"Can we have a drink. Sit down. Talk about this?" Haruka proposes.
"I don't really have a choice, do I?" Michiru replies. Heading to her kitchen for wine and glasses, she uses the opportunity to send another quick text to confirm that she has the situation under control. "And where do you want to begin?" she asks, pouring Haruka a nice full glass. The aqua woman takes a seat on the couch, prepared to listen to the whole story.
"Well, you've basically got it figured out," Haruka starts, her eyes revealing reluctant admiration. "As soon as I learned about the first accident, I started investigating what had happened. I was hoping that the brake failure had been an isolated incident. And...Yamada, my top mechanic at the time, assured me that it was. But then the second accident happened...and the third...and so on."
"And Yamada was the connection between all of them?"
"Yes. Even though Yamada is - was - the chief mechanic, he didn't have to sign off on all the vehicles. We have a system where the other mechanics do that too, since we have so many vehicles in production. But it turned out that with the SUVs that were involved in the accidents, they were all signed off on by Yamada. He was the one who had performed those safety checks and gave the clearance for the cars to be taken to market."
"So you confronted him?"
"Yes, but he denied any wrongdoing, at first. He tried to convince me that it was all a coincidence. Or even that he had been framed. He refused to take any responsibility for what had happened. It was only when I started to tell him that I'd have to hand the matters over to external authorities for a full investigation that he started to crack."
"In what way?"
"He just broke down. Told me that he and his wife were in the process of separating, that he wouldn't get to see his kids as much, and that he had been hitting the bottle hard. He confessed that he sometimes signed off on vehicles without actually performing the safety inspections."
"Are you serious?"
"That's what I said. But that was the story that he stuck to. He told me straight up that he hadn't been doing his job properly. And that's the story that I believe."
"And you fired him, I'm assuming?"
"Not quite. I demoted him, but didn't fire him."
"Haruka - how could you let this man continue to work for you?"
"Michiru," and Haruka's voice is soft, pleading again. "You have to understand something about me. And that is that I will never betray those I care about. Yamada, for all his flaws, is one of my oldest and dearest friends. He was my mentor and teammate in my racing days. I couldn't just let him go."
"Even now?"
"Especially now."