The setting sun spills its last bit of light through Natalie-Rose’s dusty window. Night has come, just how she likes it. In a burgundy, brocade-printed armchair, her rosy pink lips form a slight grin as she attempts to make sense of a dark history that threatened to shadow her for the rest of her life. “For as long as I can remember, I felt I’ve been a prisoner of my own mind,” she whispers in the dimly lit room. “I’ve done regrettable things; let regrettable things happen to me. I questioned my actions, but couldn’t find answers. I’ve been in the dark for so long that I had gotten used to it, and preferred it that way, to be alone, in solitude,” she says. “And now that I’ve finally unveiled the truth, I feel more liberated than ever. But that doesn’t mean the scars of my past would simply fade away with the wind. Sometimes, it still haunts me,” she says, looking down at her black and white cameo ring.

Natalie-Rose was molested by her stepfather when she was twelve. Then, when she was fourteen, she fell in love with a man twenty-seven years her senior, only to find out in the end that he had married someone else and was only taking advantage of her virginity. And at twenty, the father of one of her best friends sexually assaulted her.

“It seems to me that a father figure has been absent in her life,” says Margaret Lynch, Ph.D., and a psychology lecturer at San Francisco State University. “She unconsciously sought out that male, father figure in the older man she involved herself with, as girls who did not have a father generally do. They just tend to date older men. As for the abuses, those weren’t her fault. There was obviously a breach of trust, and many times, when a loss of trust happens repeatedly in one’s life, destructive behavior is continued until they seek help,” she says of Natalie-Rose’s circumstances.

Natalie-Rose never had a father, nor felt a fatherly love that reflects both the tenderness and power of a man.

“I did questionable things that later turned into regret. I never knew the motivations behind my actions, my silence until one day, I realized that it was due to the absence of a father figure in my life. Unconsciously, I was on a quest to search for that figure that lines were blurred, and before I knew it, I was immersed in hurt, pain, guilt, regret.”

When her mother remarried shortly after their arrival from the Philippines, six-year-old Natalie-Rose became hopeful of having a better father than her biological one, whose heavy hand and foot had struck her twice before. Years had gone by and Natalie-Rose thought she would finally have a complete family, until she turned twelve and her life took a horrifying turn.

“I lucidly remember one day in the summer I turned twelve. It was afternoon, and my mom had gone to work. My brother and I were playing Monopoly in our room when my stepfather called my brother in. I followed my brother, but my stepfather locked the door behind them. I tried to listen, but I couldn’t make out anything they were saying. About an hour later, my brother had horror in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong, but before he could answer, my stepfather beckoned me into the room. My heart raced. I didn’t know what was going to happen. Then a few minutes passed. He told me to turn around. I complied. He unfastened my bathing suit top, and began to touch me,” she says, gazing down. “I got scared. I didn’t know then, but I was being molested,” she says. “For a long time, he was molesting me and my brother.”

This revolting routine lasted for about a year and Natalie-Rose and her brother felt so hopeless that they could not turn their stepfather in. “Our stepfather opened his home to us when we were new in America and didn’t have stability. He took care of us financially. If we told anyone, our stepfather threatened to take everything away. We were misguided,” she says.

To this day, Natalie-Rose wonders why her stepfather abruptly discontinued his dirty deeds; nevertheless, her stepfather’s violation of trust left a deep emotional scar that would have a significant impact on her future decisions.

Natalie-Rose looks out the window, as if hypnotized by the velvet, star-filled sky. She stands up and turns off the lights, the intense moonlight flooding the room. She walks over to a baby grand piano, its elegance illuminated by the moonlight. She sits down, and begins to caress the ivory keys with her long, slender fingers. In the shadows, she drowns herself in a strange tune, a dark tone that is “Point of No Return,” a song from The Phantom of the Opera. With this song, she begins to delineate the next chapter of a tainted trust: her adolescent years.

“I’ve always felt that my music is my curse,” Natalie-Rose says, playing a series of treble clef notes. “I was taught by a musical genius, but that same person shattered my heart and mind. But how was I to ever forget him when he gave me this gift, which is my passion?”

At fourteen, Natalie-Rose joined her church choir under her mother’s wishes. Natalie-Rose grew to love the choir, but she was soon drawn to the piano and became involved with the person playing it–forty-two-year-old choir director Francis Emmanuel.

“I’ll never forget how he played. He played with so much raw emotion, passion. That’s when I knew I wanted to learn music, piano to be more specific. I wanted to be like him. To be gifted like him. I admired him,” says Natalie-Rose in a bittersweet nostalgia.

Natalie-Rose began to linger in church as Emmanuel practiced songs with his soloists. Eventually, Emmanuel took Natalie-Rose under his wing and became her informal piano teacher. Natalie-Rose couldn’t afford piano lessons, and was grateful for what she called a favor. Emmanuel called it a gift and said that she would be his protégée.

“Every time I saw them, they were on a piano,” says Neal Pascua, a former choir member of Emmanuel’s. “If not on a piano, they were together discussing music. I also always see them hanging out. I thought something of it at one point because it was as if they were having a romance,” he says. “Who knew that it was actually true? I mean, he could be her dad!”

Bingo. He could be her dad.

“I could honestly say that I’d fallen in love with him,” she confesses. “And I believed he had fallen for me, though I was fourteen and he was forty-one. Yes, I knew that others would think this to be crazy, so both he and I vowed to keep our relationship a secret. He was eager to ‘show his love for me’ and I knew he meant making love. I didn’t want to, but naive me decided that that was the only way to express true love. So I gave in. I gave him my virginity. Three years later, I discovered the terrible truth: he married after he had taken what was rightfully mine. He’d been lying for three years. I gave him everything, my youth, my heart and mind. He said he loved me. Being as young as I was, it was emotionally and psychologically devastating. For a while, he took with him my sanity. And my trust. I was so used to being with him that I continued seeing him until one day, I realized that that was just plain stupid. So I tried to replace my pain by drinking excessively. It got me nowhere. I just became sicker,” she says, a faint tear materializing in one eye. After the Francis Emmanuel escapade, Natalie-Rose consoled herself with her music and Jack Daniels to ease the searing pain brewing inside. She had been taken advantage of, again. She asks herself why she hadn’t seen the deceit, the pretense?

“Before I knew of Natalie-Rose’s happenings, she seemed completely fine to me,” states Shaniza Kaiyum, her best friend from high school. “She says she went through one hell of a storm back in 2005; well, she must have kept it together real well. She was well-composed. Her outside activities, jobs, et cetera, was not affected. Personally I don’t know how she did it, but I can only imagine the demons she tries to fight when she’s not busy.”

Natalie-Rose never sought counseling, though the people she had confided in suggested she do so. Just when Natalie-Rose thought the storm of broken trusts was over, the final blow was still to come. “I was really excited when I turned twenty,” says Natalie-Rose. “I would finally escape my teens, years of my life I just wanted to burn. As much as I wanted to put that behind me, my unconscious desire for a father was still lurking in my psyche, and because I was unaware then, I intuitively invited another occasion wherein I would be taken advantage of,” she says.

Natalie-Rose had a best friend whose family she immensely admired. He had a nuclear family: a father who was the breadwinner, a forty-year-old mother who was still very beautiful, a brother who held a high rank in the Navy and a sister who was good at everything she did and was pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. One day, her best friend and his mother flew to Maryland to visit his sister. Due to work, the father stayed. He began to invite Natalie-Rose to play tennis, which would be followed by dinner and sometimes a movie. Unfortunately she did not see through his ploy.

“Now that I think about it, I should’ve declined all those offers. I was stupid then. That could’ve prevented his advances,” she says. Like a daughter does to a father, she would confide in him. “I confided in him one night, because he was doing a great deal of listening, and that was so comforting, so nurturing, something I yearned for. It sounds like I didn’t feel any kind of love, but actually, I do have a loving mother, it’s just I longed for that fatherly love, I suppose,” she says. “Anyway, that night, I had a few sips of wine, and I began to feel tipsy so I lay on the couch. It was silent, and suddenly, it became dark. Then I feel these icy lips on my neck, but was too rigid from the drinks to resist. For a while, everything was hazy, like a dream. Then repulsive flashes of my stepfather and Francis took hold of me, and I kicked my best friend’s father before he went any further, before he could have possibly raped me. I ran out of his house, and ran all the way back, though it was around two in the morning. In that moment, I’d never felt more liberated,” she says.

Natalie-Rose never found a father figure, and now, she no longer feels the need to. And after walking a road of guilt, anguish and remorse, she thought she could never trust or love again. But today, she has a boyfriend who accepts her with open arms and promises to piece together her spirit broken by her past.

“I love her,” says Jay Tu, boyfriend of Natalie-Rose. “And while her past is so hard to accept, all I could do to help her forget is to show her what trust really is and what love is supposed to be like. And I promise her that I will show her that.”