didn’t forget his earlier ambitions to go America, but within a month of living in Denver, he was head over heels for one of their junior sales representatives. Cheryl Davies was a 23-year-old college graduate with a degree in business. Her French boss did not easily charm her, though he was persistent, and she only agreed to go out to dinner with him after his flirtations took on a tinge of desperation. They were married within a year, and expected their first child by their third wedding anniversary.

Adrien Renard Cadeaux was born on the 27 of September, 1982. He was a going concern from the moment they brought him home from the hospital -- one of those babies that seemed to like the sounds of his own screams. Eventually, he’d tire of the Guess-What-Baby-Wants game and began the Lets-See-What-Baby-Can-Grab adventures that had his father’s hair turning prematurely gray. Even when his sister was born, and she was her own bundle of wonders, he never seemed to stop or even slow down. He was never bad, per say. Just curious. Very curious. The quicker he could be enrolled in school, the faster a healthy learning environment could foster his curiosity.

It was very apparent from an early age that Adrien was a bright child. He excelled in school, when the lessons could keep his attention. His mother made noises about testing him out of his grade level, see about skipping him ahead a year or two, but his father was adamant about keeping him with his peers. His grades took a nosedive in middle school, which was around the time that Adrien realized that he had more of an attraction to his own gender. His parents thought that it had to do with boredom, that he wasn’t paying attention in class, and so they sought to figure out how to fix this. Through trial and error, Adrien’s adoration of technology emerged. With the promise of whatever bits and bobs that he would need to build his own computers from scratch so that he was never out of date with his tech, Adrien brought his grades back up to the top percentile of the class and kept it there for the rest of grade school.

It was no surprise that Adrien was going to major in computer science. He had the grades to get him into whatever school he wanted, and grandparents that were more than willing to foot the bill to one of the more prestigious universities in America, or France. But Adrien wanted to stay in Denver. His life was there, his friends and family, and he wasn’t ready to leave it all behind. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t really be his choice. Two thirds of the way through his sophomore year, his father suffered a severe heart attack at the age of 56. He went in for emergency surgery but never made it back out. Adrien was gutted. He tried to keep going, to chug along so that he could get his degree and help his family out, but it all proved to be too much for him. He didn’t want to be there anymore.

Before his junior year in college, Adrien packed up his life and moved to California – the UCLA campus to be exact. It was there or MIT, and while he enjoyed snow, he wanted more of a permanently sunny world to grieve and get over the loss of his father. It was an adjustment, not knowing anyone there and not having his mother and sister to fall back on when things got rough, but he felt it was necessary. He had to stand on his own two legs eventually. It took a good portion of the year to really settle into himself and emerge from the depression brought on by loss, but hen he did, he flourished. California had been the right choice.

Somehow, by some miracle, he impressed his professors enough that one of them got in contact with a friend of his that worked at Google. There were flaming hoops he had to jump through to get it, but the summer before his senior year found Adrien working an internship with the impressive company. And once he graduated, he applied for a more permanent position. It wasn’t an easy time, but he was a good programmer, so the job was his. He would stay there for a few years, working his way through the ranks and really turning the people there into the family he was missing most of the time.

In the spring of 2012, Cheryl would call her son and break the news that she had cancer. He was told not to worry; that everything was treatable, but all Adrien could think about was losing another parent. His job was amazing in that he could virtually do it anywhere. Literally. And so he used what vacation and sick leave he had to fly back and forth to Denver, to help care for his mom through her chemotherapy and recovery. It was tough, and he had to make a lot of sacrifices to pull it off. She went into remission, and for a while things got back to normal. Winter 2014 would mess it all up again. The chemo had been aggressive and had done some damage to Cheryl’s body. His sister, who had been watching their mother weaken over a few months, called Adrien -- her health was deteriorating. He needed to come home.

Adrien thought it would be tough to leave California. Most of his adult life had been spent there and he had a new amazing family that he loved and adored very deeply. But nothing trumped his blood. And so he moved back home.