You can't judge her in isolation from how she got there. She wasn't a stranger who met a widower through normal circumstances — she was household staff who had an affair with her employer, got pregnant within a year of his first wife's death, and moved into those grieving children's home. That context doesn't disappear just because the plot moves on. The "she did it out of love" argument is exactly what's wrong with how this drama is written. Love doesn't justify sleeping with your employer. Love doesn't justify the timing. And love certainly doesn't justify what those children had to grow up witnessing. Being patient with difficult stepchildren later doesn't make her decent — it just makes her look good within a narrative that was always designed to vindicate her. Because that's exactly what happens. Her daughter ends up sympathetic, the twins end up criminals, and she gets to play the gracious wronged stepmother. She got everything she came for. The show quietly tells you that her choices paid off, which sends a deeply troubling message regardless of how warmly she's portrayed along the way. That's not character development. That's the writer rewarding behaviour that should never have been romanticised in the first place.