# Audit: Let-Characters-Be-Wrong / Competence-Default — Chapter 09 ("Local Work")

Auditor stance: skeptical professional editor. Inputs read in full: `output/chapters/chapter_09.md`, `output/style_and_voice.md` (all `what they get wrong` fields), `premise/READING_GUIDE.md`, `premise/premise.md`, chapter card 09 (`output/outline/chapter_cards.md:244`). No calibration notes file present.

---

## Section 1 — sweep verdict

`WRONGNESS-PRESENT — instances:`

1. **June**, "she did the thing she had specifically told herself on the subway she would not do" / "Three squares. Anyone would do three squares. Nobody needed the fourth." — **blind spot** (self-justifying rationalization rendered live on the page; the narration adopts her bad math).
2. **June**, "'That's not the wall,' Asha said […] 'It's a test.' / 'Of what?' / 'The middle square. The middle square's the match.'" — **defensiveness** at a neutral observation; she answers a question nobody asked to avoid the one Asha did ask.
3. **June**, "Someone I went to school with says there's a job in Philadelphia that involves keys." — **saying the wrong thing** (minimization: the sender's actual text reads "You're the shortest list I have"; June reframes a peer who wants her specifically as a distant acquaintance).
4. **Marisol**, "'It's the same paint,' Marisol said. 'It's the same white on every wall.'" against the narration's flat "It was not the same." — **misunderstanding**, doubled by June's withholding: she knows the answer and "tightened one hand on the rail" instead of giving it.
5. **June**, "She opened it, watched the cursor blink in the reply field, typed nothing, and backed out." — **blind spot in action**: the non-answer the chapter card requires, performed rather than explained.

Caveat the verdict must carry: the wrongness is concentrated almost entirely in June. The supporting cast — Asha on-page, Nia in text — read clean, calibrated, and right about everything, which is where the competence default is hiding in this chapter (Section 2).

---

## Section 2 — per major character

**June Park** — gets-wrong field: *"mistakes being understood for being pitied; assumes choosing herself requires choosing alone."* — verdict: **split — OPERATED on the second clause, TRIGGER-MISSED on the first.**

- *Choosing-alone half — OPERATED:* "She typed nothing. She put the phone face-down on her knee" → "Nia's thread still sat unanswered above the deli's order confirmation. She opened it, watched the cursor blink in the reply field, typed nothing, and backed out." She also hides the one piece of evidence of wanting: "June set the foamcore face-down on the crate dolly before she could make another mark," and smuggles it home "against the cardboard tube […] under the scarf." The override beat ("June brought it up anyway" — *anyway* marking the default she's resisting) is earned, not free.
- *Pity-misread half — TRIGGER-MISSED.* Trigger: "*You'd be good at the parts nobody romanticizes*" followed two minutes later by "*Not a favor. I need someone who can run a job and fix the press. You're the shortest list I have.*" This is exactly the situation the field describes — an old peer seeing June precisely and helping her — and June's response is clean insight: "which she examined at the angle you would examine a swatch, looking for what they would do once they dried" and, of Nia's renewal odds, "Knowing her, she means it." Composed, analytic, generously accurate. Worse, the chapter does June's defensive work *for* her: Nia's "Not a favor" preempts the pity reading before June can have it, and June never bristles at being so perfectly anticipated — which is itself a missable trigger (being handled is being seen; the field predicts she misreads that). Strongest counter-candidate considered: "a thumbs-up June had treated like a PAID stamp" — adjacent (warmth flattened to transaction), but past-tense, glancing, costless. Her non-answer is motivated on the page by overload ("Neither one was nothing"), not by the declared misread. The field's first clause had its best trigger of the book so far and did not fire.

**Asha Ibrahim** — gets-wrong field: *"assumes everyone can survive on the same hustle math."* — verdict: **TRIGGER-MISSED** (trigger: "'I don't know.' June turned the coffee cup once on the bucket. 'My lease is up in December either way. The math down there works. The math here is a hobby I do at night.'" — June stating that the math frame is failing her; response was clean insight: "'I took a museum prep job in 2019 for health insurance and didn't stretch a canvas until May.'").

This is the chapter-specific risk realized: Asha as perfectly calibrated life coach. Audit of her every beat: her wall diagnosis is correct ("It's the same paint. It's the wall that's wrong"); her schedule math is correct; her network advice is savvy aphorism ("People tell three people before they post," "Don't make her chase you. Once it posts, she's calling whoever answers first"); her leads are all genuinely good (Dana's studio, Kessler's armory — required by the card, fine); her socioeconomic read is articulate ("It's bad on purpose, I think, at this point"); and the 2019 anecdote is the killer — it demonstrates exact self-knowledge of the stability-eats-painting trap, i.e., the *opposite* of her declared blind spot, deployed at the precise moment June needs that warning. Counter-candidate considered for OPERATED: "If you pass, send her my name. I can do the boring parts and still paint at night" — the projection is latent there (*I* can, therefore the math is survivable), and the lead-stack answering June's vocational dread with three logistics items has the shape of the wrongness. But the chapter frames the stack purely as generosity, June saves both numbers gratefully, and nothing Asha says is allowed to be wrong, land wrong, or cost either of them anything. Note also the foamcore beat: Asha sees June making art on the clock, says "That's not the wall," accepts the lie, "and went to pad the elevator" — the chapter spends what could be her missed-cue wrongness as tact.

**Nia Torres** — gets-wrong field: *"assumes material stability is enough evidence of the right fit."* — verdict: **OPERATED** ("*Keys, real paycheck, W-2, studio access after hours. Start date can flex after mid-December.*" — the entire case for fit is material and functional; even her reassurance argues fit from function: "*I need someone who can run a job and fix the press.*" The message asks June no question except a logistical one — "*Call me this week if you want details before it posts*" — and never touches what June would be doing in that shop: more programs-and-fabrication, the same art-adjacent labor June is drowning in, sold as the right fit because the W-2 is real). The limitation is carried in the frame, as required. Flag, though: her second text is over-calibrated — anticipating and defusing June's pity-reflex in two minutes flat is recruiter telepathy, and it is the proximate cause of June's TRIGGER-MISSED above. Nia's wrongness survives; June's is the casualty.

**Theo Brennan** — gets-wrong field: *"believes delay is kindness; believes being indispensable is the same as being loved."* — verdict: **NO-TRIGGER** (off-page; present only in June's memory of the rack at Marchetti Rooms — "his of her in a folder somewhere being nothing to nobody, location unasked." No scene engages his field; acceptable).

---

## Section 3 — friction yield

1. June's fourth square (blind spot): **FRICTION** ("She had made it on the clock, on Marisol's foamcore, with Marisol's paint, in the middle of a wall job" — it breaks her declared hands-only contract with herself, and she must police it: "set the foamcore face-down […] before she could make another mark," then steal the scrap from her own contractor bag).
2. "It's a test" deflection: **FRICTION**, thin ("Asha looked at the middle square, and at the run beneath it, and went to pad the elevator" — the lie stands, the real subject dies, and the downstream cost is structural: Asha spends the rest of the shift aiming leads at June's rent instead of at the reopened valve she just witnessed. The chapter relies on the reader to assemble that cost; nothing on the page makes June pay it directly).
3. "Someone I went to school with" minimization: **COSTUMED** (not resolved in-beat, but costless — Asha doesn't notice, adopts the framing back ("your printshop friend"), and nothing is absorbed by anyone; wrongness as texture).
4. Marisol's wrong wall / June's withholding: **FRICTION**, deferred ("'We can look at it for the install'" books a future cost; June's only on-page price is "tightened one hand on the rail").
5. The unanswered thread: **FRICTION** (the delay is explicitly priced before June incurs it: "Once it posts, she's calling whoever answers first" — and the chapter closes inside the cost: cursor, nothing, back out).

---

## Chapter verdict

`TOO-COMPETENT (2 findings)`

For the record, this is a near-miss, not a wholesale default: June's wrongness is the best-executed in the manuscript's recent chapters — rationalization, deflection, theft of her own trash, and a non-answer that ends the chapter. The two findings are the pity-clause of June's field being authored around rather than through, and Asha being handed self-awareness precisely where her field specifies a blind spot.

## REVISION ORDERS

1. **June Park** — field: *"mistakes being understood for being pitied; assumes choosing herself requires choosing alone."* Beat: receipt and re-reads of Nia's two texts (the twelve-forty bucket scene and the 4:47 close). The pity-misread must fire on the page: let June bristle at the second text rather than glide past it — being anticipated *is* being seen, and her field says she reads that as being managed. Options that keep Nia's "Not a favor" line intact: June drafts a prickly reply ("you don't have to pre-apologize for offering me work") and deletes it; or her interior reads "You're the shortest list I have" for one beat as charity wearing a work order before the craft-brain corrects her. What it must cost: the closing non-answer should be legibly *caused* by the misread, not by generic overload — the delay Asha priced ("she's calling whoever answers first") becomes the bill for June's flinch. Do not soften this into a wry aside; the misread should be momentarily believed.

2. **Asha Ibrahim** — field: *"assumes everyone can survive on the same hustle math."* Beat: the bucket-lunch exchange and the lead-stack. Two executable repairs; do at least one. (a) Re-aim the 2019 anecdote so it stops being calibrated insight: have her deploy it as *proof the math works* ("I took a museum prep job in 2019 for the insurance, didn't stretch a canvas until May — you catch up") rather than as a warning, and let June absorb the gap silently — June knows she would not catch up. (b) Let the hustle math misfire on a real constraint: Kessler "pays late" and June has overdue invoices and a December lease end; have June say so plainly ("I can't float January") and have Asha not hear it — answer with another lead or a scheduling fix. What it must cost: June declines to share the next true thing (the foamcore stays a lie all afternoon by June's *choice in response to Asha*, not by Asha's tact), or one of the two saved contacts is saved with visible reluctance instead of gratitude. Asha stays generous and right about logistics — the field is the spec, not a demotion to quirk; she is wrong about *whose* math it is, and the chapter must let one offer land as pressure June has to deflect on the page.
