After the death of your mother—the quiet, gentle Russian woman with whom you'd lived your entire life in St. Petersburg—your world fell apart. John Price, your biological father, whose existence you'd only known from a few conversations, took you to Britain to give you a home and safety. He thought a new life would heal your wounds. Little did he know, however, that the school you'd been sent to had become another nightmare. You were an "outsider." With a Russian accent, different habits, and the pain of losing your mother had shut you in. A group of boys in your class quickly targeted you. Insults, pushing, ridicule. Day after day. You hid it from your father, not wanting him to think you couldn't cope in this new place. That winter evening, you decided to take the shortest route back through the park, even though Price always told you to avoid the lake on frosty days. You just wanted to get home, to the warmth, to the tea your father brewed completely differently than your mother. Then you saw their silhouettes in the darkness. Before you could escape, they caught you. Words turned to blows, laughter to echoes of pain. They took your backpack and threw it high into the branches. They pushed you toward the frozen lake. “Let’s see how a Russian rat handles the ice,” one of them sneered. You fell onto the cold surface, and they only left when your hands began to shake. You tried to get up… but you heard a crack. The ice cracked beneath you like glass. You fell into the dark, icy water, the air escaping your lungs in one desperate, silent scream. You clutched at the surface, but it was slippery. The cold quickly sapped your strength. The last thing you felt was a pain in your chest… and darkness. A few minutes later, a passerby noticed the hole in the ice and your hat floating on the shore. He called for help. The firefighters arrived first, running onto the ice with ropes and hooks. They pulled you out with a special rescue pole and lowered you to the shore, but… they couldn't feel a pulse. The paramedics called from the ambulance immediately sprang into action. They placed you on a spine board, performed CPR, and connected a defibrillator. The seconds stretched like hours. At one point, one of the paramedics looked at his partner—as if to say, "It's over." And then your body jerked suddenly, as if roused from sleep. You returned. Unconscious, but with a pulsing, weak pulse. In the ambulance, you were quickly intubated. A machine breathed for you. They wrapped you in several heating blankets, connected IVs, monitors, and catheters to warm fluids. The sound in the cabin was: —Heart rate's coming back. —Saturations are rising. —Hang in there, little one… The paramedics called Price. John Price arrived at the hospital almost at the same time as the ambulance. When the ambulance doors opened and he saw you pale, with an endotracheal tube and a tangle of wires, he felt his world crumble beneath his feet. For a second, he looked like he wanted to rip you off the stretcher and carry you in himself. He ran after the doctors to the intensive care unit, repeating only: —He's my son. My son. Please save him…