Audit complete and written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_21.characters_wrong_round1.md`. The completed document:

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# Chapter 21 Let-Characters-Be-Wrong / Competence-Default Audit — Round 1

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

Process note before the verdicts: `output/critiques/codex/chapter_21.snapshot_conformance.md` quotes lines that are not in the current chapter text ("count first, feel later"; "I put public paper where hands would find it" — the chapter reads "I put that page where you would find it"). That audit was run against a prior draft. Its `OPERATING` verdicts are not cover for this draft and were not treated as such here.

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## Section 1 — sweep verdict

`WRONGNESS-PRESENT — instances:`

- Theo, "I need- ... I need you to tell me it wasn't my fault." — saying the wrong thing (asking the one person who will not give absolution to falsify the ledger for 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-" — saying the wrong thing / over-explaining under shame (the accusation swells into self-indictment until he has to shut his own mouth).
- Odile, "I sent you for nine catalogs." — 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." — blind spot on display (minimizing the engineered harm as public information; her gets-wrong field speaking).
- Odile, "You will be less convenient." — blind spot (she prices a trust rupture as a logistics cost; nobody on the page flags it).

Sweep caveat, with evidence, because the header alone would mislead: every instance above lives in scene one. Scenes two through four (fear canvas, study revision, text exchange) contain no interpersonal or intrapersonal error that survives its own paragraph. The three most suspiciously well-adjusted stretches:

1. "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." — Theo decodes June's canvas completely, correctly, in aphorism.
2. "Two things were wrong, and he had known both of them all along... He had flattered the moment into an invitation. It had been a maybe." — self-diagnosis of his own painting, both errors named, both fixed, no false starts.
3. "He read it four times. Sunday was two days away and he was not going to spend them building anything." — the declared flaw renounced as an achieved fact, in narration, unearned by any on-page struggle.

Add the pattern that scene one itself half-conceals: Theo misreads *nothing* in this chapter. He decodes June's intent from tissue paper ("She had packed these to survive a route she had also arranged, and none of the route was him"), decodes Odile's exact mechanism unprompted ("Did you want her to find it, or did you want me to finally say it, and she was just in the path?"), and decodes the painting (quote 1 above). Three perfect reads, zero misreads, in the POV of the character whose defining trait is misreading what care is.

## Section 2 — per major character

**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 split across two triggers:
  - Absolution ask — `OPERATED` ("I need you to tell me it wasn't my fault." — he asks Odile to restore the version of himself where usefulness was innocent). Weakened by narration pre-captioning the flaw before it fires: "He knew what he was about to ask for, and he asked for it anyway." Real wrongness doesn't announce itself as wrongness; that clause is the author showing the reader Theo already understands his error mid-error.
  - Fear canvas — `TRIGGER-MISSED` (trigger: "the two fear canvases from Week 6 still hung as a pair... Fixing it would have meant standing in front of it." — the exact situation his blind spot exists to distort; response was clean insight: "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. She had seen that in Week 6... and had said it in paint to his face."). The wrongness is narrated as three weeks of *past* misreading ("He had spent three weeks telling himself she'd painted his helpfulness"); on the page, comprehension is instant, total, and polished. The blind spot is cured on contact with the trigger.
- Field: "believes delay is kindness" — `OPERATED`, but see Section 3: every firing is caught and corrected inside its own beat — the morning phone reflex ("the reflex was fully formed: *All eight arrived safe.*... left the phone in the coat"), the box shortcut ("He could wrap the panel flat, slide it into that box, carry it to Sonia's, and not have to start with his own sentence. He put the glassine down."), the hedge text ("*If you'd rather not, I completely under*, and he watched the words appear and deleted them back to nothing"), the contingency planning ("Each time he set it down like the drill"). Score for the flaw: zero wins in five at-bats, in the chapter that is *about* this flaw.

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

- Verdict: `OPERATED` ("It has been public for thirty years, Theo... Anyone with a library card could have read it to you." — treating the engineered exposure as trivially survivable because the information was technically public; and "You will be less convenient" — metabolizing relational damage as a staffing inconvenience). Counter-candidate I weighed before flagging her below: the "less convenient" clause is genuine live wrongness, and the card's required withholdings hold (she never claims ignorance, deflects materially — "I opened the door. There was nothing to sign."). But the operation decays fast. One push ("That's not an answer") and she concedes; the cost-to-June exchange — the field's dead-center trigger — is answered with finished self-knowledge, not the blind spot: "I thought about it less than I should have." From that line on she is the scene's calibrated confessor: admits exactly the true partial ("It was partly your fault... Partly mine... I stopped waiting"), feeds him, accepts his boundary without argument, and initials the loan sheet — a graceful material confession the chapter frames warmly ("one degree straighter than he'd left it"). Nothing she believes after mid-scene is wrong. The stress target — do not let her become purely wise because she admits a true partial — is exactly the failure trajectory here: the admission converts her into the chapter's moral auditor, and her declared wrongness about forgiveness *speed* never operates at all. She should be mispricing June's timeline somewhere; she isn't, because she never mentions it.

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

- Verdict: `NO-TRIGGER` (June is on-page only as returned catalogs, two paintings, and a three-word text; no scene engages either field — acceptable for the fields as written). Her text's *wording* is properly bounded, and I checked it against "conveniently forgiving" before passing it: "Sunday. 9. Just coffee." picks her terms, caps expectations, forgives nothing. The wording passes. The *timing* does not — see Section 3 and Finding 5: after two weeks of silence and a twelve-hour dead phone, her reply lands while Theo is still seating the brushes from the same wash. The card's designed setback for scene four is "he must wait without managing"; a wait of minutes is not a setback, it is a reward delivered in-scene so the chapter can close warm.

## Section 3 — friction yield

- Theo's absolution ask — `FRICTION` ("It was partly your fault." — he asks for innocence and is handed the bill; his hands go to the utility knife, "folding the blade in, folding it out"). This is the chapter's best wrongness beat and its only fully-paid one.
- Theo's over-explaining accusation — `FRICTION` (it swells until "He shut his mouth" — the wrong register costs him control of his own indictment).
- Odile's "nine catalogs" / "nothing to sign" dodges — `FRICTION`, thin (Theo presses, "That's not an answer," and she concedes "No" — but she pays on her own schedule, volunteering the real answer only when she chooses: "I put that page where you would find it. On purpose.").
- Odile's "library card" minimization — `COSTUMED` (announced then resolved in-beat: the same character corrects it herself two exchanges later with "I thought about it less than I should have" — the blind spot self-heals without anyone forcing it or absorbing its cost).
- Odile's "You will be less convenient" — wrongness present, friction `ABSENT` (Theo answers "Yes," absorbing it as if it were an adequate account of what he just did; no cost lands on her for mispricing it).
- Theo's morning phone reflex — `COSTUMED` ("the reflex was fully formed... He hung the clipboard back on its nail and left the phone in the coat." — impulse and correction share a beat; no one absorbs anything).
- Theo's box shortcut — `COSTUMED` ("He could wrap the panel flat... and not have to start with his own sentence. He put the glassine down." — the temptation lasts two sentences and leaves no residue, not even tape on the box).
- Theo's hedge text — `COSTUMED` ("*If you'd rather not, I completely under*, and he watched the words appear and deleted them back to nothing." — the flaw performs, is watched performing, and is deleted; June receives only the corrected artifact).
- Theo's contingency planning — `COSTUMED` ("His head kept reaching for preparation... Each time he set it down like the drill." — serial impulse, serial success, zero failures, then ratified as permanent: "he was not going to spend them building anything").

## Chapter verdict

`TOO-COMPETENT (5 findings)`

The sweep is nominally present, so for the record the weakest surviving instance is Odile's "You will be less convenient" — real wrongness, one clause, unflagged, costless. Everything stronger than it is concentrated in scene one; from the fear canvas onward the chapter is a man performing flawless self-correction under narration that grades him correct in real time. The card licenses Theo to make a better choice. It does not license a 100% catch rate on the reflexes of an eleven-year habit, a one-look total decode of the painting that indicts him, or the granting of the card's own setback ("he must wait without managing") inside a single brush-washing.

## REVISION ORDERS

1. **Theo** — field: *"believes being indispensable is the same as being loved."* Beat: the fear-canvas viewing (scene two, "She had painted a man maintaining the perimeter..."). Degrade the decode. He may get the hands, the tended room, even the filled nail hole — he must get at least one element *wrong on the page now*, not three weeks ago: e.g., he misassigns the blank twelve-by-sixteen (reads it as reproach, or as a slot she left him as a kindness) and carries that misread forward unknowing, so that full comprehension is June's to deliver in Ch 22, in her words, at her price. The perimeter-of-the-room insight, if kept at all, must arrive broken or incomplete — not as a finished aphorism he composes about himself. Do not soften the misread into charm; it should be the field working: he converts her seeing him into a statement about his usefulness.

2. **Theo** — field: *"believes delay is kindness."* Beat: scene four, the text to June (alternate site: the box shortcut in scene three). One managing reflex must *win* and cost something. Preferred execution: the hedge — or a managing second text (logistics, an offer to make it easy) — gets sent, sits there un-deletable, and "Sunday. 9. Just coffee." arrives legible as June pruning his management, not rewarding his restraint. Alternate: he gets the panel fully wrapped and into the delivery box, tape in hand, before he stops — and the box carries the re-tape scar afterward, physical residue of how far the reflex got. Five impulses, zero wins is the competence default in a costume; the corrected version needs a scoreboard a reader can believe.

3. **Theo** — field: *"believes being indispensable is the same as being loved"* (delivery, not content). Beat: the boundary speech ("I'm keeping the keys... You don't get to send me with a box again.") and the resolution clause ("Sunday was two days away and he was not going to spend them building anything"). The boundary itself is card-required ("irreversible change: Theo sets a boundary") and stays. Its delivery must obey his voice card — "performs usefulness, over-explains, then goes very plain": give the speech a failed first pass (an inventory, a logistics on-ramp, Odile waiting him out or cutting him) so the plain version lands shorter and rougher than the current five-clause manifesto. And convert the resolution from achieved fact to attempted practice: he catches himself already half-built into a plan on the walk home, or the narration simply stops claiming he won't — a man cannot renounce a lifelong reflex in a declarative sentence and have the book countersign it.

4. **Odile** — field: *"assumes the manipulation she can survive is manipulation others can forgive quickly."* Beat: after "I thought about it less than I should have," or at the doorway exit. Restore one live, unendorsed wrongness that survives the scene: she prices June's forgiveness on a schedule — treats the returned catalogs as evidence June is already mending, or asserts some version of "she will have forgiven the box by the showcase" — and either Theo cannot answer or his contradiction is waved off. She must exit the chapter still wrong about *speed*, which is the field's actual content; keep the true-partial admission and the initialed loan sheet (card-required reveal), but the initials cannot be the scene's last word on her judgment. Guardrail: nothing she says may disclose or imply knowledge of the fake-couple origin (pre-Ch-28 rule, voice card) — her wrongness here is about forgiveness timelines, not about what she knows.

5. **June / structure** — card spec: scene four's setback is *"he must wait without managing."* Beat: the reply text. Move "Sunday. 9. Just coffee." out of the scene — keep the wording exactly; it is the best-bounded line June has had in three chapters. He seats the last brush, the phone says nothing; he shuts the building down, walks home, and the chapter's closing image ("both hands empty") becomes true instead of decorative, because the phone is empty too. The reply can land in the white space before Ch 22 or in its opening; the card requires the ask, not the answer. The current version grants a two-week silence's resolution in the time it takes wash water to run clear — that is the chapter forgiving Theo on June's behalf.
