The completed audit is written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_24.characters_wrong.md`. Note before the document: this chapter was revised after the prior audit round — I verified directly that the prior finding's evidence line ("So June did the thing Odile couldn't") is gone from the current text and that the shame beat the prior order demanded is now present at ln 129 — so this is a fresh adjudication of the current words, and the ruling flips. The document itself:

---

# Chapter 24 — Let-Characters-Be-Wrong / Competence-Default Audit

id: characters_wrong | owner: claude | tier: risk
chapter: output/chapters/chapter_24.md ("First Snow" — POV June; showcase coda / final chapter)
inputs: chapter_24.md; style_and_voice.md {what_they_get_wrong} fields (June, Theo, Odile, Mara, Luis, Ruth, Sam, Priya, Ben); READING_GUIDE.md; npc_goals.md; chapter_cards.md CARD-24
trigger: sample:every-3rd-chapter (24 = 3×8; in-sample)
card: CHAPTER CARD - 24 (showcase coda; sanctioned — artifact-borne reveal, Odile reveal without oracle monologue, live cohort payoffs, first snow, "June final voice plain"; earned-stay thesis per READING_GUIDE §8)

**Stance and declared bias.** This is the finale, the register most hospitable to the competence default: every thread pays off, everyone earns a warm exit, and clean, insightful behavior reads as good writing. Here that reading is the primary evidence of failure, and I audit against it. I also fight the opposite bias, so I do not manufacture findings against a text that has already been repaired: the book spent 23 chapters teaching June to "say it straight" (READING_GUIDE §2), and the earned-stay test (§8) requires her final choice to be legible and self-owned. So I separate *earned plainness of speech* (allowed — a grown character may talk straight) from *wound-immunity under maximal pressure* (a finding — a grown character does not stop having her specific wound). No pass is awarded without quoted per-criterion evidence and the strongest counter-candidate I could find against it.

**This is a fresh audit of the current text, which post-dates the prior round on this chapter.** I confirmed the delta rather than assume it. The prior `chapter_24.characters_wrong.md` ruled `TOO-COMPETENT (1 finding)` — June's "understood → pitied" wound went inert at the night-one reveal — and quoted a narration line, "So June did the thing Odile couldn't," at ln 131 as the "crown" certifying her composure as superiority. **That line does not exist in the current chapter** (grep: no match). In its place ln 131 reads "June looked at the dry ink until it was only ink again, not a verdict on what she had needed," and ln 129 now carries the wound the prior order demanded: "good eye turned into a problem Odile could solve by writing in a man. The shame came up fast enough that she could have torn the page for that alone." The prior finding's exact site was revised, in exactly the ordered direction. I re-adjudicate the reveal below against the current words, not the prior verdict; the ruling flips, and I show the work that flips it.

**Calibration boundary applied before ruling.** Several cohort beats are explicitly sanctioned as competent by CARD-24 and the npc_goals Ch24 lines: Luis "closes through placement, not speech"; Sam "room-making … no Sam speech"; Ruth "one sharp line only; no privacy lecture"; Ben "ordinary showcase texture … no additional planning joke"; Mara "her arc closes by not over-translating him"; Priya "ordinary care, not a lease-thread reprise." Per the audit's calibration ("Genuinely competent beats … are not findings unless the whole chapter is frictionless"), I do not convert sanctioned cohort competence into findings. The chapter is not frictionless — the dish, the coffee, the minimization, the water jar, the strap, the portrait/handback jab, and the reveal-shame all bite — so those NO-TRIGGER passes stand on their merits, and Mara and Priya carry live cohort wrongness that keeps the cohort off a uniformly-wise reading.

---

## Section 1 — Competence-default sweep

`WRONGNESS-PRESENT — instances:`

- **June**, "good eye turned into a problem Odile could solve by writing in a man. The shame came up fast enough that she could have torn the page for that alone." (ln 129) → "June looked at the dry ink until it was only ink again, not a verdict on what she had needed." (ln 131) → "She tore the page clean out … because if anyone was going to decide what that first night meant, it was going to be the one whose name got written down without her." (ln 133) — **blind spot / misunderstanding**: her declared wound (reads being-seen-and-handled as a verdict on her inadequacy) fires at the reveal, is worked down but not cured, and drives a cold self-protective seizure of Odile's record. NEW since the prior round; this is the flipped site (see Section 2, June, second trigger).
- **June**, "For a second, pity was the easier word. … The edge was harder than pity, but the word stayed in the room because he had still hidden it from her." (ln 101) → "'It's yours,' June said, too fast. 'Don't hand me the thing you hid and call it mine.'" (ln 145) → "She heard the edge in her own voice then, the stockroom word still not gone." (ln 149) — **misunderstanding + unprovoked defensiveness**: the pity-misread at the hidden study does not resolve in-beat, carries across a scene break, and bleeds into a disproportionate jab Theo has to absorb.
- **Theo**, "he went to top off a water jar that didn't need it" (ln 29); "the water jar he still hadn't needed to fill" (ln 61) — **blind spot**: the indispensability reflex, verbal form suppressed, leaks into a pointless maintenance task; uncaught, twice.
- **Theo**, "'I'm going to walk you to the--' … His hand had already started toward the portfolio strap. He saw it a half-second after she did and let it drop open at his side." (lns 165, 169) — **blind spot**: the usefulness reflex relapses into his body one line after he renounced it aloud; June catches it before he does.
- **Priya**, "Priya brought June a coffee she hadn't asked for, caught herself doing it, and set it down anyway. 'You want that,' she said. June took it. It had too much milk." (ln 46) — **blind spot** (care-as-control): imposes unasked care, dictates the want; residue carried to ln 67.
- **Mara**, "She started to route it. 'Luis, put it over by the--'" (ln 39) → "She closed it and let the dish sit there, exactly where Luis had wanted it." (ln 43) — **saying the wrong thing / blind spot**: the over-translating-Luis reflex fires and is stopped from outside.
- **Odile**, "I ran a class. You can decide I ran it for you, if it helps. I didn't. … I wanted to know what you'd make if I made you. I'm retiring, not dead." (ln 127) — **blind spot (minimization)**: prices eight weeks of engineering as a non-event needing no forgiveness, against June's "You ran all of it to see if we would" (ln 125).
- **Odile**, "So I wrote in the other half. He was handy. He's my-- … He was handy." (ln 123) — **blind spot**: reduces Theo to a tool twice, undervaluing what she did to him, and declines the human word.
- **Sam**, "You've got a lean in the wall up here … I've got a level in the car. Two minutes." (ln 27) — **misunderstanding**: reads the intentional lean as an installer's error.
- **Mara**, "'Bring it Tuesday,' she said, and remembered there were no more Tuesdays." (ln 79) — **saying the wrong thing**, self-caught.

The sweep passes on wrongness existing, and it now exists at the emotional center, not only in the furniture. Two patterns still worth stating so the pass is honest:

1. **The wound now operates at both of its maximal-pressure sites, not one.** In the version the prior round audited, June's pity-feint at the study was announced-then-overwritten and the reveal ran clean under a narrator's crown. In the current text the study misread *persists* ("the word stayed in the room," ln 101), *carries* ("the stockroom word still not gone," ln 149), and *costs* (Theo absorbs a jab, ln 147); and the reveal misread now *fires* ("The shame came up fast enough that she could have torn the page for that alone," ln 129) and *moves her hand* (the page-seizure, ln 133). Both triggers OPERATE. That is the specific repair the prior order demanded, and it is on the page.
2. **The principals still never *cognitively* misread each other.** Theo clocks Ruth's reading ("I know. From the label. … he read a person reading a picture the same as she did," ln 65); June takes the ledger apart on sight ("the pairing was in Odile's hand, and it predated the pairing … came apart plain," ln 119); each anticipates the other's unsaid line and is right (Theo "let the first answer go past," ln 69; June "watched him not reaching for" it, ln 143). The only misreads that fire between them are *emotional* (June's pity, June's shame). This mutual clairvoyance is the competence default's quieter signature; it is tolerated here — not converted to a finding — because the emotional misreads now carry real cost and because saying-the-wrong-thing, defensiveness, and blind spots all fire elsewhere. Noted, not charged.

Three most suspiciously well-adjusted exchanges (quoted as counter-evidence of the residual tilt, per stance, even under a WRONGNESS-PRESENT ruling):

1. **Urn debrief (lns 67–75):** "How's it feel to get caught." / "They know we didn't start clean … Nobody needs the rest." / "I wanted to. I had the paragraph loaded. … It's exhausting. I don't know how you've done it your entire life." / "Practice. … I say mine to myself later." — two people diagnosing their own flaws with total fluency and zero misfire; the confession-of-flaw *is* the register. The chapter's most frictionless dialogue. Not a finding (post-confession repair texture, and the flaws named are the ones firing elsewhere), but the clearest surviving instance of the competence default's charm.
2. **Theo reading Ruth reading the picture (ln 65):** "I know. From the label." / "He'd have clocked it from across the room; he read a person reading a picture the same as she did." — clairvoyance between principals rendered as intimacy. Lucid; costs nothing; nobody is wrong.
3. **Portrait interpretation (ln 103):** "He had looked at her like this, carefully, at value, with no need for her to turn around, while he was deciding for her what she could stand to know." — the most exposed private object in the book, read exactly and calmly. Held off a finding only because lns 101/145/149 make the *read* cost a jab two beats later; the interpretation itself is frictionless insight.

---

## Section 2 — Per major character

**June Park** — gets-wrong field: *"mistakes being understood for being pitied; assumes choosing herself requires choosing alone."*

- **Clause 1 ("understood → pitied"), trigger A — the hidden week-three study (lns 99–105, 141–151) — verdict: OPERATED.** The field's cleanest, highest-stakes trigger in the book: she finds a portrait he made of her "not knowing she was seen" (ln 99), faced to the brick because "he thought that was all she could stand: herself small, doing cleanup, not looking back" (ln 101) — being-seen-unaware plus being-protected-as-fragile, the exact stimulus her wound converts into *he pitied what he saw*. The misread fires and holds — "For a second, pity was the easier word. … the word stayed in the room because he had still hidden it from her" (ln 101) — survives the scene break to the handback, and drives a defensive, disproportionate jab: "'It's yours,' June said, too fast. 'Don't hand me the thing you hid and call it mine.'" (ln 145), which Theo absorbs — "Theo's mouth changed. He did not defend it." (ln 147). She names the carry-over herself: "the stockroom word still not gone" (ln 149). Wound moves, costs the exchange a beat, lands on another character. OPERATED with real friction.
- **Clause 1, trigger B — the night-one reveal (lns 121–133) — verdict: OPERATED.** This is the site the prior round ruled TRIGGER-MISSED, and the flip is the whole audit, so I show the work. Being told she was seen, placed, paired, and engineered into painting because Odile "wanted to know what you'd make if I made you" (ln 127) is the maximal *she-managed-me-because-she-thought-I-couldn't* provocation for a lapsed artist whose wound "treats desire as evidence against herself." In the current text the wound fires **before** the verdict: "coat still on, work stopped for years, good eye turned into a problem Odile could solve by writing in a man. **The shame came up fast enough that she could have torn the page for that alone.**" (ln 129). That is June reading the engineering as a verdict on her inadequacy — the pity/shame wound, dead center. She then has to *work it down*: "June looked at the dry ink until it was only ink again, **not a verdict on what she had needed**" (ln 131) — a clause that only parses if the ink *was* reading as a verdict on her neediness a moment earlier. The clarity that follows ("I'd have made most of the same choices. They'd have been mine," ln 131) is reached *through* the shame, not over a still wound. And the wound leaves a behavioral residue that exits the chapter undecided: she "tore the page clean out … because if anyone was going to decide what that first night meant, it was going to be the one whose name got written down without her" (ln 133), and carries it out as "a folded page in her pocket she hadn't decided anything about yet" (ln 175). The prior round's crown — "So June did the thing Odile couldn't" — is deleted; nothing now ranks her over the mentor. Response is no longer clean insight; it is wound-fired-then-recovered, with a cost. OPERATED — the weaker of the two Clause-1 triggers (see the counter-candidate below and Section 3), but genuinely operative.
- **Clause 2 ("choosing herself requires choosing alone") — verdict: NO-TRIGGER, correctly.** The finale deliberately *heals* this clause: she carries her own load ("Her own water, her own work, her own cold walk to her own train," ln 173), keeps the kiss "hers to give and hers to end" (ln 175), and is still not alone. The earned-stay test (§8) requires exactly this; firing this clause would break the book's thesis. Leave it unfired.

Strongest counter-candidate weighed before ruling the reveal OPERATED (i.e., the best case that it is still a costume): her spoken verdict — "It worked, and I got a life out of it, and it still wasn't yours to run. I'd have made most of the same choices. They'd have been mine." (ln 131) — is balanced, parallel, and articulate, and she never once says a wrong or defensive thing *to Odile* the way she snaps at Theo; her external conduct toward the mentor is composed throughout ("You knew," ln 121; "You ran all of it to see if we would," ln 125). A skeptic can argue the shame is one narrated clause of told emotion, immediately neutralized, sitting as a label on unchanged composure. Rejected as a rescue of the finding, on the audit's own test (OPERATED vs. TRIGGER-MISSED turns on whether "the response was clean insight instead"): the response here is *not* clean insight alone — the shame fires first (ln 129), the ink has to be worked back to "only ink" (ln 131), and the wound drives an action (the tear, ln 133) that leaves unresolved. The articulate verdict is licensed separately by §2/§8 (23 chapters of teaching June to say it straight); earned plainness of *speech* is allowed, and the wound is not immune — it fires and moves her hand. That is the line between this text and the prior one, and it is why the ruling flips rather than holds.

**Theo Brennan** — gets-wrong field: *"believes delay is kindness; believes being indispensable is the same as being loved."*

- **Verdict: OPERATED (a weak-ish pass, guarded below).** "Indispensable = loved" fires uncaught and, at the goodbye, relapses bodily against his own stated cure — the "practiced and incomplete" correction the brief requires.
  - Uncaught, displaced: with the sermon suppressed ("It's meant to lean," and left it there. He'd have built Sam an explanation a month ago," ln 29), the reflex leaks into "a water jar that didn't need it" (ln 29) and again "the water jar he still hadn't needed to fill" (ln 61). The compulsion executes; nobody intercepts it; he does not self-correct.
  - Suppressed-not-cured, on the page in his own mouth: "I wanted to. I had the paragraph loaded. … It's exhausting. I don't know how you've done it your entire life." (ln 73) — the usefulness-via-explanation reflex is still fully loaded; he is white-knuckling it, not free of it.
  - Interpersonal, with cost — the goodbye (lns 165–173): the reflex fires verbally ("I'm going to walk you to the--"), over-corrects into a *practiced* disclaimer ("'To the corner,' he said instead … 'That's it. I'm not carrying anything.'"), then leaks into his body one line later: "His hand had already started toward the portfolio strap. He saw it a half-second after she did and let it drop open at his side." (ln 169). He is not master of his own reflex — June catches it first — and June must reclaim her load in answer (ln 173). The correction is exactly practiced (rehearsed disclaimer) and incomplete (the body still reaches); the imbalance (June running point on his reflexes) is left standing, not tidied. Cost is priced explicitly at the handback too: "she watched it cost him and watched him pay it" (ln 153).
- Counter-case, named so an editor can escalate on judgment rather than re-derive it: the *deeper* belief under the field — indispensable = loved, therefore *dispensable = unloved* — never flares into fear. June strips him of every use (water, walk, portfolio, the kiss's terms) and being-made-unnecessary produces only clean acceptance ("'Right,' he said," ln 171), plus lovable texture ("she liked him so much in that second it was faintly annoying," ln 153). What keeps Theo off a second finding is specifically the *uncaught* water jar (ln 29/61, fully unintercepted) and the strap relapse (ln 169, contradicting his just-spoken cure, caught by June not him). Those two lines are the pass. Guard them (see Watch items); if either is softened, the field goes inert and Theo becomes a finding.

**Odile Marchetti** — gets-wrong field: *"assumes the manipulation she can survive is manipulation others can forgive quickly."*

- **Verdict: OPERATED.** The brief — "remain wrong, manipulative, and partial even when she gives June proof" — is met with evidence, and npc_goals' Ch24 instruction ("keep her economical and wrong") holds.
  - The field operates as *minimization / mispriced forgiveness*: at the moment she hands over the proof (the Sept-24 sheet, ln 117), she prices the engineering as a non-event — "I ran a class. You can decide I ran it for you, if it helps. I didn't." (ln 127) — assuming June will absorb it. June's shame and page-seizure (ln 129, 133) are the unpaid bill her assumption underprices; the narration confirms the missing contrition ("There it was, and no apology after it," ln 129).
  - Manipulative, unrepentant: "So I wrote in the other half" (ln 123); "I wanted to know what you'd make if I made you. I'm retiring, not dead." (ln 127).
  - Partial and cold about the human cost: reduces Theo to "handy" twice and stops before the human word — "she declined to say it" (ln 123); pays in an object, not a sentence — "she had put the proof on a page instead of in a sentence" (ln 129); marks the drawer with "one finger … not opening it, only marking it" (ln 139); exits on "Give them the drawings and the wine and none of my time" (ln 139).
- Weakest spot, weighed and left standing: the concession "'No,' she agreed. 'It wasn't.'" (ln 133) risks curing her into accountability. It survives because the payment is priced short on the page — "two words with nothing after them … more than Odile gave most people and less than the thing was worth" (ln 133) — and she reverts to cold logistics immediately (ln 139). She does not become the warm, fully-accountable mentor the brief warns against. Guardrail check (§2 pre-reveal): nothing she says asserts "couple" is elastic or that the rule was ever soft; the disclosure is the night-one page, not a thesis about categories. Voice-card mass respected (no line over two sentences beyond the licensed reveal paragraph); she is licensed for high-density lines, so her articulateness is in-spec and her wrongness is moral, not a failure of eloquence.

**Mara Valdez** — gets-wrong field: *"thinks smoothing is always kindness."*

- **Verdict: OPERATED — the cleanest cohort wrongness.** The routing/translating reflex fires live — "She started to route it. 'Luis, put it over by the--'" (ln 39) — and Luis physically preempts her. She pays on the page: "Mara had already opened her mouth. She closed it and let the dish sit there, exactly where Luis had wanted it" (ln 43) — a swallowed instinct, cost visible, stop external. Honest caveat: CARD-24/npc_goals frame this as her arc *closing* ("not over-translating him"), so the flaw fires in order to resolve into sanctioned growth. It still counts OPERATED because the reflex genuinely fires first and is stopped from outside at a cost to her, not self-insighted away. The "Bring it Tuesday" slip (ln 79) is a second, smaller genuine misstep, self-caught.

**Luis Valdez** — gets-wrong field: *"assumes silence communicates more than it does."*

- **Verdict: NO-TRIGGER (acceptable, sanctioned).** His near-wordless placement communicates perfectly — "He'd put the food where the traffic was and told the room he'd done it … 'There.'" (ln 43); Mara reads the override and defers. His over-trust in silence never *under*-communicates, so the flaw's failure mode is not engaged. The dish placement is craft competence (a signal maintainer reading a sightline), which CARD-24 wants ("placement, not speech … Do not add another verdict line"). Recorded per the prompt's cohort concern: he reads as fully competent — but the calibration protects it (a professional doing his job well, in a chapter that is not frictionless), and Mara/Priya carry the live cohort wrongness.

**Priya Nair** — gets-wrong field: *"care becomes control when she does not ask first."*

- **Verdict: OPERATED (thin, acceptable — not a finding).** The trigger occurs and the flaw operates: she imposes unasked care and dictates the want — "a coffee she hadn't asked for, caught herself doing it, and set it down anyway. 'You want that,'" (ln 46) — leaving a residue rather than resolving to nothing: "It had too much milk," which June carries the rest of the night ("the too-milky coffee," ln 67). The imposed care is literally not what June would have chosen, and June cannot refuse it. Self-caught and low-cost, and npc_goals sanctions it as "ordinary care," so it is not a finding — but it is genuine control-without-asking with a residue, which is why it is not scored a costume. Her April aside ("We're looking again in April," ln 47) is the sanctioned slower-choice payoff, not a wisdom line.

**Ben Adler** — gets-wrong field: *"assumes certainty can be built before decision."*

- **Verdict: NO-TRIGGER (acceptable, sanctioned).** No plan-vs-decision situation engages him; he is showcase texture (the agonized-over flyer; "left it a half-degree off level on purpose," ln 47), with one residual fossil of the flaw — the flyer photo "shot from the door end weeks before any of them had finished a thing" (ln 9), an image of certainty manufactured before the content existed. CARD-24 wants "ordinary showcase texture … no additional planning joke," and his arc was spent in Ch23. Acceptable — recorded caveat: it adds to the "everyone healed" surface, since his and Priya's exit is narrated as cured ("looked like April was a real place they intended to walk into on their own feet," ln 81).

**Ruth Kim** — gets-wrong field: *"lets people hide too long because she respects the need to be unnamed."*

- **Verdict: NO-TRIGGER (acceptable).** Her one live line reads the truth exactly far enough and stops — "You didn't start this together" (ln 51); "It's the best thing on the wall" (ln 57); tells no one. Her *flaw* (letting hiding continue to the point of harm) has no live trigger here: the couple is real, the secret is spent, the class is ending, so the silence enables no harm. Restraint costs nothing dangerous and hides nothing dangerous — grace, not the flaw firing. CARD-24: "one line, no privacy lecture." Sanctioned, with the recorded caveat (same as Luis) that she is rendered with frictionless perceptiveness — the competence default's most seductive form even where the ruling is correct.

**Sam Rivera** — gets-wrong field: *"can push for naming before the named person is ready."*

- **Verdict: NO-TRIGGER (acceptable).** He never confronts a naming decision to overrun: he clocks the crooked corner (an installer's reflex, ln 27), takes "It's meant to lean," files it "Huh" (ln 31), and makes room ("He made literal room, stepping back and to the side," ln 31; "drifted off to make room somewhere else," ln 49). The relationship-secret is Ruth's to clock, not his, so his push-for-naming flaw is never engaged. His lean-misread is a minor *misunderstanding* that operates and resolves in one line (see Section 3); it is not the field. CARD-24: room-making, no speech. Sanctioned.

*(Nia Torres and Asha Ibrahim are referenced but off-page in Ch24 — not present; NO-TRIGGER by absence. Their Ch23 payoffs are settled elsewhere and are not adjudicated here.)*

---

## Section 3 — Friction yield

- **June**, pity-misread carried into the handback (lns 101, 145–147, 149): **FRICTION (real).** The wound does not resolve in-beat — "the word stayed in the room" (ln 101), "the stockroom word still not gone" (ln 149) — and it costs the exchange: "'It's yours,' June said, too fast. 'Don't hand me the thing you hid and call it mine.' … Theo's mouth changed. He did not defend it." (lns 145–147). Another character absorbs the wrongness. The chapter's most emotionally central price.
- **June**, reveal-shame → page-seizure (lns 129, 131, 133): **FRICTION (real, the weakest-passing instance).** The shame fires ("she could have torn the page for that alone," ln 129), has to be worked down ("until it was only ink again," ln 131), and is metabolized into a cold action she carries out unresolved — she tears a page from Odile's ledger in front of her and pockets it undecided (ln 133, ln 175). Cost is more internal/self-directed than interpersonal, and Odile absorbs only the small affront of her record seized; but it persists past the beat and out of the chapter, so it is not costumed. Quoted again in the verdict as the weakest FRICTION.
- **Mara**, routing reflex (lns 39–43): **FRICTION (real).** "She closed it and let the dish sit there, exactly where Luis had wanted it." Costs her the instinct; the stop is external and public.
- **Theo**, strap relapse at the goodbye (lns 169–173): **FRICTION (gentle, real).** His body contradicts his renouncement, June catches it first, and June must reclaim her load. Cost: his self-mastery, absorbed by June, who stays a half-step ahead of him.
- **Odile**, "I ran a class" minimization (lns 127–133): **FRICTION (mild).** June must assert the violation against the dismissal ("It wasn't yours to run"), and Odile pays only "'No,' she agreed. 'It wasn't.'" — priced on the page as "less than the thing was worth."
- **Priya**, unasked coffee (ln 46): **FRICTION (thin).** Imposed care yields a coffee June did not choose and cannot refuse — "It had too much milk" — carried to ln 67. Small residue, but a residue.
- **Theo**, water jar (lns 29, 61): live but **costless residual** — derails nothing, absorbed by no one; its job is to keep him off a self-insighted ruling, and it does.
- **Odile**, "He was handy" (ln 123): wrongness present, **friction thin** — Theo is up front; the coldness lands on no one on the page.
- **Sam**, lean-misread (lns 27–31): **COSTUMED** — "It's meant to lean," resolved in one line; "Huh." A professional beat, correctly weightless (not a defect; the field it belongs to has no live trigger).
- **Mara**, "Bring it Tuesday" (ln 79): **COSTUMED** — self-caught inside the sentence; warmth-floor texture.

Net: the live FRICTIONs (June's pity-bleed, June's reveal-shame, Mara's dish, Theo's strap, Odile's minimization, Priya's coffee) are real and distributed, and the two strongest now sit in the emotional center rather than exclusively in the furniture. No wrongness with a live trigger is left costumed except the two that are genuinely minor and self-caught. There is no TRIGGER-MISSED.

---

## Chapter verdict

`WRONG-ENOUGH`

The sweep passes (WRONGNESS-PRESENT, distributed across misunderstanding, defensiveness, blind spots, and saying-the-wrong-thing). No major character with a live trigger runs clean: June's "understood → pitied" wound OPERATES at both maximal-pressure sites; Theo's usefulness reflex fires uncaught and relapses bodily against his stated cure (the "practiced and incomplete" correction the brief requires); Odile stays minimizing, partial, and unrepentant even while handing over proof; Mara's smoothing reflex fires and is stopped at a cost; Priya's care-without-asking leaves a residue. The four cohort NO-TRIGGERs (Luis, Ben, Ruth, Sam) are each individually defensible under the audit's calibration and are sanctioned by CARD-24, and the chapter is not frictionless, so they do not convert. The prompt's four current-text guards are met: June is not perfectly fair/healed (shame fires, page seized, jab thrown); Theo is not fully cured (uncaught jar, relapsing strap); Odile remains wrong and cold beside her proof; the cohort is not uniformly wise (Mara and Priya are visibly wrong).

Weakest instance, quoted per the template: **June's reveal-shame (lns 129–133).** It is a single narrated clause of shame, worked down to "only ink" inside the same scene, followed by an articulate, balanced verdict; its residue (the page-seizure) is more self-directed than interpersonal, and June never misspeaks *to Odile* the way she snaps at Theo. It clears the bar — the wound fires before the clarity and moves her hand to the page, which is what separates it from the prior round's inert version — but it clears by the smallest margin in the chapter. If the shame line (ln 129) or the "not a verdict on what she had needed" work-down (ln 131) were cut, or the deleted crown ("So June did the thing Odile couldn't") were restored, this site reverts to TRIGGER-MISSED and the chapter reverts to TOO-COMPETENT.

Scope note (what changed since the prior round): the prior `TOO-COMPETENT (1 finding)` verdict targeted June's wound going inert at the night-one reveal. The current text was revised at exactly that site — the shame now fires (ln 129), the work-down replaces the clean verdict's on-ramp (ln 131), and the narrator's crown is deleted — so the finding is repaired, not re-flagged. I verified the delta directly (the crowned line is absent from the current file; the shame line is present) rather than inheriting the prior ruling.

## Watch items (do not let a later warmth or line edit re-create the repaired finding)

- **Do not cut or soften June's reveal-shame (ln 129) or the work-down (ln 131), and do not restore any narration ranking June over Odile (the deleted "So June did the thing Odile couldn't").** These three edits are the entire repair; removing any one reverts the reveal to TRIGGER-MISSED.
- **Do not delete or soften Theo's strap relapse (ln 169) or let him catch it before June does, and do not "fix" the uncaught water jar (lns 29, 61).** With the jar, the strap relapse is what keeps his usefulness field OPERATED rather than COSTUMED.
- **Do not soften June's pity-bleed at the handback (lns 145, 149) or let "He did not defend it" (ln 147) turn into reassurance.** That carry-over is what makes the study trigger OPERATE.
- **Do not warm Odile's "'No,' she agreed. 'It wasn't.'" (ln 133) or add an apology after it.** The payment must stay priced short, or Odile crosses into a finding.

## REVISION ORDERS

None. The prior round's single finding (June — "understood → pitied" TRIGGER-MISSED at the night-one reveal) is repaired on the current text: the wound fires before the verdict (ln 129), is worked down rather than absent (ln 131), drives an action that leaves unresolved (ln 133, ln 175), and the narrator's crown is gone. No live trigger among the nine major characters is met with clean insight; the two remaining frictionless textures (the mutual clairvoyance between principals; the cluster of competent cohort NO-TRIGGERs) are non-findings under this audit's calibration — the first because emotional misreads carry the load the cognitive ones don't, the second because the beats are sanctioned professional competence in a chapter that is not frictionless. Any residual concern about that cluster belongs to the adjacent frictionless_competence audit, not here.

`WRONG-ENOUGH`
