Delete My Love for You novel Chapter 4

Noah’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. He snatched the toy from the floor, winding up to hurl it at Charlotte.

“Stop!”-

Darren’s strong, steady hand caught his son’s arm without effort. His face, rarely so dark, was shadowed with an icy sternness that made the air in the room drop a few degrees.

Startled, Noah shrank back, his voice small and grumbling, “Dad, can’t you just make this awful nanny leave? She annoys me every time I see her…”

Resting his palm on Noah’s soft hair, Darren’s tone left no room for argument. “No one is allowed to lay a hand on her, not without my say-so. Do you understand?”

Noah was only three, after all. Under the weight of his father’s presence, he fell silent, lips pressed tight. But his eyes, brimming with resentment, glared daggers at Charlotte, as if to say: “If it weren’t for you, Dad wouldn’t be mad at me. This is all your fault!”

Those words went unsaid, but the look in his son’s eyes pierced Charlotte’s heart to pieces.

After the nanny led Noah away, Darren straightened the cuffs of his shirt, speaking in a measured, almost lazy tone. “Noah doesn’t need you. No one in the Harrington family does. If you had any sense of self-respect, you would have left long ago.”

Charlotte’s throat tightened as she forced out a whisper, “Darren, don’t you feel any guilt, treating your own son like this?”

He only raised an eyebrow. “Oh? And what, exactly, have I done to him?”

Charlotte, her composure fraying, finally let herself speak the truth she’d swallowed for so long. “You deliberately told Noah he didn’t have a mother, made sure he grew up starved for a mother’s love, and then used your authority as his father to teach him to hate me—all for your own revenge…”

“Revenge?” Darren’s lips curled, his gaze turning coldly amused. “Then why don’t you remind me—what exactly am I supposed to be avenging?”

“Darren, you want this divorce as soon as possible, don’t you?”

He was already turning toward his study, but her words made him stop in his tracks.

“If you want it quickly,” Charlotte pressed, “then do me one favor: Tell Noah who I really am. Tell him I’m his mother, not the nanny. Help him accept the truth, and let him come with me.”

He let out a cold, dismissive laugh. “So you’ve learned to threaten me now?”

Her voice was soft but steady. “This isn’t a threat. For three years, you’ve hated me for supposedly using Noah to climb my way into your life. If I leave with the child I gave birth to, you’ll never have to see me again. I mean it this time—forced love isn’t love at all. I want this divorce as much as you do, Darren. I’m done fighting.”