Dear Nymphadora,

Well. This is… Let me start with explanations. I wrote another version of this letter, a long time ago, during the first war. It was addressed to Sirius, James, and my father. I burned it sometime during 1982.

This is another try at the same thing—a posthumous letter, I think Sirius called it. Because I need to let you know that, no matter what happens, I love you. You are the best thing that ever happened to me, ever, ever, ever.

I don't think you have ever realized how stunningly gorgeous you are. There is so much light, so much life, so much spirit and laughter and hope inside you that you are beautiful no matter what you look like. Always.

Child that I have not yet met, child I do not yet know, I love you as well. I hope you do not need to read this for many years, but I have accepted a long time ago that we are not the masters of our fates, that there is a greater power that guides us. If it is not destined that I die in bed (and somehow, I do not think that it is) I want you to know that you mean more to me than anything else except your mother. I am so excited to meet you, so desperate that you will approve of me—I do realize how odd this sounds, a father asking his son or daughter's approval, but I hope you know that I only ever did what I did for the best. If I am gone, and I will be whenever you read this, do not mourn me, if you can. I have done far more with my life than I ever expected to: crossed the globe, had the company of brilliant scholars and wonderful friends, and fallen madly in love with the most beautiful, wonderful, clever woman in the world. And yes, I do mean your mother!

I will not try to tell either of you, Nymphadora (and darling, I apologize already for using your name, although I have already explained I think it is exquisite) and my unborn child, that I have no regrets. There are many things in my life I wish I had not done, but, no matter how it may have appeared, the one thing I have sworn never to regret is the two of you. I have made many mistakes in my life, but marrying you and having a child are not one of them. I only hope all of the other things that may have at one time seemed to be mistakes prove so perfect in the end. And now that it has come to an end, I am sorry for all the time I will not spend with the two of you, but I am not sorry for anything else.

However I died, and in this war we are fighting, there are many ways to die, I am not sorry—I have confidence that I will have died doing the right thing, that I will have died fighting for something I believed in, fighting for a world the two of you can live in. Unless, of course, I have been hit by a falling piano or something equally as Muggle-cartoon and banal, in which case I am extremely ticked off…

No matter what else happens, I love you—through fire and flood and the worst man can devise, I love you.

Eternally yours,

Remus