I confess, I find it very difficult to type ‘The End’ when I am completing a manuscript. It is the end of the book, but by no means the end of the love story – I leave my characters with a long future ahead of them.

Sometimes, readers ask me whether I will write a sequel to a book. ‘Why oh why does the story have to end?!’ lamented one reviewer of my novel Aphrodite’s Tears.

It would be so easy to keep writing in each of my story worlds, to revisit the characters and follow their lives, through marriage, parenthood, business ventures, travels, even settling into their twilight years. My characters are like old friends to me, and to spend more time in their company would be wonderful.

But to continue to tell the love story is to take something away from the reader: the pleasure of imagining the future for the hero and heroine. In romance, I think the capacity to dream is essential. And so I must write those words ‘The End’ in each manuscript, and leave the characters to their ‘ever after’.

Still, the characters continue to speak to me long after I have finished the manuscript, and I think about how their love story continues. I write of true love, and so, as Richard Bach said, there is in fact no ending to the story. The lovers in my novels are soulmates; their love transcends all, so that even death would not be ‘The End’. As the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote:

Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

The love at the heart of each of my books is the same love – a universal Love, if you like. A love without end.

One of my favourite poets is Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel Prize-winning writer, musician and artist from India. My writing is deeply inspired by his poem ‘Unending Love’:

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers,
Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,
the distressful tears of farewell,
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

The echo of ‘forever’ through this poem is so powerful. I find the words beautiful and hopeful; exactly the sentiments I hope to stir in the reader through the love stories that I write.

So when you come to ‘The End’ of my novel – or any love story – you need never feel sad or bereft. The love continues, unending.