Kagome returned home with Shin, to Sengoku Jidai.

She’d barely stepped one foot across the threshold of the hut when Inuyasha caught her to him and hugged her tight. As he did, Kagome realized then how nervous he’d been—nervous that now that she was free to live in the Modern Era, she wouldn’t come back.

“You shouldn’t have been so worried, Inuyasha,” she said, frowning up at him. “I wouldn’t have left you like that.”

The words ‘like that’ rung in her ears. But Inuyasha hadn’t seemed to hear them as she had.

“Worried?” he scoffed, stuffing his clawed hands into his sleeves. “Who’s worried? And who’s leaving who? I already decided I’d give you one more day before I came sniffing after you.”

Kagome didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. They both understood that her leaving him had nothing to do with her physical location.

Not really.

Not when it came down to it.

Scratching behind his ear, he asked, “So, how’d it go? Nobody bothered you, right?”

“No,” Kagome said, setting Shin down on the floor, where he morphed into his hanyou form and began digging at one of his black pointed ears with a toe-claw. “No, it was…good.”

Inuyasha squinted at her. “Why’d you pause?”

Kagome sighed.

While Shin climbed up Inuyasha’s pants leg and started crawling over him, she told him about finding her long-last father again, so unexpectedly and at random. About learning that Mr. Higurashi, too, was a ‘reiki-wielder,’ as he put it, and had fallen in love with a modern-day taijiya woman named Reiko. About how he’d left Kagome and her family behind for this reason—in order to live with Reiko, in their ghost-hunting world.

As Shin settled on his shoulder, Inuyasha’s ears dipped. “Huh, so that’s where you get your blue eyes from.” Kagome blinked in confusion, having said nothing about that before she realized—beast speak. “Well, what do you make of all that?”

“I don’t know,” Kagome said, shaking her head. “It’s a lot to take in. What do you think?”

He shrugged. “It ain’t for me to say—I never knew the guy. And I never knew my dad, either. So there’s no point in me sayin’ anything about any of it.” After a beat, he asked, “What’d your mom and Souta and gramps have to say?”

“Mama was happy for him, believe it or not,” Kagome mumbled. “Jii-chan was…well, he just kind of walked off, shaking his head like he couldn’t understand any of it. Souta was pretty hurt and angry at first—like I was. Then he got quiet about it. He made a strange face, and he said, ‘The only thing worse than him leaving us is thinking of him being here with us and being miserable.’”

“You don’t think so?”

“I think,” Kagome said, taking a long breath as she searched for the words, “I think there was no good thing to be done. I think there was only the bad and the worse.”

As Shin tugged on his forelock, Inuyasha glanced to him and nodded. “Yeah, Kagome. I know what you mean.”

She looked off toward the window, at the cloudy blue skies beyond. She thought that her life had not turned out like she’d ever imagined, and neither had she. Since her pact with Sesshoumaru, she had come to appreciate that she wasn’t qualified to judge anyone for anything. She was far from a perfect person, and so was everyone else—if they lived long and boldly enough to make mistakes, that was.

The world wasn’t the crisp black-and-white landscape she’d always thought. Everywhere there were shades of grey, and in everyone, too. Selflessness wasn’t always for the best. Too much blind compassion, either.

Where was the sane, healthy middle ground? And there, would she find peace and happiness, for herself and her son and his uncle, whom she still loved and always would?

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi