Seeing Blind |NH|

Chapter Thirty Two

As much as I wanted to know what was going on, I also didn't want to interrupt her thoughts and pry. So, I remained quiet, walking either next to her, or slightly behind her. Abruptly, she stopped at an intersection, and having been looking both ways to prepare to walk across the street, I bumped into her.

"Sorry," I mumbled.

She turned to face me for the first time since she slammed into me. "Is there something wrong with me, Niall?" She asked, softly. "Am I crazy?"

"What?"

"Am I crazy?"

"Uh, not that I'm aware of. Why?"

She shook her head, "It's just, I swear I saw something but then minutes later, it was gone."

"What was gone?" I reached for her arm and pulled her off to the side, away from people.

"Texts."

"Texts?"

"We just got back from the airport and Jace had turned on his phone and walked off into the bathroom. The phone kept beeping and beeping and beeping. I realize that my phone will probably do the exact same thing when I turn it back on but I, I don't know, something in me told me to look down. So, I did. And there were all these texts from two different numbers; belonging to two different girls."

I didn't say anything, but my face tightened up. I knew it. The bastard was still cheating on her. And with more than one girl this time.

"Something didn't feel right to me, so I picked up his phone and unlocked it. I know his passcode. I saw, or so I thought I saw, messages. Sexually explicit messages from both girls."

My fists clenched.

"But, when I confronted him, he called me crazy. He snatched the phone from me and told me that I didn't trust him."

'No shit, you can't trust him,' I thought, getting angrier

"But when I went to show him the proof, and grabbed his phone back from him, they were gone. Poof!" She threw her arms out into the air and let them fall back to her sides. "How does that work? I'm fucking crazy."

"No, Esta, you're not crazy."

"I have to be, Niall. I saw them but then they were gone. He hadn't done anything to erase the messages in that short of a span of time. He couldn't have."

"Esta..."

"You know, the thing is, I had thought prior to this trip that something was going on, but he told me I was being silly. He then popped this trip on us out of the blue and I figured I was going crazy because why else would he want to disappear for an unknown amount of time with me? Ya know?"

"Esta, you are not crazy. I hate to say this but I can almost guarantee he's probably doing something behind your back. He probably never stopped. And he's only making you feel guilty for not trusting him. I mean, come on, you're standing here on a street corner in downtown LA wondering if you are the crazy one? The only crazy one is him! For not knowing how good he's got it with you. You, on the other hand, deserve so much more than him." She crossed her arms but remained quiet. I placed my hands on her arms and bent down to look in her eyes. "You are not crazy, Esta. He's gaslighting you; making you feel stupid and crazy when you're not."

Tears began streaming down her face again from beneath her sunglasses. She wiped them away.  "But, how did he get them to disappear? He didn't have the time for that?"

"I'm sure there's some fancy way to delete things even when someone is looking right at them. You were upset and probably yelling at him, so while making you feel insecure and crazy, he probably somehow managed to delete them even if you think you were watching him the whole time."

She wiped away more tears. I then remembered how he had told me to leave her alone. She didn't know that, and I began wondering if I should tell her.

"What should I do?" she asked.

'Dump his ass. Permanently.' I thought. In reality, I shrugged. "I don't know, Esta."

"What would you do? If you thought someone was cheating on you but you no longer had the proof?"

"I'd follow my gut. I don't doubt that you saw these messages. He found a way to hide them from you somehow. You felt this feeling for a reason, Esta. You don't trust him and you shouldn't.  Jace has done this to you before and there's no way he's changed. I mean, just a year ago you were in this same place; coming home from a trip with him after having found him cheating on you. And from what Patrick has said, sounds like Jace does this a lot."

"He does."

"So why do you keep taking him back?"

She shrugged. "I love him."