"Father!" Erik cried, the white kid of his gloves gleaming on his outstretched hands from the relative darkness of the flies. "Father, please!"

Carriere leveled the pistol at his desperate son, then faltered … his hand wavered, the muzzle dipped, and he looked away with tears in his eyes. But Erik’s voice came again like the pleas of angels falling from heaven, and his resolve bolstered. The gun fired with a deafening roar and Erik tumbled to the boards …

If I screamed I did not hear myself; my ears were filled with the sound of all his limbs crashing to the stage, as though he were some jointed wooden toy falling from the idle hands of a child. I ran to him, all at once fearing the worst and yet hoping all this was just another dramatic trick from his seemingly vast repertoire; but even before I reached him I could see that Erik, like a doomed and brilliant falling star, would never rise again.

Weeping, I gathered him into my lap. He gazed up at me with the limpid eyes of a bewildered child, but the voice that whispered over his trembling lips was all Erik’s. "Christine…" At any other moment, I would have been sure there was a lilting humour in his voice. "You will ruin your lovely gown." But as his blood soaked into the folds of my skirts, the light in his eyes dwindled like the flames of drowning candles.

"Please Erik," I choked, "don’t tease me now. How can I ever hope to deserve your forgiveness? My beloved …"

He smiled weakly. "Forgive you?" he whispered. "What sin have you committed? Because of you, I have known the purest moments of happiness any man can dream of … and now I shall die …" His throat rasped as he fought for air. "It can never be said now that I died, never knowing what it was like to love …"

"Can this be a victory," I fairly blubbered, "when you are taking my heart with you?"

"Don’t cry," he implored me with all his failing strength; I felt his shoulders tense against the pain he concealed so well. "It is enough for me, to be held by you now …"

I shook my head futilely, as if that one weak gesture could stave off the fate that yawned before us, the vast black force that threatened each moment to pull him from my possessive embrace. "How can you love me, Erik, when I’ve been such a fool?" I touched what I could of his face, wanting to infuse his last moments with tenderness beyond compare. "I cannot say goodbye to you knowing what we could have shared if I could have only seen it sooner … had I been older, or wiser …"

He lifted his hand slowly, wasting the last of his strength to mimic my own hopeless gesture; he touched me as I touched him, as if the contact of our skin could keep him alive. "You mustn’t say these things, Christine. I have loved you exactly as you are, not one bit more or less … and you must let me, as long as my heart still beats …"

It was then that the full force of my own fickleness broke upon me. Wretched innocence! – how could I have ever wanted anything less than his passion, his intensity? How could I have wanted to cool the fever he inspired in me, regardless of how it frightened me in my inexperience? All he had asked of me was a spark, the tiniest thing to give him hope, and I had thrown frigid water onto every hint I had seen in me of fire! I had been afraid of what I did not know of love, of the plunge into a passionate mystery …

And in the end it had been he who had to make the dive – this tragically glorious final decent to the boards – his swansong! How could it have taken me until this moment to admit how desperately I needed him? Without allowing myself to speak it, I had come to depend upon the hope of him; it had kept me alive as much as the hope of me had sustained him through all of these months, through all of the foolishness with Phillipe … I hated myself then, knowing it had taken the extremity of death to force me to confess that which had always been truth, despite my fervent insistence to the contrary!

Erik lay in my lap, looking up at me with eyes that were swiftly clouding, and I knew that it was not enough to speak those words to him – not now. I had to show him …

The mask lifted away easily enough, and though the crowd around me drew away with a collective gasp I felt no fear looking on his poor ravaged face. With open eyes I pressed my lips to his, wanting to kiss him alive and knowing that I could only kiss him goodbye.

"Farewell, my Erik," I whispered, forcing myself to smile at him through my tears, "for you are mine now, in this glorious moment … and I shall always hold you this close – my once- in-a-lifetime love!"

He smiled, and when his eyes closed they shed the final tears of love’s perfection and pain that was no more. I cradled him in my arms, marveling at the still-warm weight of his body against mine, and sang to him his own mother’s mournful lullaby. Finally Phillipe drew near to retrieve me, and taking little notice of the Count’s gentle insistence that we come away, I replaced Erik’s mask, tied it carefully into place, smoothed a lock of his dark unruly hair away from the face that seemed so angelic in its sleep.

I clasped Carriere’s hand briefly as Phillipe led me away, and in that small moment we were brought closer than any father- and daughter-in-law ever have been, bound together forever in the profundity of our mutual grief.

Phillipe’s touch was impatient and his voice peevish as he tried to wrap his cloak about my shoulders. "Christine, you’re so cold …"

I brushed away his fussing hands, and continued to walk though he stopped to retrieve his cloak from the ground where it had fallen. I could feel the quizzical look with which he fixed me, but I never paused and never looked back. I was anything but cold, and even if I were, nothing could have induced me to repeat my earlier mistakes by allowing his arms to come around me. Tonight Erik’s fire had finally engulfed me as it had always threatened to, and I had welcomed it with an open heart; and now that I knew what it was to burn with those blessed flames, how could I smother them with Phillipe’s insipid embraces, or extinguish them with hastened forgetfulness? I did not know how long my season of pain would last, but I would weather it and emerge on the other side older, wiser … all the things Erik had made me wish I were, and that only the burden of his loss could bring me to become.