YA she did.
He's a posthumous character, RIP Volund Cordwyk. 😔

And she's the same age in both (roughly - slightly older in her real canon, but same ballpark).

There's nowhere I've written it down Yet™️, but I've got...plans to make a carrd profile thing eventually. Maybe.

The short of it is her real name is Nicolette (Almond is a childhood nickname). She's a refugee from Werlyt to Ul'dah, escaped from under Garlean occupation with her grandma when she was very little (~6 ish). Things were fine there for a good long while until her grandmother fell ill and was moved into residential care.

They couldn't afford to keep the bills on that paid (haha Ul'dahn prices), so Almond went to the House of Splendors to buy the medical debt in exchange for becoming one of Rowena's -na girls. (She considered other options, selling herself, so on and so forth, but that wasn't...appealing to her.)

She worked like that for a while, learning how to run a business under Rowena and the other girls, until she met Volund while doing business deals. They got to chatting and Almond told him her story - Volund, being comedically impulsive And an even bigger, more hopeless romantic than Almond herself is, offered to buy the debt from Rowena in exchange for Almond's hand in marriage.

So Almond ends up surprisingly happily married to a wealthy merchant(/arms dealer) she just met, now largely debt-free, and...her grandma is suspicious about the arrangement but as long as he doesn't hurt her granddaughter then, well, the girl can make her own decisions.

Of course he gets murdered a good while later and Almond, by the time her real canon picks back up and she meets L'sta, is still in mourning and L'sta's similarity to her late husband might've been part of the initial attraction, but.
Vague gestures.
Y'know.

(I write my character lore as taking place in a similar time bubble to canon FFXIV's storyline, if that weren't immediately obvious by ALL OF THIS taking place in a relatively short time lol)