Written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_24.characters_wrong.md` and verified intact. One transparency note before the document: I overwrote an existing `chapter_24.characters_wrong.md` that I did not create — it had been written against an *earlier* draft (the chapter file is 3 minutes newer and no longer contains the portrait phrasing that audit quoted). The current text already implemented that round's portrait fix, so June's wound now genuinely operates at the study; my finding is correspondingly narrowed to the one wound-site the revision left untouched (the night-one reveal). The completed audit follows.

---

# 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, Priya, Ben, Ruth, Sam); 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 is the primary evidence of failure, and I read against it. I fight the opposite bias so I do not manufacture findings: 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 audit is of the current integrated text, which post-dates an earlier audit round.** The chapter file (mtime 20:49) is newer than the prior `chapter_24.characters_wrong.md` (20:46); the portrait beat quoted by that round ("...the harder edge, not the kinder one") no longer exists. The current ln 101 reads "...the word stayed in the room because he had still hidden it from her," and the handback (lns 145–151) now carries "the stockroom word still not gone." That revision makes June's Clause-1 wound genuinely operate **at the portrait** — a site that earlier read inert. I credit it, rule the portrait OPERATED, and isolate the surviving finding to the one wound-site the revision did not touch: the night-one reveal verdict at ln 131. This is not a re-run of the prior verdict; its scope is narrower and its reasoning is against the current words.

**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, and the portrait/handback all bite — so those passes stand on their merits, and Mara and Priya carry live cohort wrongness that keeps the cohort from reading as uniformly wise.

---

## Section 1 — Competence-default sweep

`WRONGNESS-PRESENT — instances:`

- **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) → "She heard the edge in her own voice then, the stockroom word still not gone." (ln 149) → "'It's yours,' June said, too fast. 'Don't hand me the thing you hid and call it mine.'" (ln 145) — **misunderstanding + defensiveness**: her declared wound (mistakes being-seen for being-pitied) fires at the hidden study, is *not* overwritten in-beat, and bleeds into a defensive jab Theo has to absorb. This is the chapter's central genuine wrongness (see Section 2, portrait ruling).
- **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." (ln 46) — **blind spot** (care-as-control): imposes unasked care and dictates the want; residue "It had too much milk," which June is stuck with ("the too-milky coffee," ln 67).
- **Mara**, "She started to route it. 'Luis, put it over by the--'" (ln 39) — **saying the wrong thing / blind spot**: the over-routing-of-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 that needs no forgiveness, against June's "You ran all of it to see if we would" (ln 125).
- **Odile**, "He was handy. He's my-- … He was handy." (ln 123) — **blind spot**: reduces Theo to a tool twice and undervalues what she did to him; declines the human word.
- **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**: displaced indispensability reflex, uncaught, twice.
- **Theo**, "I'm going to walk you to the--" (ln 165) → "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) — **blind spot**: the reflex leaks a second time, into his body, one line after he renounced it aloud.
- **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. But the pattern is what the audit is for, and the pattern is uneven:

1. **The revision has moved the wound into the emotional center at one site.** In the version an earlier round saw, June's pity feint at the study was announced and overwritten inside a sentence — a costume. In the current text it *persists* ("the word stayed in the room," ln 101), *carries* ("the stockroom word still not gone," ln 149), and *costs* — Theo absorbs a defensive jab ("He did not defend it," ln 147). That is a genuine interpersonal wrongness between the principals, and it did not exist before. Credit where due.
2. **One peak site is still lucid, and the narration crowns it.** The night-one reveal (lns 121–133) is the second maximal-pressure site for June's wound, and there she runs clean: a balanced moral verdict — "It wasn't yours to run. … I'd have made most of the same choices. They'd have been mine." (ln 131) — with the narration ranking her the most capable person in the room: "So June did the thing Odile couldn't." (ln 131). See Section 2 (June, Clause 1, second trigger).
3. **The principals never misread each other cognitively.** 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 *emotional* misread that fires is June's pity-bleed; there is no *cognitive* misunderstanding between June, Theo, and Odile anywhere in the chapter. That mutual clairvoyance is the competence default's quieter signature, tolerated here because the emotional misread now carries real cost, but noted.

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

1. **Reveal close (ln 131):** "So June did the thing Odile couldn't. 'It wasn't yours to run,' she said. '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.'" — the protagonist out-articulating and out-moralizing the mentor in balanced parallel syntax, narration-certified as superior. This is the finding site.
2. **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. Not a finding (it is repair-scene texture, post-confession), but the most frictionless dialogue in the chapter.
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 moment in the book, read correctly and calmly. Held off a finding only because ln 101/149/145 make the read *cost* something two beats later; the interpretation alone is lucid.

---

## 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"), first trigger — the hidden week-three study (lns 99–105, 141–151) — verdict: OPERATED.** This is the field's cleanest, highest-stakes trigger in the book: she finds a portrait he made of her "not knowing she was seen," 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 now fires and holds: "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 is not resolved in-beat; it survives 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). The wound moves, costs the exchange a beat, and lands on another character. OPERATED, with real (if quickly re-warmed) friction. This ruling is different from what the earlier draft earned; the current text fixed it.
- **Clause 1, second trigger — the night-one reveal (lns 121–133) — verdict: TRIGGER-MISSED. FINDING.** 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 "makes her treat desire as evidence against herself" and who "mistakes being understood for being pitied." A woman with that wound hears engineering as a verdict on her inadequacy — *she had to trick me into it because she pitied the part of me that quit.* June shows none of it. Her internal processing is pure fair analysis — "Odile had done it longer and colder and would be answering for less" (ln 129) — and her verdict is balanced to the point of generosity: "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). Response was clean insight; the wound did not flicker before the clarity. The narration then certifies the composure as superiority — "So June did the thing Odile couldn't" (ln 131). The subsequent page-seizure (ln 133) supplies cold *autonomy*, not the pity-wound — she takes the ledger because her name "got written down without her," an agency move, not a being-pitied flinch. Earned growth licenses her *plain speech* here; it does not license the wound going *fully still* at the second of the two highest-pressure sites in the book for that wound, while the narration hands her the crown.
- **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 thesis. Leave it unfired; the Clause-1 finding must not be executed by disturbing Clause 2.

Strongest counter-candidate weighed before ruling TRIGGER-MISSED on the reveal: the page-seizure — "she tore the page clean out … folded it into her coat pocket, 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). It is genuinely cold and self-protective, and it is the best case that June is not saintly here. Rejected as a rescue of *this* field: it is autonomy over the record (Clause-2 register, sanctioned), not the pity/inadequacy wound moving; and it comes *after* the verdict has already resolved clean. Second counter-candidate: the whole reveal could be read as *not* a Clause-1 site at all (manipulation, not being-seen-and-pitied). Rejected: Odile's engineering is explicitly premised on having *seen* June ("You corrected my label with your coat still on … I wasn't going to lose one," ln 123), which routes straight through June's seen-then-handled wound. The trigger is live.

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

- **Verdict: OPERATED (the chapter's weakest pass).** The indispensability reflex fires uncaught more than once, and at the goodbye it relapses bodily against his own stated cure.
  - Uncaught, non-interpersonal: "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). The compulsion executes; it is not intercepted at the impulse.
  - Interpersonal, with cost — the goodbye (lns 165–173): the reflex fires verbally ("I'm going to walk you to the--"), is caught and over-corrected into a practiced disclaimer ("'To the corner,' he said instead … 'That's it. I'm not carrying anything.'"), and then leaks into his body one line later, contradicting the renouncement: "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 own load in answer: "She shifted the jar to her other hand and hooked the portfolio into the crook of the same arm. Her own water, her own work, her own cold walk to her own train." (ln 173). The correction is exactly "practiced and incomplete": the disclaimer is rehearsed, the body still reaches, and the imbalance (June running point on his reflexes) is left standing, not tidied. The cost is also priced explicitly earlier — "she watched it cost him and watched him pay it" (ln 153).
- Counter-case, named so an editor can escalate if they weight it differently: the deeper *belief* under the field — indispensable = loved, therefore *dispensable = unloved* — never flares. 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), not the fear the belief is built from. Every reflex is contained, and the flaw survives partly as 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 (fully unintercepted) and the strap relapse (ln 169), which contradicts his just-spoken cure and is caught by June, not him. The prompt's brief for Theo — "not fully cured … practiced and incomplete" — is met by those two lines. Guard them (see Watch items). If either is softened, the field goes inert and Theo becomes a second 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, not asserted, and the npc_goals Ch24 instruction ("keep her economical and wrong") holds.
  - The field operates as *minimization*: she prices eight weeks of engineering as a non-event that needs no forgiveness — "I ran a class. You can decide I ran it for you, if it helps. I didn't." (ln 127) — against June's "You ran all of it to see if we would" (ln 125). That is the field's dead center: manipulation she can survive → nothing others need to forgive. It forces June to assert the violation over Odile's dismissal (friction; see Section 3), and 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 objects, not speech ("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).
- 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 narration prices the payment as short — "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: "Give them the drawings and the wine and none of my time" (ln 139). She does not become the warm, apologetic, fully-accountable mentor the prompt warns against. Guardrail check: nothing she says asserts that "couple" is elastic or otherwise breaks the pre-reveal rule; the disclosure is the night-one page, not a thesis about categories.

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

- **Verdict: OPERATED — the chapter's 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 as OPERATED because the reflex genuinely fires first and is stopped from outside at a cost to her, rather than being 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) — so his over-trust in silence never *under*-communicates; nothing engages the flaw's failure mode. The dish placement is craft competence (a signal maintainer reading a sightline), not the emotional-silence misfire the field governs, and CARD-24 wants exactly this ("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, 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) — and it leaves a real 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 as a costume.

**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), certainty manufactured before the content existed. CARD-24 wants "ordinary showcase texture … no additional planning joke," and his arc was spent in Ch23. Acceptable, though it adds to the "everyone healed" surface: 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 and hides nothing dangerous, so it is 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 — NO-TRIGGER, not present.)*

---

## Section 3 — Friction yield

- **June**, pity-misread carried into the handback (lns 101, 149, 145–147): **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. This is the revision working, and it is the chapter's most emotionally central price.
- **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 (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.
- **June**, night-one reveal verdict (ln 131): **NO FRICTION — the finding.** The wound-trigger produces a balanced, cost-free verdict, absorbed by no one, and the narration certifies the composure as superiority ("So June did the thing Odile couldn't"). Nothing is misread, defended, or made to cost.
- **Theo**, water jar (lns 29, 61): live but **costless residual** — keeps him off a self-insighted ruling; derails nothing, absorbed by no one.
- **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.
- **Mara**, "Bring it Tuesday" (ln 79): **COSTUMED** — self-caught inside the sentence; warmth-floor texture.

Net: the live FRICTIONs (June's pity-bleed, Mara's dish, Theo's strap, Odile's concession, Priya's coffee) are real, and the strongest of them now sits in the emotional center rather than exclusively in the furniture — a genuine improvement over the earlier draft. The single beat that still runs lucid under maximal wound-pressure is the night-one reveal verdict, and it is the one TRIGGER-MISSED.

---

## Chapter verdict

`TOO-COMPETENT (1 finding)`

Finding: **June — Clause-1 field ("mistakes being understood for being pitied") TRIGGER-MISSED at the night-one reveal (lns 121–133).** Being told she was seen and engineered into painting is a live trigger for a lapsed artist who reads being-handled as being-pitied; she meets it with balanced fairness ("I'd have made most of the same choices. They'd have been mine," ln 131) and the narration crowns the composure as superiority ("So June did the thing Odile couldn't," ln 131). A single TRIGGER-MISSED bars WRONG-ENOUGH.

Scope note (what changed since the prior round): the same field's *other* live trigger — the hidden study — now OPERATES (pity persists at ln 101, carries to ln 149, and costs the handback at lns 145–147). That is credited, not re-flagged. The finding is narrowed to the reveal, the one wound-site the revision left untouched.

Theo is **not** a second finding on the current text: the indispensability reflex fires uncaught (the jar, lns 29/61) and relapses bodily against his renouncement at the goodbye, caught by June, not him (ln 169) — the "practiced and incomplete" correction the brief requires. The counter-case (the deeper belief's flip-side, dispensable = unloved, never flares) is quoted in Section 2 so it can be escalated on judgment rather than re-derived. Odile OPERATES as minimization and stays partial/unrepentant; the cohort is not uniformly wise (Mara and Priya carry live wrongness).

**Watch items for any later pass (do not let a warmth edit create new findings):**
- Do not delete or soften Theo's strap relapse (ln 169) or let him catch it before June does; with the uncaught water jar, it 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 portrait 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 ("less than the thing was worth"), or Odile crosses into a finding.

## REVISION ORDERS

**Order 1 — June. Fire the "understood → pitied" clause once at the night-one reveal, before the earned verdict lands, and drop the narration's crown.**
Field, verbatim: *"mistakes being understood for being pitied; assumes choosing herself requires choosing alone."* (Clause 1 only.)
Beat: the night-one reveal, lns 121–133 (Odile's disclosure through June's verdict and the page-seizure).
As written, the moment June learns she was seen and engineered — "I wanted to know what you'd make if I made you" (ln 127) — produces only clear-eyed fairness ("I'd have made most of the same choices. They'd have been mine," ln 131), and the narration ranks her over the mentor ("So June did the thing Odile couldn't," ln 131). The wound does not move.
Make it move *first*: before the fair verdict, let June actually take the engineering as a verdict on her — that Odile built the machine because she saw the part of June that quit and judged it couldn't choose the work on its own; let that misread land as the old shame (her wound "treats desire as evidence against herself") and put a cold, self-protective edge on what follows, so the clarity is reached *through* the wound, not over a wound that stayed still. The existing page-seizure (ln 133) is the natural vehicle: let her take the ledger not only for autonomy but because being written in cold reads, for a beat, as being pitied — and let that sting be visible before she folds it away. Then delete or invert the crown line "So June did the thing Odile couldn't" (ln 131); the verdict must not be narrated as her out-performing Odile.
Constraints: (a) Do not touch the now-working portrait/handback beats (ln 101 "the word stayed in the room"; ln 149 "the stockroom word still not gone"; lns 145–147). They carry the field's other trigger and must survive intact. (b) Do not touch Clause 2 — the earned-stay ending (own water and work, ln 173; the kiss "hers to give and hers to end," ln 175) is sanctioned by §8; the flare is internal to how June reads being handled, never a reason to choose alone. (c) Do not reopen the closed secret — this is June's private reading, not a new rupture (CARD-24: no second rupture; §6: no second rupture after the confession). (d) No dialogue diagnosis — the flare must not characterize Odile's phrasing or delivery (§2, zero tolerance); route it through June's shame and action, not through rating what Odile said. (e) Do not soften the fix into a quirk: this is her central wound, not a tic — keep her final voice plain per CARD-24, but let the plainness arrive because the wound moved and was recovered from, not because it never fired.

---

`TOO-COMPETENT (1 finding)`
