Snow muffles every sound outside the duchy except the one that matters: a child coughing behind a door she is not supposed to open. Anissa was just a former kindergarten teacher, spirited away and dropped into the body of a minor villainess doomed to die of a mysterious wasting disease. She knows the script. She memorized the death flags. And the smallest, most fragile one belongs to the boy in the next room — her stepson, the terminally ill heir of Duke Mikhail von Eisenstadt.

The novel never gave him a name. Anissa gives him her time. She sneaks past the staff she was supposed to command, ignores the husband whose grief she now shares, and sits beside the fevered child every night. She tells him stories. She feeds him soup. She argues with a duke who has spent years watching his son fade and has no reason to trust the stranger who married him for politics. But Anissa is not losing another child. Not even one the author gave up on. Somewhere in the capital, the true antagonists of this story are still moving, and the wasting sickness is not as natural as the doctors believe. Anissa is running out of pages, and the cure she needs was never written into the chapter.

Also known as: I Became the Stepmother of a Terminally Ill Child, 시한부 아이의 계모가 되었다, Sihanbu Ai-ui Gyemoga Doeeotda, I Became the Stepmother of an Irrevocable Dark Family.