I just read the summary for the last volume of AS here...that really IS a happy ending.

I can't say I'm surprised like Genki's friend, though--from her interviews, Kaori Yuki seems to be a sentimental person at heart (like me :3)... I don't think it would have been like her to end the story without some happiness, but man, that is a lot of happiness. I'm glad, though--it makes me love the story even more, knowing that despite all the bad things that happened, things turn out well in the end. Even in the short stories in Boy's Next Door, the endings were pretty happy, relatively speaking. X3;