"I'm sorry, Mr. Roland! I was far too rash!"
Kuroko Shirai knelt respectfully on the sofa, offering Roland a sincere apology in dogeza.
There was not the slightest trace of pretense in the guilt on her face.
"Hmm... what should I do?"
Roland rested his chin on his hand, leisurely tapped the tabletop with his fingertips, and took a bite of the strawberry cake before him with his fork.
After Uiharu Kazari and Saten Ruiko arrived and cleared up the misunderstanding, he had been brought to this family restaurant, half willingly and half under persuasion, so they could make amends.
"We're terribly sorry! It was all Shirai's fault!"
Standing beside Kuroko Shirai, Uiharu Kazari also bent deeply at the waist, bowing to the utterly unconcerned Roland.
But faced with the two girls' pitiful pleading, Roland remained unmoved, merely nudging the strawberry on the cream as though pondering something.
Instead, this made Saten Ruiko, beside him, feel a little sorry for them, and she tugged at Roland's sleeve.
"Um, Mr. Roland, it doesn't seem like they meant to do it. And Shirai only got so anxious because I sent Uiharu a warning directly. Could you forgive them?"
She did not feel sorry for Kuroko Shirai; she simply felt bad seeing her friend dragged into apologizing alongside her.
"That won't do. Publicly announcing your own subjective judgment outside school without witnessing a crime is a very serious overstepping of authority."
"Especially when it involves a blunder on the scale of arresting the wrong person. That street just happened to be empty, but what if there had been people there? Even if the misunderstanding were cleared up afterward, in this information-driven society, plenty of people who didn't know the truth would still take it as fact."
"And if it only involved my personal