# Chapter 18 — Let-Characters-Be-Wrong / Competence-Default Audit

## Section 1 — Sweep verdict

`WRONGNESS-PRESENT — instances:`

1. June, *"Can't — working,"* — saying the wrong thing (a lie to dodge care; the narration concedes it would only "even be true if she started a painting before Friday").
2. June, *"The plan fit in one line, and it required no one."* — blind spot (choosing-alone framed as logistics efficiency; uncaptioned, the field operating raw).
3. June, *"Now the exactness bothered her more than a mistake would have."* — misread (she reclassifies Theo's accurate seeing — the knot drawn "exactly right" — as contamination; the chapter does not adjudicate, which is correct).
4. June, *"she would be answering Theo, not Nia"* / *"She wasn't going to ratify it by fleeing on his schedule."* — blind spot (indecision dressed as principle; her refusal to panic-exit is right per calibration, but the same passage is also a machine for not deciding at all, and the chapter lets that stand unflagged — good).
5. June, *"I'm painting."* in answer to *"Are you eating?"* — saying the wrong thing (deflection visible as deflection; Mara must absorb it).
6. June, turning the five studies face-down: *"saying something for her to people she had not chosen."* — blind spot (overcontrol; the truest work she's made since Week 6 goes under a water jar).
7. Mara, *"Keep it!! I have two. That was the plan."* — saying the wrong thing (a managing lie; June punctures it: *"You told me that so I'd take it."*).
8. Mara, *"October. It's almost December. I'm glad you came. Luis is circling the block; I should go."* — misunderstanding/deflection (June's *"Thank you for October"* is farewell-coded; Mara calendars it away and exits on logistics, never answering *"I don't know about Tuesday"* either).
9. Sam/Ruth, *"crooked is dynamic"* / *"it's crooked."* — mild defensiveness, texture-weight only.

The sweep passes on volume. The two problems are not absence of wrongness but (a) June's narration pricing her own wrongness in-beat, and (b) Mara's wrongness being defused or endorsed by the scene that stages it. Both are detailed below.

## Section 2 — Per major character

**June Park** — gets-wrong field: *"mistakes being understood for being pitied; assumes choosing herself requires choosing alone."* — verdict: **OPERATED** (*"The plan fit in one line, and it required no one."*; the forced scarf return Mara explicitly didn't want — *"If the loan was going to end, she would have to end it out here, on a weekend, on purpose."* — care repaid as debt; *"Now the exactness bothered her more than a mistake would have."* — being-understood retroactively poisoned). **Caveat, per calibration:** the three highest-value avoidance beats are self-priced inside the beat — *"It was a true question and a competent one, and sending it tonight would have nothing to do with ceiling height."*; *"She'd told a lie to avoid a dinner so she could paint a room she was also avoiding. Then she rinsed the bowl."*; *"she was not going to help it arrange itself."* June acts wrong while her narration gets everything right. That is the competence default relocated into interiority: a blind spot she can caption is a managed choice, not a blind spot. She also revises her Week 6 verdict on Theo's painting toward accuracy within one paragraph of the chapter opening (*"she could see the first pass differently"*) — fast, clean self-correction one chapter after the rupture. She is not *perfectly* self-aware (instances 2–4 stand unwitting), but she is roughly 40% witting, and the witting fraction is concentrated exactly where Ch19–22 need her to still be discovering things. → **Finding 1.**

**Mara Valdez** — gets-wrong field: *"thinks smoothing is always kindness."* — verdict: **OPERATED**, but in costume (evidence: *"Keep it!! I have two. That was the plan."* — punctured by June, conceded in two words — *"and it worked. ok."* — and converted to charm within the same text exchange). The Sunday scene hands her the live trigger her flaw exists for: June in visible rupture, dodging Tuesday, saying a farewell-coded *"Thank you for October."* What Mara does is smooth — pie-brick with face-saving device (*"It's a dish I want back."*), re-invitation with non-romantic pretext (*"Ruth is bringing a ruler and I need another painter at the table."*), no question asked about what happened, exit on *"Luis is circling the block; I should go."* The flaw technically fires — she smooths when receiving was what the moment asked for — but the page renders every move as flawlessly judged care and charges her nothing for the miss. This is the calibration failure named in the brief: Mara upgraded toward ideal emotional labor. Her one on-page imperfection (the lie) is defused in-beat; her one real miss (the unreceived goodbye) carries no legible cost. → **Finding 2.**

**Theo Brennan** — gets-wrong field: *"believes delay is kindness; believes being indispensable is the same as being loved."* — verdict: **NO-TRIGGER** (one text: *"Okay. No chair."* June's gloss — *"He had left the chair empty and asked for nothing back."* — is consistent with the field, compliance as one more service rendered, but a single off-page line gives the wrongness no room to operate or cost. Acceptable: his bill comes due in the Ch21 confrontation, and this is structurally June's absence chapter.)

**Asha Ibrahim** — gets-wrong field: *"assumes everyone can survive on the same hustle math."* — verdict: **NO-TRIGGER** (her texts are purely functional — *"ok. before the 4th gives me time to reshuffle."* June has neither accepted nor refused anything yet, so the assumption has nothing to grind against. Acceptable.)

**Sam Rivera** — gets-wrong field: *"can push for naming before the named person is ready."* — verdict: **NO-TRIGGER** (chat-only presence; the cohort does not yet know there is anything to name. Acceptable — but Ch19's empty chair is this field's appointment.)

**Ruth Kim** — gets-wrong field: *"lets people hide too long because she respects the need to be unnamed."* — verdict: **NO-TRIGGER** (June hides from the chat all chapter and no one asks where she spent Thanksgiving — ambient consistency with Ruth's field, but with no Ruth scene or focalization it is unmeasurable here. Acceptable.)

## Section 3 — Friction yield

1. June's dinner lie — **FRICTION** (*"Mara sent back a turkey and a heart and asked nothing else, and that was the part that cost."* — and canned soup eaten standing while the chat fills with *"We saved you a plate."*). Real cost, on the page — discounted only by the Friday self-caption (see Finding 1).
2. June's drafts-email stall — **COSTUMED** (announced and neutralized in the same sentence: *"sending it tonight would have nothing to do with ceiling height."* The insight is extracted in-beat, so there is nothing left for June to discover later; the only cost lands off-page on Asha's reshuffling).
3. June's forced scarf return — **FRICTION** (the misread of exactness-as-contamination converts a warm open loan into a severance errand; Mara explicitly didn't want it back, and June executes it anyway — care repaid as ledger entry).
4. June's choosing-alone catalog plan — **FRICTION**, deferred (*"it required no one"* stands uncaptioned; the nine-a.m. post office collides with Week 7 in Ch19 — acceptable as armed setup).
5. June's face-down studies — **FRICTION**, small and deferred (the cost is only the image of the jar on the stack; payable later).
6. Mara's *"Keep it!!"* lie — **COSTUMED** (*"and it worked. ok."* — absorbed into charm within two texts; costs nothing).
7. Mara's deflection of *"Thank you for October"* — **COSTUMED** (the miss is real but the scene endorses it: sleeve touch, graceful exit, June left holding a level pie. No beat marks that June's half-goodbye went unreceived; the smoothing reads as ideal tact rather than her flaw).
8. June's *"I'm painting"* deflection — **FRICTION**, small (Mara absorbs it and routes around it with the pie; June pays in not being asked twice).

## Chapter verdict

**TOO-COMPETENT (2 findings)** — June's wrongness is present, varied, and mostly costed, but her three sharpest avoidance beats are self-diagnosed in-beat, shaving the blindness Ch19–22 are supposed to spend; Mara exits the chapter closer to ideal emotional labor than to her field, with her one fired flaw defused in two words and her one real miss uncharged. On the calibration question: **June remains wrong enough for Ch19–22** (the answering-Theo rationalization, the exactness misread, and choosing-alone all stand uncorrected, and Philadelphia is undecided) *provided* the self-caption density is cut; **Mara does not currently remain wrong enough** — as written, she has nothing left to get wrong about June by Ch27 except off-page.

## REVISION ORDERS

1. **June** — field: *"mistakes being understood for being pitied; assumes choosing herself requires choosing alone."* Beats: the Thursday-night columns/drafts email and the Friday soup paragraph. Cut or convert to enacted behavior at least two of the three in-beat self-diagnoses — *"sending it tonight would have nothing to do with ceiling height"*, *"She'd told a lie to avoid a dinner so she could paint a room she was also avoiding"*, *"she was not going to help it arrange itself"* — keeping at most one lucid self-read in the chapter. Replace with action that shows the stall without pricing it (she adds a second question to the draft, deletes it, closes the laptop; she eats facing the propped study with the phone face-down), so the reader clocks the avoidance a beat before June does. Cost to preserve: the discovery of her own pattern must still be available to Ch19–22; do not let Ch18 spend it as narration.
2. **Mara** — field: *"thinks smoothing is always kindness."* Beat: Sunday outside Sonia's, from *"I don't know about Tuesday"* through her exit. Let the smoothing misfire visibly once: have June actually start the real sentence (three or four words of it) and have Mara hand pie instructions or Tuesday seating over the top of it, so that what June pockets unsaid is on the page; alternatively, do not let *"and it worked. ok."* close the *"Keep it!!"* lie as charm — let June's *"You told me that so I'd take it"* sting for one more exchange before Mara recovers. The cost must be June's, rendered from June's side without captioning Mara: she leaves having been perfectly managed and entirely unasked. Do not soften Mara into a meddling quirk and do not delete her competence — the pie device can stay deft; the flaw is that she cannot tell when deftness is the wrong instrument, and the scene must charge her for it once.
