# Audit: Let-Characters-Be-Wrong / Competence-Default — Chapter 15 ("Keys Elsewhere")

Stance: skeptical professional editor. Gets-wrong fields quoted from `output/style_and_voice.md`. Focused extra checks (June self-diagnosis, Nia rightness, Asha device-risk, Theo text) folded into Sections 2–3 and ruled with evidence.

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## Section 1 — Sweep verdict

`WRONGNESS-PRESENT — instances:`

1. **June**, *"'I had a thing with panels.' / 'For two days.' / 'They were complicated panels.'"* — **saying the wrong thing** (a visibly bad lie, doubled down on after Nia punctures it) layered over a **blind spot** (two days burned on an invoice and a pickup "neither of which had taken until eight-forty").
2. **June**, *"'I can do math,' June said."* — **defensiveness for no good reason**. Nia's "You know your current number better than I do" is neutral and factually generous; June snaps at the one line that implies Nia can see her finances.
3. **June**, *"The volume with the paper slip in it went on the bottom. She told herself that was about weight distribution."* — **blind spot**, and a self-deception the narration catches the reader on, not June: she later un-protects herself with the worse misdiagnosis *"facing them at the wall had been melodramatic and the slip was just paper."* The slip is not just paper (S-CATALOG-01 is armed); June's "insight" here is wrong.
4. **June**, *"Asha, who said it like it was nothing, who would walk into the Tasker building and have the gripper freed by Friday and a wet canvas in the back room by the Friday after."* — **misunderstanding/idealizing another person**: June projects a frictionless braver-Asha that the on-page Asha (net-45 pay, no-heat room, "you'd love it, it's terrible") does not actually corroborate.
5. **Asha**, *"Invoice Jan, see it in Mar. You in or do I give your slot to Dario"* — **blind spot**: she offers June her own hustle math (paid in March, $340 room with no heat after 10pm) as self-evidently workable, against June's on-page numbers (*"1,475 now"*, two open invoices).
6. **June + Theo jointly**, *"She read it twice and answered the part that was a fact: 'The coat counts.'"* — **blind spot operating as collusion**: "the part that was a fact" concedes there was a part that wasn't, which June skips; Theo, two days after the kiss, is texting chair inventories.

Counter-candidates I checked before ruling the sweep PRESENT: the Nia call is the most well-adjusted stretch on the page — Nia answers every question cleanly, pre-empts every objection (*"Because I need the answer to hold up when I take it to the board"*), and reads June correctly twice (*"I know you're taking notes. I can hear the pen."*). Taken alone it would be a competence-default exhibit; it survives because June misbehaves inside it (instances 1–2) and because Nia's own declared wrongness operates structurally (Section 2).

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## Section 2 — Per major character

**June Park** — gets-wrong field: *"mistakes being understood for being pitied; assumes choosing herself requires choosing alone."* — verdict: **OPERATED**. First clause: the trigger is Nia seeing June's situation plainly, and June's response is the unprovoked *"I can do math."* (Noted: Nia's *"I'm offering you work, June, not a rescue"* — the most direct pity-trigger in the chapter — passes without any June reaction on the page. I weighed this as a possible TRIGGER-MISSED and ruled against, because the same trigger already fired two beats earlier and a second bristle would be repetition, not wrongness.) Second clause operates structurally and uncorrected: June runs the entire decision alone — tells Theo nothing (per contract), tells Asha nothing true (*"That's a hold. I'll know by early Dec."* — no reason given), and does not even let her own notebook hold the question (*"under the first four, 'what happens if no'. Then she put one heavy line through the last one."*). Nobody on the page challenges the choosing-alone assumption; the chapter correctly leaves it load-intact for Ch22.

Focused check — does June diagnose her own avoidance too perfectly? **No, and I checked the four strongest candidates.** (a) *"The line that interested her was 'true up the Vandercook.' Not the wall. The press."* — she registers the diagnostic datum but never converts it to the thesis ("this job is the trap again"); the conversion is left to the reader via image (*"Behind her, the wall stayed clean and empty under the raking light"*). (b) The self-aware tags ("told herself," "not yet an accomplishment") are June's licensed interiority rhythm, and crucially her self-diagnosis is sometimes wrong — the "melodramatic / just paper" line is a misdiagnosis that increases her exposure. (c) The choice stays genuinely open: *"She went down the page once more, looking for the line to cross out, and did not find one. She had not prepared for that"* — her plan (find the flaw, decline cleanly) fails on the page. (d) The chapter ends with her doing the avoidance again, un-ironized: pinning the deadline under *"the jar she hadn't opened"* is one more symbolic arrangement in place of an answer or a phone call. Pass.

**Nia Torres** — gets-wrong field: *"assumes material stability is enough evidence of the right fit."* — verdict: **OPERATED**. Nia's pitch architecture treats access-in-writing as the clincher: *"I want to be clear that's in the actual job description, because I wrote the job description. After-hours studio access. It's in writing,"* and she closes the Tuesday walkthrough on the same theory: *"you're alone in a shop with working ventilation, a wall, and your own key. That's a Tuesday."* The chapter immediately falsifies her theory without telling her: June's attention goes to the press, not the wall, and the eight-fifteen vision puts June *"at the press with a rag"* with the wall clean behind her. Nia never learns this, is never corrected, and remains right about everything material — which is the spec (*"right enough that June's no must cost something"*). Focused check satisfied: her rightness costs June (no line to cross out; a deadline that now owns June's apartment), and her wrongness — stability/access as sufficient evidence of fit — is on the page and operative, not narrated.

**Asha Ibrahim** — gets-wrong field: *"assumes everyone can survive on the same hustle math."* — verdict: **OPERATED**. She quotes *"$32/hr, pays net-45. Invoice Jan, see it in Mar"* and a no-heat $340 room in the same register she'd use for good news, with no acknowledgment that March money may not work for someone whose rent is $1,475 now; the chapter does the arithmetic against her silently (*"Kessler: 32 x 40 x 3 = 3,840 gross, paid Mar."* next to *"49,500 / yr"*). Focused check — is Asha clearer/braver than June, a device? **No.** The gripper-freed-by-Friday, wet-canvas-by-the-Friday-after Asha exists only inside June's projection (Section 1, instance 4), and the loading-dock line it's built on (*"I can do the boring parts and still paint at night"*) is itself hustle-math bravado, not demonstrated clarity. On-page Asha is texting leads and pressuring for an answer; she is evidence of a network, not a moral compass.

**Theo Brennan** — gets-wrong field: *"believes delay is kindness; believes being indispensable is the same as being loved."* — verdict: **OPERATED**, at the correct (small) scale for an off-page chapter. Two days after the kiss became forty flyers, his entire output is *"Six pm count done. 41 chairs, 9 occupied, one occupied by a coat that I ruled counts."* — usefulness performing as intimacy, the wrongness running exactly to spec. Focused check — does his text solve June's offer pressure or make the choice romance-led? **No.** June answers *"the part that was a fact,"* puts the phone on the charger, and the chapter's closing object is the deadline receipt, not the phone; the text changes nothing about the Dec 4 problem and Theo learns nothing (contract held).

**Mara Valdez** — gets-wrong field: *"thinks smoothing is always kindness."* — verdict: **OPERATED** through an object: *"Mara had left the dropped brush at the bottom edge and the full line of June's hand on Theo's jacket."* Mara's crop choice makes the couple maximally legible — her smoothing instinct — and it lands on June as a problem she must absorb alone: *"June's eyes in it were angled toward him, not the camera, and they were not surprised. That was the trouble with it."*

**Priya Nair** — gets-wrong field: *"care becomes control when she does not ask first."* — verdict: **NO-TRIGGER**, acceptable: her single text (*"40 copies live. Matte looks clean"*) is print logistics; nothing in the chapter engages her care-control axis, and inventing a trigger would bloat a chapter already flagged `dense-or-system-heavy`.

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## Section 3 — Friction yield

1. June's two-day stall / "complicated panels" lie — **FRICTION** (*"'For two days.'"* — Nia clocks it and the stall is materially priced into the chapter: the hard Dec 4 deadline exists because Nia *"can't hold the room open past the fourth"*; June's avoidance helped build the clock now pinned in her apartment).
2. "I can do math" — **FRICTION**, minor but real (Nia absorbs the snap by withdrawing warmth into procedure — the next beats are pure terms — and June is left doing the math anyway, on paper, alone).
3. Slip-on-the-bottom / "just paper" misdiagnosis — **FRICTION**, deferred by design (the cost is Ch17's armed discovery; on this page it costs her the stack-turning charade she then has to walk back. Not COSTUMED: the "correction" replaces one wrong read with a worse one).
4. June's idealized-Asha projection — **FRICTION** (*"June did not type Asha's name into anything."* — the projection makes the referral feel like a verdict on herself, so she withholds it, which costs Asha information and June clean conscience; the ledger's "not hers to spend yet" weight is created by exactly this beat).
5. Asha's hustle-math blindness — **FRICTION** (her *"You in or do I give your slot to Dario"* forces June into a hold she can't justify honestly, and Asha has to extract even that through a second push: *"So that's a yes?"*).
6. June/Theo coat exchange — **FRICTION**, the thinnest on the page (the cost is the skipped non-fact part of his message and the photo problem sitting unanswered just above it; in-beat, the exchange itself reads as mutual charm and costs neither speaker anything visible).

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## Chapter verdict

`WRONG-ENOUGH` — sweep passes with six instances, no TRIGGER-MISSED, friction real. Weakest instance, quoted per spec: the Theo exchange — *"'The coat counts. Coats are people who left their position marked.' / 'That's going in the label notes,' he sent back, and that was all"* — is wrongness (mutual logistics-as-avoidance) whose cost is entirely deferred; it passes only because June's *"answered the part that was a fact"* puts the dodge on the page, and because the chapter contract forbids the conversation that would generate in-beat friction. All four focused checks pass: June sees the trap's components but never assembles the diagnosis and ends the chapter mid-avoidance with the choice open; Nia's rightness costs June while her stability-equals-fit theory is falsified behind her back; Asha's clarity is June's projection, not a device; Theo's text solves nothing and the closing object is the deadline, not the romance.

`REVISION ORDERS:` none — no TRIGGER-MISSED or COSTUMED rulings. One watch item for the Ch16 draft, not an order against this chapter: June's interiority tags ("She told herself," "not yet an accomplishment," "melodramatic") are at their per-chapter ceiling here; one more chapter at this density and her wrongness will start arriving pre-ironized, which is the competence default in her costume.
