Cinderella Threw Away Her Glass Slipper

When David and I signed the divorce papers, a strange calm settled over us.
He asked, with a veneer of concern, what I wanted.
My answer came without a second thought.
The cars, the house, the savings.
And half the shares in your company.
David froze, a flicker of surprise in his eyes.
What about the children? You don't want either of them?
"You love them so much. Can you really bear to leave Leo and Mia behind?"
My gaze fell to the latticework of scars on my wrist, a silent testament to years of self-inflicted pain.
I gave a small, slow shake of my head.
Not anymore.
From this day forward, the only thing I wanted from David Thorne was his money.
Everything else connected to him, I was leaving behind.

1.
Faced with my cold detachment, David looked like he wanted to say something more.
But after a moment's hesitation, he simply fell silent and signed his name to the agreement.
As we parted, he offered a final, polite gesture.
"I can't give you the shares, but you will always be the children's mother."
"If you ever run into trouble, you can always come to me."
I nodded.
The moment I turned away, the business card he'd handed me found its home in the nearest trash can.
In this lifetime, I would rather die than ever see David Thorne again.
Back at the house, I told the housekeeper to pack up all of Davids belongings and throw them out.
She chuckled, unconcerned.
"Ma'am, did you and Mr. Thorne have another fight?"
"If you ask me, you should just let it blow over," she said, her tone light and teasing.
"He does care for you, deep down. It's not worth throwing away your position as Mrs. Thorne over a little spat."
Maria had seen everything. All the years of pain, the humiliation I'd endured.
She knew the torrential force of my love for David.
She had also witnessed my hysterics, the countless times Id shattered in the face of his betrayals.
Like David, she was convinced I would never leave.
But this time, I didn't break down in tears and complaints as I usually did.
Instead, I took our wedding portrait down from the wall and spoke, my voice calm and empty.
"My mother is dead."
The smile vanished from Maria's face.
She stood frozen, stammering an apology, her hands fluttering uselessly.
I offered a faint, humorless smile and said nothing.
With all my strength, I brought the heavy frame down, smashing it to pieces on the floor.
Maria jumped back, startled.
Then, she was crouching beside me, helping me clean up the shards of glass. She expertly bandaged the cut on my hand, a wound torn open by the impact.
"Good," she murmured, her voice thick with emotion. "Good riddance!"
"You're an Ivy League graduate, a brilliant woman. You can live a much better life without him."
"You don't have to take that kind of pain anymore, my dear."
"I know," I whispered, my head bowed.
I hadn't wanted to cry.
But as I looked down, the tears came anyway, hot and unstoppable. There was regret, and a deep, aching sadness.
But beneath it all, there was something else.
A glimmer of the dizzying joy of a survivor.
After ten years of entanglement, the fairytale romance of the prince and the cinder-girl had finally reached its end.
It wasn't a happy ending, but it was the one I should have seen coming all along.

2.
At eighteen, I was the top student in my county, accepted into one of the most prestigious Ivy League universities.
That same year, I met David Thorne, a successful alumnus who had returned to campus to make a donation.
The beginning of our story was, like all fairytales, breathtakingly romantic.
For David, it was love at first sight.
After his speech, he began a relentless, whirlwind courtship.
Hed wait for me after class with flowers and my favorite latte. Hed bribe my roommates with cash just to know my schedule. He memorized every trivial detail about me and declared his love in a field of a thousand roses hed had planted just for me.
Back then, everyone said we wouldn't last.
They were certain a small-town girl like me, a nobody, could never truly fit into his world.
But David didn't care. He brushed off their doubts, determined to be with me. He fought against the pressure from his family and proposed, shielding me from all the malice and judgment.
Under his protection, my life, once a struggle, was suddenly switched to easy mode.
Jewelry and bouquets, graduate school placements, opportunities to study abroadeverything was laid at my feet before I even had to ask.
What teenage girl, inexperienced and full of dreams, could resist such an onslaught?
I fell, hard and fast.
I gave up my ambitions and stepped into the gilded cage of marriage.
Dating, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth. It all unfolded so seamlessly.
For the girl I was then, life felt impossibly easy. Everything I ever wanted was mine for the taking.
I was drunk on love, completely unaware that every gift from fate comes with a hidden price tag.
The day our son, Leo, was born, the Thorne matriarch, a woman I had never met, swept into my hospital room and took my child from my arms.
Her smile was polite, perfectly composed, but her voice was a shard of ice.
"Leo is the future heir to the Thorne fortune. His position is of the utmost importance."
"Your background, your upbringing hardly qualifies you to raise him."
I had carried him for ten months, endured a difficult birth, and I wasn't even allowed to hold him.
To even see my own son, I had to get permission first.
I begged David, pleaded with him not to be so cruel, not to separate me from our baby.
He just looked at me with a strange expression.
"My mother's right, you know. You're from the countryside."
"She made it clear from the start. I can fool around all I want, but when it comes to the children, her word is law."
I was on the verge of collapsing from grief.
But David simply pulled me into his arms and kissed me, completely ignoring my tears.
He laughed it off.
"Come on, don't be so sad."
"If you want a baby that badly, we can just make another one."
I couldn't push him away.
But then his eyes caught the faint, silvery stretch marks on my stomach.
He stopped.
A flicker of something between hesitation and disgust crossed his face. After a long moment, he pulled away and said flatly, "You've had a long day. You should get some rest."
Davids indifference was like a bucket of ice water, shocking me out of my long, beautiful dream.
I remembered his mother's contempt, the snickering of those around me.
And I suddenly understood.
This grand, sweeping love affair of ours?
It had been nothing more than the indulgent whim of a rich boy.
Fate had showered me with blessings.
Now, it was starting to collect the interest.
And my son was just the beginning.
In the weeks after giving birth, I spiraled into a severe postpartum depression.
My calls to David went unanswered. My texts were left unread.
Just as I started to panic, worrying that something terrible had happened to him, the news broke.
Scandalous photos of him in bed with some starlet were plastered across every gossip site overnight.
The world began to speculate how long it would be before the small-town Cinderella was kicked to the curb.
The public mockery and vicious comments shattered the last fragments of my fairytale.
I couldn't accept it. My depression deepened.
David and I had the most violent argument of our lives. In a complete breakdown, I grabbed a knife and threatened to jump from the balcony.
That finally got his attention. He rushed to grab me, his hands trembling as he apologized.
He was just like every other cheating husband, crying that he was sorry, that it was all a misunderstanding, that he loved me and I had to give him another chance.
That night, David knelt before me, his face wet with tears.
"Nina, please. Can you forgive me, just this once?"
3.
I made the second worst decision of my life.
I chose to forgive him.
For our son. For the stubborn love I couldn't yet sever.
And because a sudden car accident had left my mother in critical condition, robbing me of my last safe harbor.
So, David and I reconciled.
And soon, I was pregnant with our second child, Mia.
Like her brother, Mia was taken from me the moment she was born.
The excuse this time was that David needed to focus on his work and couldn't be disturbed by a crying baby.
Just to see my own children, I had to go to the Thorne estate before dawn every day to perform my duties.
I served tea, massaged Mrs. Thornes shoulders and back, and even knelt to wash her feet. I humbled myself in every way imaginable, all for the small mercy of being allowed to spend a few moments with Leo and Mia.
But all my desperate efforts were rewarded with David's flagrant betrayals and the deep-seated resentment of my own children.
Leo never called me "Mom."
Whenever he saw me, he would scowl and say, "That stupid country woman is here again. I don't want to see her."
Mia was too young to speak, but she would cry and reach for her grandmother the moment I came near.
Meanwhile, my mother's condition was steadily worsening.
The coldness of my children, the crushing weight of my life... I was exhausted, hollowed out by despair.
And in the moments when I needed him most, David was off building a new life with another woman.
It was our wedding anniversary.
Leo refused my invitation to celebrate.
David didn't answer my calls.
Instead, his new lover took the initiative and sent me a video of them in bed together.
Listening to their moans and whispers, I finally shattered completely. I lost control and dragged a razor across my arm.
By the time Maria burst into the bathroom, I was bleeding out on the floor.
She frantically called David.
This time, he didn't show up until dawn.
He crouched in front of me, a smirk on his face as he looked at the gruesome wounds on my arm.
"Still here? I thought you were going to die."
"Its been a whole night. How are you still clinging to this family like a stray dog?"
His words ripped open the fragile calm Id found.
Without a second thought, I threw myself off the balcony.
I didn't die.
I just broke my leg.
Mrs. Thorne paid off the reporters and had me dragged to my mother's hospital.
She stood over me, her voice dripping with cold fury.
"The ICU costs twenty thousand dollars a day."
"If you ever dare to embarrass the Thorne family again, I will make sure your mother joins you."
For the first time, I realized that even death was a luxury I couldn't afford.
I couldn't let go of the love that once was, couldn't sever the ties to my children. So I remained, shrinking myself into nothingness in a marriage devoid of self.
I watched my children pull away from me.
I watched David move from one woman to the next.
I watched them use my mother as a leash to control my life.
A marriage into wealth was both a sweet paradise and a chain of torment.
Cinderella had ascended to become Mrs. Thorne, but the Prince was still lost in his games of love, "rescuing" one poor, beautiful girl after another.
Until one day, David went too far.
He fell for a socialite in her thirties, a woman with multiple divorces under her belt, and got her pregnant.
Mrs. Thorne was livid.
She slapped me twice across the face, her voice shaking with rage as she berated me for failing to control my husband.
"A woman who can't even hold onto her own husband's heartwhat use are you?"
"I am ordering you to clean up this mess immediately. If you don't"
"I will cut off your mother's medical payments and ensure you never see Leo and Mia again!"
After my marriage had crumbled into ruin, the last thread of family I had left was my only reason for living.
I couldn't lose my mother.
I couldn't lose that final connection.
With a heavy heart, I went to see the woman, Vivienne.
Unlike David's previous flings, she wasn't arrogant or condescending. She was polite, almost deferential.
She called me "Mrs. Thorne" with every other breath, her eyes dripping with faux admiration.
"I'm so sorry, Mrs. Thorne. I never intended to disrupt your family."
"It's just I love David so much."
"But if it's for his own good, I'm willing to terminate the pregnancy and disappear from his life forever."
Vivienne was true to her word.
She took the money and vanished without a trace.
That night, for the first time in a long time, David came back to our bedroom.
Without a word, he pushed me onto the bed.
For an entire month, he barely let me leave it.
Until I was pregnant with our third child.
As a reward for solving Davids "problem" and a way to keep him at home, Mrs. Thorne made an unprecedented concession: I would be allowed to raise this child myself.
Around the same time, under the care of the Thorne family's private medical team, my mother's health began to improve.
I was ecstatic.
I thought the worst was finally over.
I thought things were finally looking up.
But when I was eight months pregnant
David pushed me down the stairs.

First, search for and download the MotoNovel app from Google. Then, open the app and use the code "294134" to read the entire book.