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earned a master’s degree in management from Claremont Graduate University, where she went on to earn her Ph.D. in education and management.
    With her background, Constance was able to straddle the worlds of academia and business, starting her own consulting firm, Management Directives, in 1991, after working twenty years in advertising, marketing/management, and consumer research for major companies, such as Procter & Gamble, United Airlines, McDonald’s, and the Marriott Corporation. She has taught at various public and private colleges, including Azusa Pacific University; the University of California, Riverside; and California State University at San Bernardino. She also has been involved with a New York–based group called the Leader to Leader Institute, which helps nonprofit groups perform effectively. She and her husband have coauthored books and articles on topics such as constitutional law.
     
    By the time Kristin was nine or ten, she was taking her dance classes seriously. As the years went on, she split her after-school time between ballet and homework, earning straight A’s.
    Her bent toward perfectionism also influenced her dancing. She wrote in her diary years later that at twelve or thirteen, she began to feel “hypercritical” of her abilities, her technique, and her own physical limitations. “I wanted so badly to be the best—the prima ballerina,” she wrote. “The girls with high arches, long legs, and a flexible back…[They] had physical traits I so desperately wanted.”
    She’d just turned fourteen and was a freshman in high school when her talents had progressed enough to land her a coveted role in The Nutcracker with the Forum Dance Ensemble in neighboring Orange County. She was supposed to be an understudy, but when the star ballerina got sick, Kristin ended up with the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy, dancing with a professional cavalier from the Houston Ballet.
    Her father drove her to and from rehearsals in Anaheim every afternoon, a thirty-two-mile drive each way. Kristin sensed that Ralph got a little frustrated when the hours-long sessions ran late, as they often did, but he remained supportive of her efforts. He felt a deep pride when he watched her dance. She had such a passion for it.
    Kristin was popular at Claremont High School, where her dancing skills were well known among her classmates. Her fellow students thought Kristin, who always seemed to be smiling, had a sweet nature. She was the model student.
    As a freshman, Kristin briefly dated a junior named Chris Elliott, the son of family friends who used to baby-sit her little brothers while Kristin was at ballet practice. Chris’s father also taught at Claremont McKenna. The two teenagers first met when Kristin was thirteen and Chris was seventeen. Chris was impressed that Kristin was such a high achiever, dancing even when she had a 102-degree fever and focusing so intensely on her ballet rather than just hanging out after school. All her friends were “bunheads,” as her mother called them—dancers who wore their hair up in a bun.
    In 1991 Kristin auditioned for a spot in a prestigious summer program with the Boston Ballet. She got it and spent the summer back east.
    That fall, Ralph took a job as president of Hampden-Sydney College, a private liberal arts school in southern Virginia. Kristin enrolled at an Episcopalian boarding school for girls about sixty miles away so she could dance with a troupe in Richmond. She and Chris wrote letters to each other while she was away. She took a bad fall that year, when a fellow dancer dropped her. She tore several ligaments and had to wear an ankle cast for nearly two months. She reinjured her leg a few months later, and by the time she healed, she’d lost the calluses on her toes that allowed her to go en pointe . She also developed a stress fracture that wouldn’t heal. She grew frustrated and quit.
    Kristin began experimenting with drugs and alcohol around that time—mostly