Thirty-four years after leaving Erik behind, Christine had the best day she'd had in nearly a decade. She was awake all day, and even able to talk more-or-less clearly with her family. In the afternoon, she met her grandchildren for the first time. With Raoul squeezing her hand tight, she told her son how proud she was of him and the family he was raising.
When Raoul helped her to bed that night, she kissed him goodnight and told him she loved him as she did every night.
But unlike every other night, this one saw Christine's final breath. As she slept next to her husband, lying close as lovers yet somehow not touching one another, Christine's chest rose and fell with increasingly labored breaths until she took one long, gasping breath, and while exhaling loosed her soul from the shackles of her body.
All at once, Christine found herself in her dressing room at the opera house wearing a dressing gown, her hair curled and pulled back perfectly to frame her face. Looking in the mirror, she saw herself as a teenager- young, beautiful, and positively radiant- and she saw the outline of a familiar face that she couldn't quite place.
As the mirror swung open, she found herself looking up into the eyes of her angel of music, his deformity gone, his smile genuine, his eyes happy.
He extended a white gloved hand to her, and through the corridors beneath the opera house he escorted her to their own personal heaven.
