While Inuyasha sulked in a tree just outside the house, Kagome sat with Sango in the hours after. Not speaking much, weeping often. Kagome felt raw with grief—fleshed-out from the inside out. Sango’s eyes were rubbed red, her face pale as swept stone. She looked washed out, hollowed out. Worn out with pain, yet unable to let her exhaustion overtake her. Suspended in a hellish limbo of disbelief at what had been and what was not. 

As the terrible spell began to break, she said hoarsely, “I thought…when he came home yesterday, he…he seemed strange. Not quite himself…He said he was fine, but now I think…” She swallowed tremulously. “We…we had just made love. He was very…” She bit her lip, flushing faintly. “Very fervent…almost desperately so. He was breathing harder than usual, after…but then so was I. He told me to go…to go on ahead. I went to wash, and when I came back…”

Sango fell forward. Her face fell into her hands. Kagome put her arms around her. An agonized shudder wracked through them both.

“W-when I came back…he w-was…”

“Sango-chan,” Kagome whispered, hugging her. “You don’t have to…”

Sango shook her head. “He was..he was o-on the floor…c-clutching at his chest…he c-couldn’t b-breathe…and I couldn’t…I c-couldn’t…” She choked, rasping out, “T-then he…he went calm, Kagome-chan, so calm…L-like all was well…but he was…he w-was…”

Kagome held to Sango as she sobbed out a fresh wave of grief. 

“I s-should have known…how could I n-not have known…”

Kagome’s heart clenched with guilt. “How could you have possibly known, Sango-chan?”

Sango shook her head again. “T-there must have been s-something…what k-kind of wife a-am I, that I could not see…?”

“Stop it, Sango-chan.” Kagome pulled back, drawing Sango up by the shoulders to meet her eye-to-eye. “This isn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Sango’s features crumpled. “B-but if there was no sign…h-how can I…how am I to make sense of it all?”

Kagome’s throat constricted. She looked into her best friend’s devastated face. She thought of the promise of discretion she had made to Miroku. Did a man’s wishes outlive him? Or was her promise to Miroku dead along with him? Did she owe more loyalty to the friend still here than the one who’d gone on? The one who was stuck here wondering if she could have averted this catastrophe or at least been more prepared for it?

Sitting here with Sango now, Kagome wondered: could telling the truth sometimes be wrong?

In relieving her soul of its burden of conscience, would she just be placing it upon Sango? Plaguing her with the thought of what she might’ve done differently if only she had known. Tormenting her with the possibility that things might’ve turned out differently if she had…

Kagome knew this eviscerating pain, because it was the very one cleaving through her now. Because she knew all too horribly well why Miroku had died—

She knew that he had died because of her. Because of the stress that her actions had put him through.

“I don’t know, Sango-chan,” she said wretchedly. “I just don’t know.”

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Revised 11/28/23