James sighed as he went into the bathroom and wrapped his arm around his sobbing wife. That was the third miscarriage this year. Unlike with his parents who'd had so much trouble conceiving that they thought they never would, Lily tended to get pregnant at the drop of a hat.

The problem was, she could never stay pregnant.

He was nearly at his wit's end, and considering the look Lily was giving him, he was afraid that his wife would do something drastic in order to stop the miscarriages. He didn't know what he could possibly do about the situation however.

As Lily slept fitfully in one of the beds in St. Mungo's that evening, he flipped through the classified ads at the back of the Daily Prophet more to have something to do so he wouldn't have to confront what had happened earlier that day than anything. Amongst the ads for miscellaneous services, he'd found a discreet one for a rental space of a certain sort.

With magic such things were possible, but a woman usually had to be seriously down and out before she even considered renting out her womb for nine months as such things were seriously frowned upon for reasons that had been lost to time so long ago that it had merely become tradition to frown upon such actions. Usually, such women waited until they were already pregnant in order to conceal what they were doing, and hopefully avoid the scandal that inevitably came with the discovery that they had done something like that. Based on the wording of the ad, it looked like this would be the case in this situation as well.

A week and several long discussions after James had spotted the ad in the paper, James and Lily were in Ottery St. Catchpole speaking with a man and his wife who desperately needed funds in order to pay for medical treatment for their middle son who'd contracted a very serious illness.

Several months later, they stood supervising as the couple's sixth son was born, making sure that their own son didn't end up more than four months premature.

At the end of July, they snuck a certain woman who was in labor into their home and anxiously watched and waited until Harry James Potter was born.

Nearly fifteen months after the Potter heir was born, a Lord Voldemort who'd done a great deal of research since the children of those who'd thrice defied him that had been born in July had come into the world in decidedly non-standard ways picked the Potter home for his next attack.

On one level, Molly knew that the boy wasn't hers. On another however...On another, all her instincts screamed at her that the boy she'd given birth to was as much hers as Ron or Charlie or Percy was. A witch couldn't carry a child for nine months and give birth to it without...

Though common sense told her to pass the boy who stood there looking so forlorn by before she did something she would end up regretting and tend to her own brood, she felt something other than common sense take over, something that made her want to be there for every milestone in that lonely looking boy's life, something that lamented at the milestones already missed.

"Packed with Muggles of course." she found herself saying, noticing that the lost looking child who'd been abandoned at the station perked up at this.

Without seeming to, she deliberately guided her children over to the boy.

As the boy joined the group, a part of her seemed to note with a degree of satisfaction that her family was finally complete...