Morbid maybe, but it was floating in my mind at the time. I kept reading a lot of fan fiction that had Hermione bitting the bullet and Ron living on, so it was interesting to write something from the flip side.

Author's Response: OK: Apologies for the blatant self appreciation review. Lets just say I tried to respond to another review, and I failed. Ended up posting the comments I meant to say in the review I posted above. And then the delete failed. So I intend on using this as a place to explain something, and I am surprised that this question hasn\'t come up. The question being: If Ron is a ghost, then why cannot Hermione see him, like all the other ghosts in the HP universe? Well, here is the answer I gave to my beta, via email. Ron isn\'t technically a ghost per se: rather he is his soul left behind in a sort of limbo before moving on to the next plane of existence. I get the feeling that in the books, a ghost is a rather undesirable state and no wizard would wish it upon themselves. Hence Nearly Headless Nick\'s comments to Harry about Sirius: he won\'t come back, despite Harry being the closest thing Sirius would have to a son, a likewise Harry to a father. In a similar vein, this is Ron moving on, and being allowed to say farewell to Hermione, something he was unable to do when alive. So Ron is not a ghost, and therefore invisible to Hermione. At the same time, this is the point where Hermione overcomes the first so called stage of grief: denial. Now, many of the problems arise from the fact that the majority of the story is from Ron\'s perspective. To him, Hermione is staring at him. In fact, she is staring at the empty space on the bed, where she expects him to be: hence the gaze of half love, half confusion. When her hand rests on Ron’s shoulder, it is rather the pillow on Ron\'s side of the bed. On the point about Hermione smiling: It is sort of a wistful, sorrowful smile: hence the eyes. I\'m taking my inspiration from the last episode of a British TV series, called Cold feet. In this episode, one of the main characters has lost his wife to a car crash. Throughout the episode, he has conversations with his wife as if she was still there. In other words, he is in denial. He is in a rather overtly jovial mood during her funeral, and worries his friends with his behaviour. It is only when their son manages to make his first steps, and his wife\'s ghost makes a comment \"I really wish I could have been there to see that\" does he finally overcome his denial, and break down. I\'m trying to describe that point in Hermione\'s grief in the present, as Ron\'s presence finally disappears from her life, and she realises now that Ron is actually gone.