When I Was Invisible Read Online Free Page A

that’s cos I’m so happy with you.’
    I didn’t understand. Was he saying to stay or not? I’d be happy either way, but I didn’t know which way it was. I would happily put my ‘Recline. On. The. Sofa.
Together
’ dreams on hold if it meant I was still with him.
    â€˜I don’t understand,’ I confessed. I needed him to explain, to tell me outright what he wanted.
    Todd hooked the tips of his fingers under my chin and raised my face a little to look at him. ‘I love you, Nikky Harper. Please move in with me.’
    Who’s Nikky?
I wondered. Then I remembered: me, I was Nikky to Todd. ‘Even if Murray doesn’t approve?’ I asked.
    â€˜Murray will approve. Murray always approves of the things that make me happy.’ He stared intently into my eyes, and I was lost for a moment in the depth of his, how green they were, how beautiful they were when they were focused on me. ‘What do you say? Are you going to stay?’ Another sleepy, sexy smile. ‘For ever?’
    My chest swelled with the huge breath that had filled me. I was so full at that moment. My heart, my head, my everything was full of Todd, full of the man who loved me and who I loved. At one time, my chest had been paralysed, incapable of letting love in or letting love out; at one time, my chest was barely able even to take in or let out air.
    Before Todd, my life had seemed flat, one-dimensional; a bland peach that blanked everything out and made it indistinguishable from everything else in the world. In the four months we’d been together everything had changed. I had someone again to share things with, to talk to, who wanted to be with me all the time. When we weren’t together he would call me and ask when we’d be together. He told me all the time how much he liked being with me. I’d never had so much attention in all my life. No one had ever taken so much interest in me – ever. I loved it. I loved him. Under the fizziness and excitement, there was the knowledge that my heart belonged to Todd.
    â€˜Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I’ll stay for ever.’ I knew when I said that, that I’d taken a step closer to being part of the wonderful, multi-coloured world we lived in.
    Â 
Nika
Birmingham, 2016
    I stand at the bottom of the stone steps that lead into and out of the police station. There are marked and unmarked police cars parked on either side of the entrance and ahead of me there is a low, concrete wall with a wide gap for the pavement and the road in and out for cars.
    From my place at the bottom of the steps, I slowly unwind the wires of my player, carefully push each little bud into their corresponding ‘R’ and ‘L’ ears.
    It’s a silky, black night, the sky is dusted with stars, a late-winter/early-spring coolness teasing the air. When I walked into the police station darkness was rolling in, inking the sky as it moved. I had walked here from the hospital, thinking about what I was about to do with every step, allowing myself the permission to not go in if I had changed my mind by the time I arrived at my destination. I’d needed that walking time to think and had used every step to remind myself what it would mean for my life, where it would lead to for ‘Grace Carter’.
    I have spent so many hours in that building, talking and answering and listening, then talking again. They offered me coffee, they offered me food, they offered water and I had turned it all down. The only thing I had done was go to the toilet to take some time out, to centre myself and remind myself how to be Grace. I have talked so much I have begun to hate the sound of my own voice, to cringe at its intonations and phrasings and crazy, jumbled accent. I have told all that I know and now it’s their turn to check things out, to join up dots, to make connections in all the right places. And to find out who I really am, of course. Who came