Over the course of the next ten years, Remus Lupin left Mrs Collins's tenements and drifted aimlessly throughout Great Britain; Evelyn Linkollew and Thomas Raymond got married and had three children, none of whom had scales or talons; Albus Dumbledore declined the post of Minister of Magic three more times and solidified his reputation as one of the giants of Hogwarts history; John Patrick Dellon served two more terms as district judge for Flatwillow before retiring to spend more time with his wife and youngest daughter; and Rowena Margaret Osborn, née Clay, grew from a diminutive infant into a healthy and spirited young woman.

Due to the slight malnutrition in early life that is inevitable in External Womb babies (an umbilical cord simulated by charms is a poor substitute for the real thing), she remained perpetually small for her age, and her head always gave the impression of being slightly too big for her body. She inherited, however, the robust constitution of both her biological parents, and the active lifestyle of a farmer's daughter (her father had her assisting in the less demanding chores almost as soon as she was old enough to walk) ironed out any lingering frailties that the circumstances of her proto-infancy might have left in her frame.

In appearance, it might have been said that she was her mother down to the nose, and her father below it. That is, she had the dark-red hair, the small, pert nose, and (of course) the almond-shaped, startlingly green eyes of Lily Evans, combined with the thin, sly mouth and the round, determined chin of James Potter. The juxtaposition could not be called strictly beautiful, but it had a certain roguish charm that her foster parents, and particularly her father, delighted in.

Nor was her appearance the only roguish thing about her. Whereas her unknown brother, a hemisphere away in Little Whinging, had the appearance of his father and the affections of his mother, Rowena combined the general contours of an Evans with the incorrigible temperament of a Marauder. The 15,000-acre expanse of the Flaming O Ranch offered her innumerable opportunities for mischief, and she took nearly all of them; she snitched her mother's wedding ring and hid it in the cow pasture, dug in the fields for groundhogs and then let them loose in the ranch house, and nearly got trampled by the stallion Xerxes when she was fooling with the padlock on his pen and inadvertently let him out.

Indeed, if it hadn't been for her father's intervention, Rowena would likely have gotten herself arrested before she was old enough to vote. (And probably gotten a stiff sentence, too, for Judge Dellon's successor, the Honorable Hector C. Graney, was a staunch conservative with a deep-seated distaste for female delinquents and no love lost for the Flaming O set.) Where Mrs. Osborn was inclined, in an understandable excess of natural affection, to pamper and spoil the daughter she had desired so long, Mr. Osborn was determined that the future mistress of his ancestral lands should grow up to be a disciplined and responsible woman, and he exerted all the powers of his formidable personality to this end. Indeed, part of the reason he so delighted in Rowena's willfulness was because it matched his own; his tussles with her were like duels between two swordsmen of the same school.

There was one area, however, concerning which no struggles between father and daughter were necessary: namely, Rowena's monthly transformations. From the age of four, when she had woken up with dried blood and feathers on her lips and a search of the chicken coop had revealed that her beloved hen Cynthia was missing, Rowena had understood perfectly that the wolf inside her needed to be kept firmly under control, and she had given her total cooperation to her parents' methods of doing so. Every month at the full moon, when Jeff DePinto drove her out to the exact middle of the Osborn land (using his old, fume-belching pickup so as to muffle any human scent that might be left), she sat demurely on the grass until the moon rose, neither attempting to follow the truck back as it drove off nor moping about the unfairness of not being able to sleep in her bed every night – and Albus Dumbledore, when informed of this many years later, commented that the good spirit with which she had entered into her transformations had likely made Petroleum County much safer than it might otherwise have been.


It had never occurred to either of her parents to conceal from Rowena the mystery surrounding her birth; in fact, the basket in which she was found and the strange parchment note were among the most discussed objects in the Osborn house. The theory that R.L. was her mother and A.D. a family friend, offered so tentatively by Mrs. Osborn that first evening, had become accepted as gospel by Rowena's first "finding-day" (celebrated on May 30 in lieu of a birthday), and an entire family mythology had grown up around it.

R.L. and her husband, it was asserted, were Chicago residents who had both shared their daughter's lycanthropic affliction, and had found themselves, shortly after Rowena's conception, slowly sinking into a sort of bestial mindlessness brought on by some atypical lunar phenomenon. By the time Rowena was born, they had all but gone feral, and R.L., in one last burst of sanity, had entrusted her daughter to A.D. (who was usually a Catholic priest, to satisfy Mr. Osborn's vague, Episcopalian notions of Catholic priests as wise, mysterious figures acquainted with all the secrets of the occult) to prevent herself from tearing her apart with her own teeth. The Osborns were unclear why A.D. had left Rowena in the O'Hare terminal, but the usual consensus was that he, being only a humble parish priest, was unequipped to raise a baby werewolf, and had trusted on faith that whoever came along after him would be able to do better. (This was never fully satisfactory, but, since the Osborns were unaware of the marvelous properties of Felix Felicis, they were unable to come up with a better explanation.)

It will be seen that this version of the story left Rowena without the adopted child's usual recourse, when in dispute with her parents, of shouting, "You're not my real father!" since Mr. Osborn could respond easily, "No, and you'd better be grateful. If I was your real father, you'd be dead now." It also, however, provided her with another and a rather more elegant way of expressing her dudgeon with her caregivers: to wit, by insisting that her last name was Larson, or Langford, or Lobachevsky, or whatever L name happened to catch her fancy on that particular day. (The Flaming O Ranch, unknown to its owner, lost quite a bit of money one day when a potential customer called to ask about their beef-preparation processes, and eight-year-old Rowena, fresh from an altercation with her father about the judiciousness of leaving garter snakes in her mother's underwear drawer, had answered the phone with, "Hello, this is Rowena Lillie speaking, how may I help you?")

Even this, however, she didn't do very often, as she was actually quite fond of her parents. For her father, this was merely the usual affection that children feel for their parents of the opposite sex, but with her mother, it was a different story. Rowena seemed to have an almost puppy-like attachment to Mrs. Osborn: every time something significant happened to her, whether it was the exaltation of landing a part in the school play or the shivering terrors that followed particularly rough full-moon transformations, she would fly instantly to her mother's arms, driven by an almost physical longing for affirmation and comfort.

This attachment was matched, as has been noted, by Mrs. Osborn's equally strong attachment to Rowena, and so the two of them became something of a local icon: the Flatwillow Madonna and Child, as it were. The townswomen would see the two of them going into the local Rite-Aid, their arms around each other's waists, and they would sigh wistfully and wish that they and their daughters had such a simple, natural, mutually pleasing relationship as did Julie and Rowena Osborn.

So the hidden Potter child "grew, and waxed strong in spirit" (though not, perhaps, as strong as the child of whom those words were first written), and never imagined that there was anything unusual about her apart from her monthly difficulties – and then, one day, came a flier that changed everything.