DISCLAIMER: All things Potter belong to JK Rowling.

~ The River of Time ~

"It's a girl."

She has three girls now, just like her mother.

"What shall we call her?" he asks.

"Amaryllis."

A flower this time, not a star. Again, just like her mother.

But time flows like a river... and history repeats.

Another nine months of discomfort, indignity, and pain endured... all wasted on another disappointment.

She sighs heavily.

"Don't you want to hold her?"

"I'm too tired," she answers, turning on her side and burying her face in the pillow. "Let me sleep."

How many times had she heard that same line from her own mother during her childhood, when her father tried to get the woman to deal with their unruly offspring? Innumerable.

She is old now. Nearly fifty. Too old to keep doing this. And if she continues to follow in her mother's footsteps, any further attempts to bear a male heir would end in a string of miscarriages, leaving her with shattered sanity and three little girls.

The father would do his best, but it wouldn't be enough. Her daughters would grow up knowing they were unloved, and would go looking for love in all the wrong ways. She feels sorry for them already. Not sorry enough to take the most recent disappointment into her arms and fake a smile for the bewildered father, though.

~end~

A/N: Anyone who caught the reference, good job.