Authors Note: I wrote this the day after I finished reading the series. The ending made me cry but i loved it, so here is something i needed to come up with to make it a little happier, at least for me

Disclaimer: I own nothing, i just had fun consoling myself over my two favorite characters dying.

At times I found myself wondering if perhaps it is all my imagination. The longing one finds oneself experiencing after a loved one has left us, and the hopes for a vision of them leaves us dreaming and seeing those dearly departed in so many places.

I believed or perhaps I just wished to believe that my brother did keep that promise he made me. I wished to believe that he survived and simply would one day return to me, but now I am an old woman with children who have children and a husband who even now in his dotting age still cares for me.

I now know that brother will never appear to me the way he promised, but maybe his soul has returned to us. I heard one day, long ago, that when one dies we return to those we love in a different from so that we may be together once again.

Now as I watch my grandson I believe it might be true. The smiles of mischief and the way that even at the age of six he reaches for my old hands and kisses them before going to another room or running off to some adventure in the garden.

It is almost like brother and Riff have returned, and maybe they have. Watching the ever patient son of the cook tail my little Christopher around I can almost see them again.
No, I can see them, respectful Raphael sleeps in the shade of the oldest tree on our estate. Into his embrace Christopher has snuggled himself, with arms wrapped around his middle as if the older is protecting the younger even in sleep, and the messy dark hair of my grandchild hides their faces one head tilted in as if to always listen even to the softest of cries, and the other turning a little so he can always whisper just in his ear.

On slow legs I return to our tea, ignoring that I had told my daughter that I would find her son. "Mother?" she questions me and I give her a look of sudden recollection of her waiting on me, with a sigh she swats back a strand of long pretty golden hair.

For now let them rest, and enjoy their childhood, and their future. Who are we the living to judge what path life places us on to begin with, we can only speak of that which we alter with time.