# Chapter 21 Let-Characters-Be-Wrong / Competence-Default Audit — Round 2 (verification)

id: characters_wrong | owner: claude | tier: risk
chapter: output/chapters/chapter_21.md ("Prying Loose / Faced to the Wall", POV Theo)
round: 2 — verifying Round 1 orders (output/critiques/claude/chapter_21.characters_wrong_round1.md)
card: CHAPTER CARD - 21 (agency hinge; sanctioned improvements: boundary set, work made, plain ask — sanction does not extend to full cure)

Process notes before the verdicts:

- **Repair-boundary integrity:** the `0026...before` → `0029...after` snapshot diff contains exactly the five ordered edits and nothing else: the added catalog exchange (lns 45–49), the rebuilt boundary speech (ln 59), the degraded fear-canvas reading (ln 75), the sent hedge (ln 107, with the consequential "He sent it," removal at ln 109), and the removed reply/removed cure with the relocated shutdown (lns 111–113). No unordered edit rode in. The current chapter is byte-identical to the `0029...after` snapshot (diff empty): no drift entered between repair and verification.
- **Stale sibling audit:** `chapter_21.thought_development_round2.md` (OVERALL: DEVELOPED) predates these repairs — its exemption list cites text the Order 5 repair deleted ("'he was not going to spend them building anything' (ln 109)" and "'Okay' (ln 111)" no longer exist). No conflict follows: the beats that audit verified (the delivery-box temptation, the concretized preparation list, the colon merge) all survived the characters_wrong repairs intact at current lns 95 and 109. Noted so its DEVELOPED verdict is not read as covering the current ending.

---

## Order-by-order verification

**Order 1 — degrade the fear-canvas decode; the misread carries forward; full comprehension is June's to deliver in Ch 22. EXECUTED.**

The perimeter aphorism ("She had painted a man maintaining the perimeter of a room so that he would never be required to stand in the middle of it") is gone. Current ln 75:

> "Fear of what, had been the assignment. He had spent three weeks telling himself she'd painted his helpfulness, a fond portrait of a man who did things. Now the blank twelve-by-sixteen looked like the part she had left him: a clean square waiting until he finished the jars and keys and came to it. It was a kinder reading than he trusted, which did not stop him from wanting it to be true."

This is the field working, not charm: he converts her seeing him into a schedule — finish the chores, then the blank is yours — which is "believes being indispensable is the same as being loved" restated as a reading of a painting. The order's misassignment option ("a slot she left him as a kindness") is the one used. The indictment (perimeter/center) appears nowhere on the page; the true reading is not narrated over his head, so comprehension remains June's to deliver at her price. On "carries that misread forward unknowing": the clause "a kinder reading than he trusted" is doubt about convenience, not knowledge of the truth — he distrusts his reading and adopts it anyway, which is wishfulness, not insight. And the misread leaves residue: he arrived with "the drill and a new D-ring in his jacket pocket" (ln 71) to fix the wire, and after the viewing "He put the canvas back on its hooks. He left the wire a half-inch low on the left." (ln 77) — the thing stays unfixed, uncorrected by anyone, out of the chapter.

**Order 2 — one managing reflex wins and costs something: the hedge gets sent. EXECUTED.**

Current ln 107:

> "He read it over once. Then his thumbs started the next part on their own, *If you'd rather not, I understand.* He sent it too. The second bubble appeared under the first before he could take it back."

Round 1's scoreboard objection (zero wins in five at-bats) is discharged: the eleven-year reflex now wins once, on the page, at the chapter's highest-stakes site. The cost is un-retractability plus the wait — the plain ask now travels with an escape hatch he handed her, and "The phone stayed dark while he seated the last brush in the jar" (ln 111); the chapter ends with the hedge sitting unanswered under the ask. The remainder of Round 1's preferred execution (June's reply legible as pruning his management) was relocated to Ch 22 by Order 5 of the same round; the two orders are jointly consistent and jointly executed. Card-conformance, adjudicated in Round 1 and holding: the ask itself stays plain and brief ("Can we talk? Sonia's. You pick the day and time and I'll be there.", ln 105), so the card's dialogue rule is met by the ask while the hedge is the licensed reflex-win.

**Order 3 — failed/logistical first pass before the plain boundary; remove the declarative permanent cure. EXECUTED.**

Before (snapshot 0026): "I'm keeping the keys. The freight, the condition reports, the loan sheet. That's the job, and I'm good at it, and I want it. But I'm done being the route. If you want a person moved somewhere, you're going to ask them, out loud, with your own mouth. You don't get to send me with a box again." — one fluent five-clause manifesto.

Current ln 59:

> "'Odile.' She stopped in the doorway. 'The keys stay with me. The freight, the condition reports, the loan sheet. I can do the job. I want it. I just-' He looked at the box by the door, the split tape. 'I'm done being the route. If you want a person moved somewhere, ask them yourself. You don't get to send me with a box again.'"

The speech now opens on the inventory (the logistics on-ramp his voice card specifies: "practical offer before emotional statement; qualifies when guilty, then forces himself plain"), stalls at "I just-", and needs the physical object — the box, the split tape — to restart before the plain version lands, shorter and rougher than the draft's ("ask them yourself" vs. "you're going to ask them, out loud, with your own mouth"). The declarative cure is gone entirely: "He read it four times. Sunday was two days away and he was not going to spend them building anything" no longer exists anywhere in the chapter; what stands in its place is attempted practice — "His head kept reaching for preparation... Each time he set it down like the drill." (ln 109) — with no narration countersigning a victory.

**Order 4 — restore Odile's live wrongness about forgiveness speed. EXECUTED.**

New exchange, current lns 45–49, inserted directly after "I thought about it less than I should have":

> "'She sent the books back clean.'
> 'That isn't the same as forgiving us.'
> 'No,' Odile said. 'It is faster than nothing.'"

This is the field's dead-center content — "assumes the manipulation she can survive is manipulation others can forgive quickly" — operating live: she offers the clean returned catalogs as timeline evidence, Theo contradicts her, she concedes the letter ("No") and keeps the mispricing ("It is faster than nothing"), and he cannot answer — his next utterance is the wrong ask ("I need you to tell me it wasn't my fault," ln 51), which her mispriced hope arguably feeds. Nobody corrects her; she exits the chapter still wrong about speed, soup instruction and initialed loan sheet intact, so the card-required reveal stands without the initials being the last word on her judgment. Guardrail verified: nothing in the new lines discloses or implies fake-couple knowledge — the exchange is entirely about the catalogs and the timeline.

Legibility note, weighed before passing (not a competence finding; flagged for the line-edit owner): ln 45 is untagged and follows Odile's tagged ln 43, so a cold reader applying strict alternation garden-paths — assigns "She sent the books back clean" to Theo — until the "Odile said" tag at ln 49 forces the re-parse (under the alternation read, Odile's "No" would answer her own sentence, which is incoherent; the only parse that survives gives ln 45 to Odile and ln 47 to Theo). Why this is not a finding here: under either parse, the tagged line "It is faster than nothing" is Odile's, so her speed-mispricing operates regardless; and under the garden-path read the wrongness merely migrates ("clean books" as Theo grasping at hope is his field, not clean insight) — no parse restores the competence default. A tag on ln 45 ("She sent the books back clean," Odile said.) would close the seam; that is a followability tidy under reading guide §8, not a characters_wrong order.

**Order 5 — move June's reply out; phone stays dark; chapter closes on unanswered waiting. EXECUTED.**

The reply block ("*Sunday. 9. Just coffee.*", "He read it four times...", "*Okay,* he typed") is deleted whole. Current lns 111–113:

> "The phone stayed dark while he seated the last brush in the jar, bristles up. He left it along the sink edge and shut the building down the way he shut it down every night... He turned off the last light, locked the freight door behind him, and walked home through the cold with his keys in his pocket and both hands empty."

The card's scene-four setback ("he must wait without managing") is now actually served: two weeks of silence are no longer resolved in the time wash water takes to clear, and "both hands empty" is true instead of decorative. The reply's wording, which Round 1 ordered preserved, is available to Ch 22.

---

## Section 1 — sweep verdict (re-run)

`WRONGNESS-PRESENT — instances:`

- Theo, "I need- ... I need you to tell me it wasn't my fault." (ln 51) — saying the wrong thing (asking the one person who will not falsify the ledger to absolve him).
- Theo, "You put it in my hands and I carried it to her. I taped the box myself. I did the labels. I told her which volumes had the installation shots. I told her-" (ln 35) — saying the wrong thing / over-explaining under shame until "He shut his mouth."
- Theo, "Now the blank twelve-by-sixteen looked like the part she had left him: a clean square waiting until he finished the jars and keys and came to it." (ln 75) — blind spot / misunderstanding: he converts June's seeing him into a usefulness schedule with a reward slot, and carries the misread out of the chapter. NEW.
- Theo, "*If you'd rather not, I understand.* He sent it too." (ln 107) — saying the wrong thing, un-retractable. NEW.
- Theo, "I can do the job. I want it. I just-" (ln 59) — the logistics on-ramp stalling before the boundary; the wrong first pass his voice card predicts. NEW.
- Odile, "I sent you for nine catalogs." (ln 25) — defensiveness (literalist dodge of "You sent me for those").
- Odile, "It has been public for thirty years, Theo. Anyone with a library card could have read it to you." (ln 29) — blind spot (minimizing engineered harm as public information).
- Odile, "No... It is faster than nothing." (ln 49) — blind spot on forgiveness speed, live, contradicted once, held, never corrected. NEW.
- Odile, "You will be less convenient." (ln 61) — blind spot (pricing a trust rupture as a logistics cost).

Round 1's structural complaint — all wrongness confined to scene one, then a man performing flawless self-correction under narration grading him correct — no longer describes the chapter: scene two now carries a live misread (ln 75), scene four carries a reflex loss (ln 107), and scene one's exchange ends on Odile's uncorrected mispricing rather than her calibrated confession. Theo's three-for-three perfect-decode pattern is broken at the decode that mattered most.

Counter-candidates swept in the new/moved text, work shown:

1. "He left it along the sink edge" (ln 111) — leaving the phone at the studio could read as renunciation-as-achievement, the deleted declarative cure returning in object form. Cleared: the narration makes no claim over it (contrast the removed "he was not going to spend them building anything"); it follows the un-retractable hedge, so walking away from the phone is equally walking away from his own second bubble sitting on the screen — avoidance the text leaves uncaptioned; and the wait it defers stays unresolved at chapter end. It reads as a man who cannot watch the screen, not a man cured of watching.
2. The study-revision scene (lns 85–93: "He had flattered the moment into an invitation. It had been a maybe.") — still a clean two-error self-diagnosis, unchanged. Cleared, consistent with Round 1, which quoted it as suspicious but issued no order: this is craft competence (a trained cataloguer's eye correcting drawing errors against remembered geometry), the corrections cost him ("It made the picture harder to look at. He left it that way"), and interpersonal wrongness in the same scene is preserved one paragraph later when the box shortcut tempts him (ln 95). Frictionless-competence territory borders here; the interpersonal field does not misfire.
3. "He knew what he was about to ask for, and he asked for it anyway." (ln 51) — the pre-caption Round 1 flagged as a weakener inside an OPERATED verdict without converting it to an order. It survives unchanged. Held as adjudicated: a weakener, not a finding; re-litigating it in verification would be churn against Round 1's own ruling.

## Section 2 — per major character (re-run)

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

- Field: "believes being indispensable is the same as being loved" — verdict: OPERATED, at both triggers now.
  - Absolution ask — OPERATED ("I need you to tell me it wasn't my fault.", ln 51), unchanged; still carries the pre-caption weakener noted above.
  - Fear canvas — OPERATED ("a clean square waiting until he finished the jars and keys and came to it. It was a kinder reading than he trusted, which did not stop him from wanting it to be true.", ln 75). Round 1's TRIGGER-MISSED is discharged: the blind spot fires on contact with its trigger and wins; the indictment goes unread.
- Field: "believes delay is kindness" — verdict: OPERATED. Scoreboard now one loss, three catches: the hedge sent (ln 107, the loss), the morning phone reflex (ln 13), the box shortcut (ln 95), the contingency reaching (ln 109). One win for an eleven-year reflex against three caught impulses is believable practice, which is what Round 1's order demanded ("the corrected version needs a scoreboard a reader can believe"); the catches are no longer ratified as permanent by any narration.

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

- Verdict: OPERATED ("'No,' Odile said. 'It is faster than nothing.'", ln 49 — pricing June's forgiveness on a schedule built from returned objects; plus "You will be less convenient", ln 61, the rupture priced as staffing). Round 1's decay pattern — one live clause, then calibrated confessor for the rest of the scene — is broken: the mispricing now sits *after* "I thought about it less than I should have," survives Theo's direct contradiction ("That isn't the same as forgiving us"), and is the last thing she asserts about June before the soup and the initials. The true-partial admission ("It was partly your fault... Partly mine... I stopped waiting", lns 53–57) and the initialed loan sheet (ln 65) stand as card-required, and no longer function as the scene's verdict on her judgment. Reread integrity: nothing she says discloses or implies the fake-couple origin; her deflections stay material ("I opened the door. There was nothing to sign.", ln 19); voice card mass respected (nothing over two sentences).

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

- Verdict: NO-TRIGGER (acceptable). June is now on-page only as artifacts: the interleaved tissue ("She had packed these to survive a route she had also arranged, and none of the route was him", ln 3), the return routed via "R. Kim / S. Rivera" not via her (ln 11), the fear canvas, and a phone that "stayed dark" (ln 111). No scene engages either field; her absence is itself boundaried rather than conveniently forgiving — the clean return is explicitly re-priced on the page as "not the same as forgiving us," and Round 1's timing objection (a two-week silence resolved inside one brush-washing) is gone with the reply. The chapter no longer forgives Theo on her behalf.

## Section 3 — friction yield (re-run)

- Theo's absolution ask — FRICTION ("It was partly your fault.", ln 53 — he asks for innocence and is handed the bill; his hands find the utility knife, "folding the blade in, folding it out", ln 55). Unchanged; still the chapter's best-paid wrongness.
- Theo's over-explaining accusation — FRICTION ("He shut his mouth.", ln 35 — the register costs him control of his own indictment).
- Theo's kinder-slot misread — FRICTION, deferred by design ("He put the canvas back on its hooks. He left the wire a half-inch low on the left.", ln 77 — the drill he brought stays unused, the wire stays wrong, and the wishful reading exits the chapter uncorrected; the full bill is reserved for June in Ch 22, which is where Round 1's order placed it).
- Theo's hedge text — FRICTION ("The second bubble appeared under the first before he could take it back.", ln 107 — the plain ask now carries an escape hatch he cannot retract, and the phone stays dark on both bubbles for the rest of the chapter). Round 1's COSTUMED is discharged.
- Theo's boundary falter — FRICTION, mild ("I just-", ln 59 — costs him fluency mid-speech with Odile stopped in the doorway; the plain version has to be restarted off the box). Proportionate: the card requires the boundary to land.
- Odile's "nine catalogs" / "nothing to sign" dodges — FRICTION, thin (unchanged: "That's not an answer." / "No," lns 31–33, with the real answer volunteered on her own schedule at ln 39).
- Odile's "library card" minimization — COSTUMED (unchanged: self-corrected two exchanges later at ln 43). Carried from Round 1 as a non-finding; the Order 4 repair now gives her a wrongness that does *not* self-heal in the same scene, which is what the order required.
- Odile's "faster than nothing" — FRICTION ("That isn't the same as forgiving us." is spent contradicting her and fails to move her; Theo's next line is the wrong ask at ln 51, his hope taking the bait her mispricing set; she exits the chapter unrevised on the point).
- Odile's "You will be less convenient" — wrongness present, friction thin (Theo's "Yes", ln 63, absorbs it). Unchanged from Round 1, where it was ruled the weakest surviving instance and not converted to an order; held as adjudicated.
- Theo's phone reflex / box shortcut / contingency reaching — individually COSTUMED (each caught in its own beat: lns 13, 95, 109), but the Round 1 objection these instances jointly triggered — a 100% catch rate — is discharged by the hedge loss; three catches against one loss is practice, not the default in costume.

## Chapter verdict

`WRONG-ENOUGH`

All five Round 1 orders are executed against the current text, the repair diff contains nothing unordered, and the re-run sweep finds live, distributed, costly wrongness in all three scenes that previously ran clean. The new wrongness passes the register checks: nothing is over-explained (the misread gets one clause of wishfulness, not a decoded truth; the hedge gets one sentence of consequence), nothing lands sitcom (no comic double-take, no banter rhythm around the second bubble), nothing is cruel (Odile's mispricing is hope, and the soup and initials keep the scene inside the warmth floor — the boundary is accepted, the embarrassments survivable), and every new line sits inside its speaker's voice card (Odile never exceeds two sentences; Theo's falter follows his "qualifies when guilty, then forces himself plain" spec).

Weakest surviving instance, quoted per the template: Odile's "You will be less convenient." (ln 61) — still one clause, still absorbed by a single "Yes," still costless to her. It was weighed and left standing in Round 1 and the verdict holds: it is thin, but the scene around it no longer depends on it, and ordering friction onto every clause would push Odile toward speechifying her card forbids.

## REVISION ORDERS

None. For downstream owners, two non-binding notes recorded above: (1) a dialogue tag on "She sent the books back clean." (ln 45) would close a first-read attribution garden path — a §8 followability tidy for the line-edit owner, not a competence-default defect, since every coherent parse leaves the speed-mispricing in Odile's tagged mouth; (2) `chapter_21.thought_development_round2.md` cites two lines the Order 5 repair deleted and should be re-dated against the current text before its DEVELOPED verdict is cited as covering the ending.
