"So that's how it was..."
The store manager looked up at the utterly ordinary ceiling above him. After working under this roof for so many years, he had never imagined a day like this would come.
After staring blankly for a moment, he suddenly thought of something strange. "But why was it that after I spoke to Nanakawa last time, nothing went missing from the store for the entire following month? If not for that, I wouldn't have been certain Nanakawa was the thief."
Mouri Ran looked at the real thief standing dazedly amid the crowd, whom she had exposed, and answered hesitantly:
"Maybe it was because he wasn't entirely bad—after hiding in the ceiling and hearing you scold Nanakawa, he felt that he'd implicated an innocent employee. So he stopped stealing and lived off the little money he'd saved from selling game software.
"But after he ran out of money, he wanted to steal more at once to reduce the frequency of his thefts. That's why what happened today occurred."
"But no matter what..." Thinking of her innocent classmate being scolded and suspected for an entire month, Mouri Ran glared furiously at the silent thief. "Stealing is stealing! If it weren't for you, Xiao Xuan wouldn't have been treated like a thief!"
As her fist clenched tighter and tighter, the middle-aged man gradually felt an indescribable pressure.
His knees gave out, and he promptly dropped to the floor with a thud. "I-I'm very sorry!!"
Mouri Ran, who had nearly punched him: "...?"
With his forehead pressed to the ground, the middle-aged man said sorrowfully, "Three months ago, I was laid off by my company, and my landlord threw me out too. I wandered through the streets, hungry and unsteady. By the time I came to my senses, I was