# Narrator-Publicist Audit — Chapter 09 ("Local Work")

Stance: skeptical professional edit per `checks/audits/narrator_publicist.md`. Protagonist: June (POV). Favored-character watch list per brief: Asha, Nia. Reading-guide check (step 4): `premise/READING_GUIDE.md` §2 declares close third with interiority discipline and no unreliable/publicist narrator by design; `output/style_and_voice.md` grants June "narration transparency" on scene logistics but nowhere licenses narrator advocacy. No declared-attitude exemption applies; findings stand on their own.

Scope note on the brief: the phrase **"the city growing a handle" does not appear in the integrated chapter.** It existed in the raw draft (cited at raw line 101 in `output/critiques/codex/chapter_09.claude_tic_audit.md`) and was replaced in integration by the concrete inventory at line 101 ("a corner in a Ridgewood studio... a set of keys on Tasker Street. Neither one was nothing."). The replacement contains no figuration to inflate; that risk is closed. The other two flagged passages are audited below.

## Per-line verdicts

PUBLICITY — marker 5 — "Asha came over and looked at the swatch from straight on before taking the angle, because she was also good at this." (line 25) — strip test: what action remains: "looked at the swatch from straight on before taking the angle" — the full diagnostic two-position check survives, and the check itself is the proof of competence — attributable perceiver: June (free indirect), but the clause is not perception, it is a narrator caption rating Asha; the action has already demonstrated everything the clause asserts. This is the exact press-the-brief risk: the narrator certifying Asha as the seasoned working artist instead of letting her procedure do it.

PUBLICITY — marker 2 — "The artist would learn it from the wall eventually, the way everyone did." (line 123) — strip test: what action remains: with "the way everyone did" cut, "The artist would learn it from the wall eventually" remains, anchored by the concrete fact in the prior sentence ("The north wall was lit secondhand all day, a full step cooler in practice") — attributable perceiver: June, but the closing clause universalizes her knowledge into a law that "everyone" eventually confirms — generalized hypothetical validation, not a specific person's specific reaction. The scene already owns a specific reaction (the artist's frown at the north wall, lines 115–117); the generalization adds nothing but a halo of June-was-right-as-always. Mild severity, but it is the chapter's one moment of the narrator grading June's expertise by an imagined consensus rather than by the scene.

EARNED — "a warm drift toward parchment that nobody would ever consciously see and everybody would feel the moment fresh paint went up next to it in a patch" (line 19) — the on-page action that backs it: "She popped the lid and stirred and cut a test swatch... At the rake, the rectangle went cooler. A whole step cooler, blue against the field" (line 21). The nobody/everybody claim is about the paint, is materially verified by the swatch two paragraphs later, and is then independently confirmed by the incoming artist's unprompted "It reads cold to me. Almost blue" (line 117) — which also strips June of uniqueness: another eye in the scene sees the same class of difference.

EARNED — "The edge where the veil quit was good. It was the kind of edge she would have stood in front of in someone else's painting." (line 43) — the on-page action that backs it: the full making of the run ("pulled the stroke long, dragged it down the scrap, let the white thin out... from solid to veil to nothing"). Perceiver: June, explicitly ("she would have"), and the chapter frames the self-image critically in the same paragraph — "It had no function. It corresponded to no surface in this room. She had made it on the clock, on Marisol's foamcore, with Marisol's paint" — and by the framing sentence "she did the thing she had specifically told herself on the subway she would not do" (line 39). Admiration embedded in self-indictment, which is the fallibility framing the template requires.

EARNED — "crossed the freshly painted wall without slowing down, which was the highest review the wall could receive" (line 115) — the on-page action that backs it: the named in-scene perceiver (the incoming artist) performing a specific, concrete non-reaction, which is exactly the marker-2 exclusion ("a specific person's specific reaction in the scene"). I pressed this hardest per the brief: the candidate failure is marker 4, a movement credited with communicative power. It survives because (a) the gesture belongs to the artist, not the favored character; (b) the "review" is praise of a wall whose two-coat construction the chapter showed stroke by stroke; (c) the superlative is June's trade-wry free indirect, and the chapter marks June's interpretive judgment as fallible on the page — she misreads Nia's text ("June read it once and got mad," line 69) and concedes it at line 135 ("Wrong, and still the only sentence she had"). Strip test residue would be complete either way.

EARNED — "By next week nobody, including the artist, including Marisol, including June, would be able to stand in this room and prove she had been in it." (line 113) — the on-page action that backs it: the documented repair sequence (setting compound, shellac spot-prime, full-face coat to the breaks, second coat cut in at the ceiling line). The generalization names its members, includes June herself inside "nobody" — her own eye loses to the wall — and asserts erasure, not mystique. This is the source fix operating correctly: the work is described; invisibility is the job's success condition, not a campaign.

EARNED — "The corner of the foamcore stuck up out of the tote the whole way to the train, white edge catching the streetlight, and she did not push it down." (line 137) — the on-page action that backs it: itself — object, light, and a withheld action, with no appended clause telling the reader what the non-gesture communicates. I checked it for gesture inflation per the brief: there is no "which meant—" rider to strip; the strip test has nothing to remove. The codex tic audit reached the same conclusion under tic 11. Pass.

EARNED — "You'd be good at the parts nobody romanticizes." / "You're the shortest list I have." (lines 63, 67) — the on-page action that backs it: these are Nia's words in quoted text messages, a named fallible perceiver with stated self-interest ("I need someone who can run a job and fix the press"), not narrator assertion. Checked the narration around Nia for grown-up-with-the-answers flattery: the narrator's only Nia content is neutral ("She had not seen the name on her screen since March," line 61); her practicality lives entirely in her own dialogue, and June's endorsement ("Knowing her, she means it," line 83) is spoken, attributed, and hedged. No finding.

EARNED — "It's bad on purpose, I think, at this point." (line 89) — the on-page action that backs it: Asha's own dialogue, hedged twice in nine words, surrounded by un-glamorous specifics (label stuck to her thigh, bodega sandwich, "Pays late. Pays real."). Checked for hard-bitten-seer glamorization: her 2019 anecdote ends "I took a museum prep job... and caught up" (line 105) — pragmatism with a visible cost June silently disputes (line 107), not clairvoyance. The single narrator caption on Asha is the line 25 finding above.

EARNED — "You could do it half-asleep if your hands knew the order of operations, and her hands did" (line 15) — the on-page action that backs it: "the five-minute kind, because lightweight spackle would shrink into holes this size and show a dimple by spring. Knife at a low angle, fill, cross-stroke, leave it a hair proud for sanding" (line 17). The competence assertion is immediately cashed in procedure; the same paragraph undercuts any cool by pricing it ("the framer who called her when his good stretcher guy was in Vermont" — she is somebody's backup).

Markers checked with no hits beyond the above: marker 1 mystique assertions (nearest candidate was line 113, ruled earned — the chapter runs anti-mystique, June as invisible labor); marker 3 cosmic flattery (none; nearest figuration is "announcing itself like a price sticker," line 21, aimed at a paint swatch).

## Chapter verdict

`PUBLICIST-FOUND (2 lines)`

Both findings are caption-clause failures, not structural ones; the chapter's method — competence demonstrated in procedure, admiration attributed and priced — is otherwise the source fix working.

## REVISION ORDERS

1. Line 25 — "Asha came over and looked at the swatch from straight on before taking the angle, because she was also good at this." Cut "because she was also good at this." End the sentence at "before taking the angle." The two-position check is the competence; certifying it is the publicist move. If the beat feels thin without the clause, extend the action instead: have Asha take the rake without being told and call the result before June does — her next line ("It's the same paint. It's the wall that's wrong.") already does this work and can carry it alone. Do not replace the clause with a softer adjective; the assertion converts to action or goes.

2. Line 123 — "The artist would learn it from the wall eventually, the way everyone did." Cut "the way everyone did." Marker 2 applies, so the generalized validation must be replaced by one named character's specific reaction: the scene supplies it — tie the prediction to the artist's frown at the north wall, e.g. let the sentence end on the concrete fact and the artist's own act ("The artist would learn it from the wall; she was already frowning at it.") or simply stop at "eventually," leaving the lit-secondhand fact in the prior sentence as the warrant. The physical beat ("tightened one hand on the rail") stays — it is the earned content, June paying to keep her expertise in her pocket with the invoice. Any rewrite that retains a clause asserting universal confirmation of June's knowledge is invalid.
