After Marrying into His Family as a Substitute Bride, I Become Their Beloved Darling

[Comeback in the 1970s] [Sweet Romance and Family Favorite] [Female Lead's Growth] [Domestic Life] [Mutual Devotion] [Marriage Before Love]

In the bitter winter of 1977, Su Qinghe is slapped awake by her birth mother, Zhao Jinhua, and shoved into an old red padded jacket. She is to take the place of her runaway younger sister and marry an army officer in a wheelchair.

At five, she was dumped at her maternal grandmother's home in the countryside to herd cattle. For twelve years, no one cared about her or asked after her.

Now that her grandmother is gone, she doesn't even have a place to stay.

Fine, she'll get married. At least she'll have something to eat.

But she never expected that the man sitting in the wheelchair, cold as ice, would turn over her frostbitten hands on their wedding night and say, "I'll ask my mother to buy you a pair of gloves tomorrow."

Her mother-in-law crouches by the stove to rub frostbite ointment on her, her eyes reddening.

Her father-in-law tears up the IOU Zhao Jinhua forced her to thumbprint, right in front of the whole compound, and burns it to ashes.

Her sister-in-law stuffs a newly knitted sweater into her arms and snaps back at anyone who dares gossip.

One by one, she puts the gossipy women in the military compound in their place. Her birth mother comes demanding a settling-in allowance and gets kicked out, while her scheming younger sister will eventually beg her on her knees.

With her deft hands, she amazes everyone in the canteen kitchen. Thanks to her photographic memory, she picks up her textbooks again and prepares for the college entrance exam.

And the wheelchair-bound officer, tough on the outside but softhearted underneath, secretly slips a copy of their marriage registration into his pay book. A line in the spouse field is left blank.

As if waiting for her name to be written there.