Luckily, it's not that much of a detour. Beyond it, there's a relatively short distance until the staircase... and the tricky part that follows.

[He doesn't sound truly worried about the 'tricky part', though, so Evie's trust may be well-founded.]

((The game does super interesting things with all the villains, either directly or indirectly. It's great! And the last two chapters before the finale were very generous towards FF7.))