By the third time, it’s not a mistake. It’s a schedule.

One incident is an accident and two can be coincidence, but a third is information you already have. The reason it keeps getting called a mistake is that naming a pattern forces a decision, and staying confused is more comfortable than deciding. Patterns are not really about whether someone is a bad person. They are about what that person reliably does, which is the part you have to plan around.

Count honestly how many times a particular thing has happened. If the number is three, stop writing an explanation for the fourth. Decide what you will actually do when it repeats, and tell them that before it does.