"You joining us afterward, Kagome?" Eri asked.
Instincts begged her to agree, but she shook her head. "I can't. Souta's getting out of the hospital today, and I need to be there."
"Oh yeah? How's he doing? Did his leg heal properly?" Yuka asked, closing her textbook before leaning back in her chair.
"The cast came off today, so things are looking up." She jotted down a few more notes. "He's still going to need physical therapy, though."
Ayumi let out a low whistle. "He should be lucky, considering how fast that car was going. It could've been a lot worse."
The words in her notebook blurred as Kagome gripped her pencil. Souta had stayed late at school to help with the finishing touches for the spring festival. Mama had had a last-minute meeting for an upcoming wedding, so she'd asked Kagome to pick him up since the weather report had said it would rain.
Kagome had initially agreed, thinking nothing of it, but then she'd grabbed the wrong box of tea and been assaulted by a fragrance that had her fantasizing about times spent around roaring fires in between battles and had been lost to the shadows of her past.
She'd once again woken with a screaming headache, but it was due to the constant buzzing of her phone instead of the usual hangover, her mother demanding to know why she'd left Souta to get home by himself instead of picking him up.
Rain had darkened the sky and slickened the roads, and Souta hadn't been able to jump out of the way when a car lost control at the bottom of the shrine steps, leaving him with a concussion and a broken leg.
Kagome hadn't had a drink since.