# Narrator-Publicist Audit — Chapter 04: The Edited Version

id: narrator_publicist | owner: claude | tier: risk
chapter: output/chapters/chapter_04.md (close third, Theo focalizer)
inputs: output/style_and_voice.md; premise/READING_GUIDE.md; premise/premise.md; output/outline/chapter_cards.md (Ch 04); output/critiques/codex/mechanical/quality_gate_report.md
calibration: none present

## Narrator-stance check (step 4)

READING_GUIDE.md §1–2 declares close third past, dual POV, interiority discipline ("Feelings are rendered through action, object, and dialogue first"), warm-precise register. No unreliable or publicist-by-design narrator is declared, so every admiring line must either survive the strip test or attribute to a fallible on-page perceiver. The only available perceiver is Theo, and the chapter does treat his perception as fallible on the page: June corrects his account of their meeting twice in dialogue ("I didn't come to the opening," line 65; "He knows the gallery's schedule," line 71), and his read of Ruth is explicitly self-undercut ("Wrong. Wrong in every particular he could name. And still nearer the truth than the version the rest of the table had adopted," line 131). Findings below were judged against that standard, not excused by it.

## Marker sweep (steps 1–3)

Characters collected: Theo (focalizer), June, Ruth, Sam, Mara, Luis, Priya, Ben, Dee. Every narrator description of appearance, movement, gesture, presence, or reputation was pulled and tested against markers 1–5. Verdicts on every line that triggered a test:

- `EARNED — "Theo, who spent his working life learning what people look at, made a note that she had not been watching the coat go up." (line 19) — the on-page action that backs it: "Fifty-seven, center. Like everything in the building." (line 97, his hanging spec, produced cold) — tested as marker 5 (narrator credentialing the focalizer's perceptiveness); strip test residue: "made a note that she had not been watching the coat go up. She'd been watching the no discussion." — a concrete, checkable observation survives; perceiver: Theo, whose reads the chapter rules fallible at line 131. This is the chapter's closest call and the clause type to watch in future Theo chapters.`

- `EARNED — "Mara folded her forearms on the table and settled her chin at an angle that announced an agenda." (line 55) — the on-page action that backs it: "Okay. Park and Brennan... How did you two meet? And don't give me the edited version." (line 55) — tested as marker 4 (gesture inflation); strip test residue: "Mara folded her forearms on the table and settled her chin"; the gesture's claimed communication is cashed out in her very next line of dialogue, unlike the field-guide failure where the "conveyed paragraphs" claim is never paid.`

- `EARNED — "She had lied the way a good hang lies, by deciding what goes on the wall and what stays in the rack, and she had done it without once glancing at him for a cue." (line 119) — the on-page action that backs it: "I didn't come to the opening... I came the Thursday after." (line 65); "He knows the gallery's schedule," June said. "I was a recurring item on it." (line 71); "Separate check for mine." (line 45) — tested as markers 3/5 (figuration praising June's skill at lying); strip test residue: the itemized method ("The opening, corrected to a Thursday. The label, with a count attached... June had invented nothing") plus "without once glancing at him for a cue"; perceiver: Theo. Special-focus check (June's truthful lying must stay complicated and dangerous, per the chapter card's "dangerous because it works"): the paragraph's payoff is threat, not glow — "If she'd been bad at this, he knew how the night went: he managed it, he smoothed it, he absorbed the cost. There was no procedure for it being easy." The admiration is rendered as alarm and as Theo's displacement, not narrator endorsement.`

- `EARNED — "Sam, who missed nothing involving chairs or the people in them, set the sugar caddy between Ruth and her plate." (line 133) — the on-page action that backs it: "Eight... The corner, if that's legal, plus those two chairs. I'll put them back myself." (line 7); "Sit here. Not symbolically. The chair's better for your back than that bench." (line 13); "Sam carried the chairs back to the wall, as promised." (line 153) — tested as marker 5 ("missed nothing" is an absolute competence assertion); strip test residue: the sugar-caddy action; the hyperbole is scoped to chairs, comic, and triple-backed by Sam's chair work within the same scene.`

- `EARNED — "June waited. She was good at waiting. It was the same waiting she'd done in front of the wrong label, deciding whether to be that person." (line 159) — the on-page action that backs it: "And I stood in front of it for ten minutes deciding whether to be the person who tells a stranger his label's wrong." (line 79) — tested as marker 5 (flat competence adjective asserted in narration); strip test residue: "June waited... the same waiting she'd done in front of the wrong label"; the assertion is cashed against a specific behavior already quoted in June's own mouth in this chapter.`

- `EARNED — "When June said Thursdays, Ruth looked at him. When he said line eight, she looked at June's mug. When the pencil came out, she didn't look at the pencil at all." (line 121) — the on-page action that backs it: "The slot," she said. "Is it comped?" (line 126) and "I didn't ask what she owed," Ruth said. (line 129) — tested as marker 1 (mystique: the unreadable watcher). Special-focus check (Ruth's watchfulness must not become mystique-publicity): no mystique assertion survives anywhere in her coverage. Her watching is itemized as named gaze targets; her judgment arrives as one quoted question; the riskiest narration about her — "He could see the file she was assembling" (line 131) — is marked as Theo's inference with its basis stated ("because he would have built the same file from her chair") and is immediately ruled wrong by the inferrer ("Wrong. Wrong in every particular he could name."). The closing figuration "she was keeping it the way she kept everything else at that table: squared" (line 137) ties to her literal on-page actions ("squared the fork on the napkin," line 19; "squared the corners of the napkin... folded it once, and put it in her coat pocket," line 151). Her unexplained napkin-pocketing is left as observed action, uninterpreted — the correct discipline.`

- `EARNED — "When the coffees landed he turned the mugs so the handles faced out, all eight, one by one, which is what his hands did at receptions when nothing real could be fixed." (line 49) — the on-page action that backs it: Priya's named, specific puncture — "You can stop working," she said. "It's after nine." (line 51) — tested as marker 5 (effortless-competence campaigning for the focalizer). Special-focus check (Theo's competence/logistics reflex must read as behavior under pressure, not narrator campaigning): the chapter consistently frames the reflex as compulsion and cost, not virtue — "carrying things was his best method of standing still" (line 11), "Habit... Tonight it had a motor in it" (line 53), "He heard himself offer the gallery's books to a woman he'd met four hours ago, and kept going anyway" (line 127) — and June names it as a defect at the exit: "You're still at work," she said. "We're not at the gallery." (line 163). Two named characters criticize the trait inside the chapter; the self-image is framed critically, satisfying the template's close-third condition.`

Marker 2 (effect-on-others) dedicated pass: the only generalized-reaction candidate is "He set it on the paper placemat and the whole table leaned in" (line 89) — a specific physical event by eight seated, named characters toward an object, immediately localized to one named perceiver's specific reaction: "Oh, that's good," Mara said. "You can't make that up." Not hypothetical-people framing; no hit. "Eight people coming off two hours of charcoal did not arrive at a volume you could seat discreetly" (line 5) generalizes the group and flatters no one; no hit.

Marker 3 (cosmic flattery) dedicated pass: no imagery anywhere in the chapter asserts specialness as its only content; the chapter's figuration ("lied the way a good hang lies," "kept... squared") carries craft or scene content and is tested above. No hit.

## Chapter verdict

`CRITICAL-DISTANCE-HELD` — no unattributed publicity. Most admiring surviving line: "She had lied the way a good hang lies, by deciding what goes on the wall and what stays in the rack, and she had done it without once glancing at him for a cue." (line 119). Perceiver: Theo, on the page, in a paragraph that itemizes the observed method ("The opening, corrected to a Thursday. The label, with a count attached.") and converts the admiration into threat ("There was no procedure for it being easy."); June's backing actions are quoted in scene at lines 45, 65, and 71.

REVISION ORDERS: none — zero PUBLICITY lines. (Advisory, not an order: the credential-clause construction at line 19, "who spent his working life learning what people look at," passed on residue and fallibility framing, but it is the exact shape that decays into marker-5 publicity if reused without on-page cash-out; future Theo chapters should be audited for recurrence.)
