“THE GIRL WITH THE RED SCARF” by Andrea Hicks

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Epiphany…

A moment of sudden and great revelation or realization. This is the definition in the Oxford Dictionary…and that’s what it was for me…an epiphany because nothing in my life until I sat in the utter stillness in the café in the park had made any real sense… until I saw her. Of course, the café wasn’t still or quiet. It buzzed with the voices of excited children, the tinkling splashes of water from the fountains glinting in the sunlight, but around her was serenity, a bubble of composure drawing me in. And I was captured.

Tom Alexander has no memory of his life at House in the Hills orphanage on the outskirts of Sarajevo, or of his birth parents, the ones whose faces he wants to see, but doesn’t remember. When he receives a letter from ChildAbroad, the agency that arranged his adoption in 1994, he is offered the opportunity to search for the boy he once was, Andreij Kurik—if he returns to Sarajevo. With Sulio Divjak, the driver and interpreter Tom befriends, he searches the derelict orphanage and discovers he has two siblings, one who was also at House in the Hills. Sulio uncovers a faded photograph in Andreij’s file of a girl wearing a red scarf. She looks like Ellie; the girl Tom fell in love with at first sight in a café in Regent’s Park. Devastated when he realises what it could mean, Tom goes back to the UK to get some answers. Accompanied by Ellie he returns to Sarajevo to find his birth parents, only to receive news that destroys everything he thought he knew about Tom Alexander—and Andreij Kurik.

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