The substance of the ending and the resolution were something I wrestled with quite a bit.  The actual ending scenes - the field, the mock-tour and the rooftop - were all elements that I had settled on very early in writing this story and nothing major about them changed.  However, the two big things I struggled with practically while writing and revising it during my absence (and Scissorlips was a big help in getting me over this) were:  1.  Practically speaking, how was I going to get the characters from the hospital and back to the school?  2.  How was I going to justify the conversation that they [i]needed to have[/i] without making it seem like it was just crammed-in?  The first one was challenging because of a cultural barrier in that I don't really know anything about Japanese hospitals - for example, the parents would need to be involved somehow, surely?  Would they have a prolonged "stay" together?  I settled on having them released at different times and this sort of solved the issue for me entirely.  Leaving Rika there longer in spite of her not having had a heart attack was intended to highlight the relative severity and complexity of her illness compared with Hisao.  A lot of the challenge here is apparent when you read my rather awkward introduction to the last installment (the third-to-last "scene").

The issue with Rika being convinced that she's either possessed or haunted was something I wanted to deliver with a light touch, since I'd been hinting at it, and the "do you believe in ghosts?" conversation was one of the first things that I wrote.  Their rooftop conversation contains bits and phrases that I knew I was going to throw in there before I even started writing Act 3.  In fact I had the entire rooftop scene written to my satisfaction about a week after my last other written installment.  Connecting those two parts - the hospital scene and the rooftop scene - was most of what I struggled with during my downtime and it was my greatest challenge.

The time that elapsed also made me lose my motivation to some extent.  I wasn't really in my "stride" anymore, I had trouble finding that magical place I used to find myself in when I was writing the parts of this story that I'm the most proud of (like the scene where she breaks into his room in Act 3 and they talk about "last words" or the conversation about her prognosis that they have in the Shanghai).  Most of the better things in here that I wrote were written very quickly and spontaneously, and the more belaboured parts are, I think, relatively not as good.  I wanted to abide my inspiration because it's important to have a punchy ending, so that caused me to wait, but then the delay obviously deflated a lot of the impact it would have had since a lot of the people reading had given up on ever seeing an ending.  That degree of expectation is stressful.

So it was more that the content of the ending caused me an enormous delay, rather than the delay influencing the way the ending turned out.  It very closely resembles my original vision for how it was going to end.  The only substantive issue I really struggled with was how directly I wanted to address the ambiguities that had been created throughout the story.  Some people find the ending confusing and are left with a lot of questions, or they see what they consider to be inconsistencies, or they don't "buy" Rika's character development, and the risky thing about writing something that is vague and open-ended is that it can come off as simply being bad writing.  Questions like "why does she get sexual with him on their first date?"  "Why does she get sentimental at the end when that's not really how she is?"  "Why does she act like a beaten dog in the 'neutral' ending?"  Are all things that I have answers to, but I think the story answers them already so I didn't want to spoonfeed explanations.  Moreover, it would be difficult to provide explanations because the only way that could be done would be in conversations - and sometimes it might not make sense for the characters to have these conversations.  Hisao can't ask Rika about what happened during her "neutral ending" since it never happened.  He can't ask her to explain what she means when she says that her ex "hated" her or what that entails.  So it raises a question it can't answer explicitly.  You need to sort of give me the benefit of the doubt that I had something in mind.  I'm open to the possibility that I didn't fully convey the answers to all of these, even implicitly, and that's just my inexperience as a writer.

The more mysterious plot elements in the story revolve around the way that Rika and Hisao occupy different thematic roles vis-a-vis one another.  Regarding her ex, "Shin" (in retrospect I should have left him nameless),  I was trying to imply that she had a relationship with him similar to the one she is having with Hisao, but with the roles reversed, with her in the role of impressionable defeatist and him being the one dictating the gloomy outlook.  So she was the "Hisao" in her last relationship, and now she's serving it up second-hand.  The "different" element this time around is that Hisao hasn't lived with the condition his whole life so he has a sort of naive optimism that reminds Rika of what she's lost.  This has a lot to do with why she falls in love with him.  He manages to resist this worldview that Rika has adopted in a way that she failed to do originally.  So that is what's thrown into question at the end.  It's meant to be a happy ending because it creates a note of optimism.  Rika doesn't need to try and "teach" Hisao anymore, and Hisao can't shake the things that he's come to believe, but gives her an example of how they can acknowledge the truth of their fates while still forging ahead.  It's a little bit complex and I don't think it fully came across.  I didn't want to be too explicit, though, because I like a story to leave some questions unanswered instead of revealing all of its substance at once.  The very last line of the story is something I put a lot of thought into - their bond is one between two people who are in on the same secret that nobody else can really know other than the two of them.

There are a lot of questions in the plot that I don't want to answer and I'd rather leave unanswered, such as "did she hide his pills or did he really just forget them?" etc.  I think little mysteries and uncertainties like this are good for the story and ultimately it's not really important what the answers are, just that they cause the person reading to speculate and make an assessment of her character on the spot.