All verification complete. "Same time next week" appears nowhere else in the book (only idiomatic "at the same time" in Ch04/08/11), the three repair orders are confirmed executed in the current text, and the echo-gate vocabulary density is measured. Here is the completed audit document:

---

# Audit: Plain-Translation Final Verification — Chapter 19 ("Empty Side")

id: plain_translation | owner: claude | tier: risk | round: final (post-repair)
chapter: `output/chapters/chapter_19.md` (current text, post `chapter_19.0019` repairs)
calibration: `premise/READING_GUIDE.md` §§1, 2, 5, 6, 8; `output/style_and_voice.md`; `output/model_prompts/claude/chapter_draft/chapter_19.md`; `output/tics.md`; `output/rolling_summaries/chapter_18.md`
repair history consulted: `output/critiques/codex/chapter_19.plain_translation_repair_memo.md`
output: `output/critiques/claude/chapter_19.plain_translation_final.md`

Stance: generative-not-evaluative. Every verdict below was produced by writing the binding-register version against the named sample and comparing on information density, dramatic content, and binding-standard fidelity. No paragraph is cleared on impression.

---

## 0. Prior-order verification (three Round-1 REPLACE orders)

1. **Aphoristic Luis line** — ORDER was: replace `"Move it or paint it," Luis said.` Current text reads `"You can't leave it half," Luis said.` (para 22). **Executed.** Drift check on the replacement: the original was imperative-pair art-advice, fully portable. The replacement has maxim syntax (`You can't…`) but a dangling complement — "leave it half" is ungrammatical without the stool Theo has just offered to move ("I can move the stool. In the painting."), so it cannot detach. It also stays inside Luis's one-direct-fact register ("Paint has weight"). **No worse drift introduced.** Full adjudication under the Aphorism Gate below.
2. **Kept-room over-explanation** — ORDER was: cut the colon-appositive after `It was a good beginning, and from this side there was no missing what it was a beginning of.` Current text proceeds directly to `Past it, eight inches of primed ground sat with nothing on it but a stain the size of a thumb.` (para 28). **Executed.** The cut did not orphan the sentence; the litotes now does the withholding the appositive used to undo. Adjudicated at P17 below.
3. **Final jar caption** — ORDER was: cut `and left the clean jar there, ready to be filled`. Current text ends the jar action at `set it upside down on the shelf at the right end of their ground, below the stain he had not been able to lift and was no longer sure he wanted to. Then he turned off the lights and locked the door.` (para 31). **Executed.** The caption is gone; the chapter ends at the lock. Adjudicated at P21 below.

All three orders repaired; none produced replacement drift. Verified against the current file, not the memo's claims.

---

## 1. Per-paragraph verdicts

Paragraph numbers follow the current file's block order. Forms named per READING GUIDE §1–2 vocabulary: close-third Theo narration, conversation/exchange, documentary insert (assignment card, labels).

**LOCKED — `# Chapter Nineteen: Empty Side` — skipped, chapter heading listed as locked in the task calibration.**

**CARD (documentary insert) — "Week Seven. One ground. Two reaches. Paint the side you can reach. Leave the other side workable. — O."** — sample compared: Odile voice card Dialogue Spec ("Looking is the assignment"; declarative fragments complete in intent) and READING GUIDE §1 card flourish (10–40 words, her wording, rereadable as conducting two specific people). 18 words. Binding-register rewrite attempted: "Week Seven. Joint ground, one per pair. Each of you paints your own half. Don't paint into your partner's." — worse on all three axes: it loses the numbers-first economy ("One ground. Two reaches."), replaces her clean verbs with procedure-manual hedging, and destroys the reread payload — "the side you can reach" and "workable" are material joint-panel logistics forward and, backward, Odile ordering Theo to keep June's side open for her return without saying so (pre-reveal guardrail intact: no couple/rule language, clue stays material). Aphorism-gate exposure of "Paint the side you can reach" is adjudicated in §2; the card form is the calibration's sanctioned epigraph instrument. **HOLDS.**

**P1 HOLDS — "Theo unlocked the studio at ten past six…"** — sample compared: Theo voice card, interiority rhythm ("inventory of needs, risk calculation, **delayed** recognition of his own desire"). Binding-register rewrite: "Out of habit he set two stools at his table before remembering June wasn't coming, and put one back." — not worse on clarity, much worse on fidelity: the card mandates delayed recognition, and the original's syntax enacts it — five clauses of competent setup, then "and lined two stools on opposite sides **before he noticed what he had done**." The rewrite names the lapse up front and converts the chapter's engine (habit outrunning knowledge) into reported information. Density also drops: "found theirs by size before he read the tape" and "weighted the newsprint corners with clean jars" are load-bearing setup (the size choice is Ch14 payoff; the jars begin the jar system). Original stands.

**P2 HOLDS — "He carried one stool back to the stack by the sink…"** — sample compared: Theo voice card, under-stress behavior ("lists tasks… performs competence") plus §2 interiority discipline. The high-risk feature is the fragment run: "Seven stools. Three stations got two. His got one, on the wall side of the table." Binding-register rewrite: "There were seven stools now, two for each of the other stations and one for his." — grammatically smoother and measurably worse: the counting fragments are Theo's stress tell rendered as arithmetic, per his card, and the rewrite deletes the wall-side placement that pays off at P25 (he seats himself where he cannot reach the seam). The jar sentence's repetition ("filled wash jars… because he always filled wash jars") is habit enacted in syntax, and "before he could decide otherwise and left both" escalates P1: first reflex corrected, second reflex left standing. The escalation is dramatic content the plain version flattens. Original stands.

**P3 HOLDS — "The card at his station was clipped to the far corner…"** — sample compared: Odile voice card ("moves people and objects rather than explaining"; clues stay material) via Theo's noticing. Rewrite: "Odile had clipped the card where he'd have to walk around June's side to get it." — not worse on density, fatally worse on fidelity: it converts a material clue into a decoded intention, which violates the pre-reveal guardrail and the §8 reread test (moments must read innocently forward). The original's flat "so that he had to walk around the bare side" keeps causation physical. `*The room after class.*` is a documentary strip (subject slip), not narration — checked against its own form only. Original stands.

**P4 HOLDS — "Their fear canvases from Week Six still hung…"** — sample compared: Theo voice card ("straightens labels" under stress) and chapter-card obligation ("Carry Ch16 fear canvases as object memory, not exposition"). Rewrite: "The fear paintings still hung there from last week, reminding him of everything that had gone wrong since." — worse: it captions. The original does three restraints as actions — squared the catalog spine "and stopped there," "he did not go near" the flyer — which is the §2 discipline (feeling through object and action). The returned catalog "a half inch proud of its neighbors" is the Ch17/18 catalog-return consequence carried without a word of exposition. Original stands.

**P5 (conversation) HOLDS — "At twenty to seven the door opened on Mara… / 'I over-bought coffee'… / 'Glare'"** — samples compared: Mara card ("thinks smoothing is always kindness"; smoothing via logistics) and Luis card ("Move left. You'll see it better." — one word plus placement). Conversation form checked against its own samples only, not plain-translated. Mara's "I over-bought coffee… Somebody has to take two" is deflection visible **as** deflection (§2): the narration has already shown her see the one stool and change hands. Luis's "Glare," plus a table moved a hand-width is his card verbatim in behavior. Plain-speech floor: the scene's factual content (one stool, everyone saw) is followable without decoding. No flattening rewrite improves either line without breaking voice. Original stands.

**P6 (conversation) HOLDS — "Priya and Ben came in together… / 'Is June coming?' / 'No. Not tonight.'"** — samples compared: Ben card (more words when nervous, plans as love — the rotation paper; "He folded the paper along its existing crease" is retreat as object action) and Priya card ("Did you eat?"; brisk, kind, conditions-controlling). Priya's exchange is the chapter's plain-speech anchor: "Is June coming?" / "No. Not tonight." / "Is she sick?" / "No." — four direct lines, nothing angled. "There's dal in the green tub. Eat at break, not after" is her card's care register exactly. Rewrite test on Theo's "It's a good rotation": any expansion ("That's thoughtful of you, Ben") is worse — the three-word absolution is Theo hosting from inside shame. Original stands.

**P7 HOLDS — "Ruth arrived and squared the sign-in sheet… Sam came in last…"** — samples compared: Ruth card (stills, squares paper edges; **no** editorial line spent — cap intact per tics Ch06/Ch11 history) and Sam card (makes physical room — snack table moved toward the radiator). One clause each, no captions. A plainer version deletes the owned care moves §5 requires. Original stands.

**P8 HOLDS — "Odile came at seven exactly…"** — sample compared: Odile card ("Under stress, removes choices by arranging the room"; narration transparency: every scene consistent with her knowing). "She looked at the pencil line, and at the two filled jars, one on each side, **and she moved nothing, and went on**" — the reread test passes precisely because she moves nothing: she reads the kept-place and lets it stand. Rewrite ("She noticed the second jar but said nothing about it") is worse — "noticed" claims her interior, breaking the outside-focalization rule on her card. "Cards are on your tables. Read them twice." — imperative pair, inside her plain-line budget. Original stands.

**P9 HOLDS — "He read the card twice, as told…"** — sample compared: Theo voice card operation snapshot ("a man who can run a room without standing in it as himself") and §8 smallness test. High-risk features: "the bones of a room he could have drawn with the lights off" and "The inventory steadied him until he got to the seam." Rewrite: "He blocked in the parts of the room he knew well, which calmed him until he reached the dividing line." — worse on all three axes. "With the lights off" is a cross-POV mirror of June's Ch18 study ("the room with track lights off," rolling summary) — dramatic irony the rewrite deletes. The craft chain (burnt umber thin with medium, big shapes first) satisfies the smallness test; "the one hook that had been hers since October" carries the whole relationship in a fixture. "Inventory" names Theo's own tic once without becoming catalog prose. Original stands.

**P10 HOLDS — "The composition ran the room straight across both halves…"** — sample compared: Theo voice card ("risk calculation, delayed recognition"; over-explains when ashamed). This is the chapter's densest sentence and a top-5 risk. Binding-register rewrite: *"The stool sat in the middle of the room he was painting, where it had sat for seven Tuesdays. He drew it on the pencil line, half on each side."* Comparison: the rewrite is cleaner and worse. The original's stacked appositives — "in the middle of the room, in the room he was painting, which was the room after class, her stool stood" — are Theo **arguing himself into it**, clause by clause, the exact over-explaining-when-ashamed rhythm his card licenses; the rewrite deletes the rationalization and keeps only its conclusion. "Half of it promised to hers" carries the plot fact the rewrite drops: finishing the stool requires her return. Fidelity and dramatic content both worse in the rewrite. Original stands.

**P11 HOLDS — "The wash was too thin…"** — sample compared: draft-prompt prose stance ("Let useful action fail on the page") and §8 smallness test (fat-over-lean-grade craft truth: thin wash runs; dry-wiping widens a stain). Rewrite: "Some paint dripped onto June's side and he couldn't get it all off." — worse: loses the procedural causation (too-thin wash → run → wipe → ghost → dry-working → widening), which is the failure-of-competence beat the card ordered, and loses the card-instruction pivot (`*Leave the other side workable.*` stopping his hand — the assignment doing what Odile built it to do). "The stain stayed, small and visible" is declarative, unquotable, and load-bearing for the ending. Original stands.

**P12 HOLDS — "Around him the other stations had found their rhythm…"** — sample compared: cohort voice cards, one owned move per pair (§5), no captions. Priya/Ben run the rotation with "the folded paper never leaving Ben's pocket" (arc movement in an object); "Ruth on edges, Sam on mass" is division of labor, not metaphor; Luis's knife-flat gray is literal. A plainer version loses the §5 owned-move differentiation and gains nothing. Original stands.

**P13 (conversation) HOLDS — "Luis crossed behind Theo… / 'You blocked in her stool.' / 'It's the room.' / 'Nobody's going to ask what.'"** — samples compared: Luis card ("adjusts placement, then states one direct fact"; "Direct, not cruel" per chapter card) — conversation form, checked against its own samples only. This is the chapter-card Luis/Mara arc beat: Luis says the unsmoothed thing. "You blocked in her stool" is his direct fact. Theo's "It's the room" is deflection visible as deflection — he is filing the stool under the assignment's subject. "Nobody's going to ask what." is the oblique reply (one of the chapter's two licensed oblique lines, §2 cap) and is staged as **interrupted speech** — "Mara was there before he finished it" — so the text itself refuses to let the line land as a completed epigram. Followability check (§8): a cold reader gets Luis's point from Mara's next line ("Everyone counted"), which cashes the ellipsis: the question is never going to be *what* the stool is. Adjudicated further under the Aphorism Gate. Original stands.

**P14 (conversation) HOLDS — "'Everyone counted, Theo'… / 'She couldn't-- she isn't coming tonight'… / 'You can't leave it half.'"** — samples compared: Mara card (tic is "Luis says/means…" translation "until her arc breaks it" — this is the break: she arrives to smooth, says "Luis--", and instead confirms him) and Theo card ("performs usefulness, over-explains, then goes very plain"). Theo's speech is the card's shape exactly: the self-correction "She couldn't-- she isn't coming tonight" moves from excuse to fact mid-line; the jar/stool spiral is over-explanation; "I can move it" repeated is bargaining. Rewrite test on Mara: "It's fine, Theo, nobody minds" would be her old register — the current line is the arc beat the chapter card ordered ("Mara does not smooth him"). Luis's "You can't leave it half" — repair #1's replacement — adjudicated under the Aphorism Gate. Original stands.

**P15 HOLDS — "Mara stayed a moment longer…"** — sample compared: Mara card (stress response: fills silence) inverted by arc: "She went back to her station without explaining it" — the character whose tic is explaining-before-asked gives a cup without commentary. Rewrite ("She left him the coffee as a peace offering") is worse: it names the gesture's meaning, violating §5's never-announce rule. "It was going cold and she gave it to him anyway" — the "anyway" construction recurs at P18; adjudicated as an echo candidate in §3. Original stands.

**P16 HOLDS — "He painted. He committed the stool to his side of the line…"** — sample compared: Theo voice card ("delayed recognition of his own desire"; never "polished aphorisms about care") — **highest-risk paragraph in the chapter**; contains the kept-room formulation. Binding-register rewrite of the risk cluster: *"He painted the room the way he kept expecting it to be used again: water out, stool angled for someone about to sit back down. He couldn't picture it any other way."* Comparison: the rewrite is not worse on clarity and is worse on everything that matters. (1) "understood while he was doing it that he was underpainting a room that was waiting" is the delayed-recognition event itself — realization arriving *during* the brushwork — and the colon immediately cashes "waiting" in objects ("jars filled, stool turned out from the table at the angle of someone coming right back"), which keeps the formulation from floating into personification; the rewrite makes the insight precede the action. (2) The peg's shadow "longer than the light justified" is Theo falsifying the picture toward presence — craft-specific, non-portable, and the chapter's one deliberate light image (§4 cap: one, held). (3) The closing anaphora — "He did not know how to paint the room any other way. He did not have another version of it. If she had one, he had never seen it." — was tested for pull-quote shape: all three sentences are pronoun-bound to *this* room and collapse out of context; the full forms are Theo's trying-not-to-fall-apart register per contractions policy; and the third sentence is the Ch18 hinge (June has five leaving-side versions he has never seen — rolling summary) delivered as ignorance, not information. The rewrite loses the irony's blade. Original stands.

**P17 HOLDS — "Theo sat down where June would have sat…"** — sample compared: Theo voice card plus repair memo (repair #2 site). Binding-register rewrite of the repaired sentence: *"It was a good beginning. From this side he could see exactly what the painting was waiting for."* Comparison: the rewrite re-installs precisely the explanation Round 1 ordered cut — naming the waiting — so it is worse on fidelity by construction; the surviving litotes ("there was no missing what it was a beginning of") withholds the noun and makes the reader supply it from P16's objects. The paragraph's close is the chapter's best restraint-as-action: "Sitting here he could reach her whole side without straining. He put his brush on the rag and kept his hand on his knee." — the reach motif paid as a refused reach, zero interiority caption. Any plainer version ("He could have painted her side from here, but didn't let himself") diagnoses the moment. Repair #2 confirmed clean. Original stands.

**P18 HOLDS — "He worked the rest of the session from her side…"** — sample compared: Theo voice card and chapter-card outcome rule ("Odile gives him the empty side, and that is worse than scolding"). Three sentences; the risk is the closer "He did it anyway." Tested as aphorism: four common words, pronoun-bound, no coined image; deleting it leaves the paragraph ending on complaint ("It was harder from this side."), which drops the consequence-acceptance the card mandates. Its structural pairing with P23's "He kept on." is adjudicated as an echo candidate in §3. Original stands.

**P19 (part-conversation) HOLDS — "At nine Odile said, 'Brushes'… / 'Got it,' Sam said."** — samples compared: Odile card (allowed plainness: "Again," "No," "Eat" — "Brushes" is the same species) and Sam card (makes physical room: opens a rack slot "wide enough that no wet corner touched"; "Got it" is his entire speech — no lecture, per chapter-card constraint). Theo eating "three forkfuls of Priya's dal standing up **because she was watching**" pays P6 without comment. Rewrite adds nothing and costs the wordlessness. Original stands.

**P20 HOLDS — "Theo slid the ground in, wet side clear…"** — sample compared: Theo voice card (labels as care) with a documentary insert (`*The room after class. June / Theo. Wk 7.*` — rack label, checked against its own form: house order, subject/names/week). "He wrote her name first." — tested as aphorism candidate: it is an action report, five words, no maxim syntax; cutting it deletes the paragraph's only dramatic content (her precedence on the label he controls). "So it would still be legible in six weeks" is logistics carrying hope — the showcase horizon — without naming either. Original stands.

**P21 HOLDS — "The others left in twos… 'Same time next week.'"** — sample compared: Odile card (departure logistics; no cushioning). "Mara's tray abandoned by the sink with one untouched cup still seated in it" closes the coffee cover-story without caption (the over-bought cup was June's). "Same time next week" adjudicated under the Aphorism Gate — verified by corpus search to be its first and only occurrence in the book, so it is not a flattened ritual echo. "The click it always made" is habitual-sound continuity, not weather-as-feeling. Original stands.

**P22 HOLDS — "He put the stools up, all seven…"** — sample compared: Theo voice card (lock checks, setup tasks) plus repair memo (repair #3 site) — top-5 risk as the chapter's final action. Binding-register rewrite: *"He rinsed his jars, dried one, and put it on the shelf by their painting. Then he turned off the lights and locked the door."* Comparison: the rewrite survives the gate but is worse on all three axes. Density: it drops "all seven" (the stool count finally true), "upside down" (how a dry jar is actually racked — the kept place stored, not staged), and "at the right end of their ground" (June's end — placement as address). Dramatic content: "below the stain he had not been able to lift **and was no longer sure he wanted to**" is the chapter's lone stated change of heart — the trespass-mark reclassified as a kept thing — delivered as a trailing, hedged, unquotable clause; cutting it makes the jar mute logistics. Fidelity: the repaired ending stops at the lock with no caption, exactly as ordered; the reader assembles the meaning from P16's painted jars. Repair #3 confirmed clean. Original stands.

---

## 2. APHORISM GATE (zero tolerance — full sweep)

No failures. Strongest candidates considered, each tested for portability, pull-quote shape, tattoo-ability, and epigraph shape:

- **"Nobody's going to ask what."** (P13) — maxim syntax absent; the line is an ellipsis that requires Theo's "It's the room" to parse and is staged as interrupted ("Mara was there before he finished it"). Out of context it is not even grammatical. The chapter spends Mara's next line cashing it in plain speech. **Passes.**
- **"You can't leave it half."** (P14, repair #1 replacement) — has the `You can't…` maxim opener, which is why it was the hardest call in the sweep. It passes on the dangling complement: "leave it half" has no portable completion — it binds to the stool drawing straddling the pencil line and to Theo's just-spoken "I can move it. In the painting." Compare the replaced original, "Move it or paint it," which was a self-contained imperative aphorism; the repair moved the line from portable to context-locked. The romantic double-reading (the relationship left half) is present but requires the whole chapter to activate — that is motif work, not pull-quote work. **Passes; repair confirmed as improvement, not sideways drift.**
- **"From here."** (P18 setup, Odile) — two words, incomplete without the moved stool; her card's allowed-plainness species ("Again," "No," "Eat"). Object moved instead of sentence made — the anti-aphorism. **Passes.**
- **"Same time next week."** (P21, Odile) — stock dismissal, zero coinage; corpus-verified first occurrence (no prior-chapter ritual being flattened). Its charge is entirely situational: Week 7 of 8, one student missing, and Odile asserting continuity anyway. Nothing to extract. **Passes.**
- **Kept-room formulation — "underpainting a room that was waiting: jars filled, stool turned out from the table at the angle of someone coming right back"** (P16) — "a room that was waiting" alone would be an installable phrase; the colon immediately dissolves it into two literal objects and an angle, and the syntax ("understood while he was doing it") pins it to one man's realization mid-brushstroke. Not extractable without dragging the jars with it. **Passes.**
- **"He did not have another version of it. If she had one, he had never seen it."** (P16) — anaphoric, gravid, and the closest thing to an epigraph shape in narration. Fails portability: every noun is a pronoun. The sentences are irony delivery, not wisdom delivery. **Passes.**
- **"He kept on." / "He did it anyway."** (P23/P18) — minimal persistence beats; tested against poster-shape ("do it anyway"). Past-tense, pronoun-bound, and structurally opposed (see §3). **Pass.**
- **Card epigraph, "Paint the side you can reach. Leave the other side workable."** — instruction-shaped and the most quotable text in the chapter, as an assignment card is licensed to be: READING GUIDE §1 designates the cards as a binding flourish in Odile's voice, and her voice card names them her covert instrument. Within that license it stays material (grounds, reaches, workability are wet-panel logistics) rather than oracular ("never oracle" — no life-advice completion is offered). **Passes under the calibration's explicit form license.**

Odile's total spoken output — one card, "Cards are on your tables. Read them twice.", "From here.", "Brushes," "Same time next week." — contains zero epigrams, honoring the post-Ch16 quotability ceiling flagged in `tics.md` and the draft prompt's anti-tic list.

## 3. VERBATIM-ECHO GATE

Measured density (current text): `side` ×26, `room` ×17, `stool(s)` ×15, `jar(s)` ×13, `reach`-family ×6. Adjudications:

- **`side`** — assignment-mandated vocabulary (the card names sides; the chapter is titled for it), same license as Week 4's sanctioned hands density (`tics.md` Ch10 precedent). The instances transform across the arc: setup ("one on each side of the ground") → prohibition ("the bare side") → trespass ("crossed the pencil line") → assignment of position ("From here") → exchange ("from her side, leaning left now, reaching back into his own half"). No two adjacent uses are doing the same work. The repair memo's forward-watch (Ch20 must not inherit this density) is affirmed and re-issued below. **Cleared.**
- **`reach`** — full transformation chain: instruction ("Paint the side you can reach") → avoidance ("rather than walk around to the open side where the reaching would have been easy") → available-and-refused ("he could reach her whole side without straining… kept his hand on his knee") → reversed ("reaching back into his own half"). This is motif work, not flattening. **Cleared.**
- **`jar`** — the chapter's object spine: filled in reflex (P2) → read by Odile, moved nothing (P8) → painted as waiting (P16) → publicly defended (P14) → emptied, one dried and kept at her end (P22). Each recurrence changes the jar's meaning. **Cleared.**
- **`stool`** — same system; the drawn stool and the physical stool run parallel tracks that cross when Odile moves the real one. **"The one stool" appears verbatim twice** ("she saw the one stool" P5 / "looked at the one stool by Theo's table" P13) — strongest echo candidate considered. Cleared as load-bearing: two observers registering the identical fact in identical words is the mechanism of "Everyone counted… The second we walked in. Everyone." — the chapter card requires ordinary care to make the break public, and the verbatim noticing *is* the counting. A varied second phrasing would imply Luis saw something different. **Cleared.**
- **`The room after class`** ×3 — subject slip (documentary), painting logic ("which was the room after class," inside Theo's rationalization chain), rack label (documentary, house order, her name first). Slip → reasoning → label is transformation; per the repair memo, the phrase is title/label-only from Ch20. **Cleared.**
- **`same time`** — once in the chapter; corpus search shows no prior "Same time next week," only unrelated idiomatic "at the same time" (Ch04/08/11). No echo exists to flatten. **Cleared.**
- **"before he noticed what he had done" / "before he could decide otherwise"** (P1/P2) — same syntactic move twice in adjacent paragraphs; cleared as escalation, not repetition: the first reflex is corrected (stool returned), the second is ratified (both jars left). The pair is the chapter's first decision. **Cleared.**
- **"He kept on." (P23) / "He did it anyway." (P18)** — two short persistence closers, the chapter's most repetitious rhythm. Cleared as a mirrored pair with opposite valences: P23 is stubbornness in the wrong position (straining across the table rather than walk to her side — avoidance), P18 is acceptance of the harder right position after Odile moves him. Same shape, inverted meaning, separated by the chapter's turn. **Cleared, with a Ch20 watch: no third short-persistence closer.**
- **"a thumb-length of it" / "the stain the size of a thumb"** — same object re-identified from the opposite side of the table; phrasing varied; the reader must recognize the stain for P22 to land. **Cleared.**
- **"her stool stood where it had stood for seven Tuesdays" / "seven weeks of Tuesdays"** — the book's spine motif (title clock); idiom-of-persistence plus varied reprise. **Cleared.**
- **"It was going cold and she gave it to him anyway." (P15)** vs. P18's "anyway" — shared terminal adverb across scenes, different agents and clauses; the parallel (care given despite / work done despite) reads as design, but three would be a tic. **Cleared at two; Ch20 adds none.**

## 4. Register spot-checks against §2/§5/§6 (evidence, not orders)

- **Blind-POV test (§8):** any interiority paragraph strips to Theo on syntax alone — jar logistics, warm water because the pipes run cold, house-order labels, competence as apology. No June-register visual-noun compression leaked in. Passes.
- **Dialogue diagnosis (§2/§6 zero tolerance):** swept every line. Nearest candidates: "her face reported nothing about any of it" (face, not speech; no sentence is rated) and "said one quiet thing to Ruth that made Ruth take a rag to a corner" (content unheard; perceptiveness shown by what Ruth *does* — the guide's own prescription). Zero instances.
- **Ch19-specific anti-tics (draft prompt):** no `load-bearing`, no `crooked`, no ledger/fiscal narration figure, no keys cluster (keys appear only in "unlocked"/"locked" frame actions), no clementines, no chair-count comedy (stool-counting is pressure, not joke), no therapy speech, no Ch17 `the way` pileup (single instance, "the angle of someone coming right back" is not the connective). All held.
- **Plain-speech floor (§2):** every principal lands at least one unguarded line — Priya "Is June coming?", Theo "No. Not tonight.", Luis "You blocked in her stool.", Mara "Everyone counted." Oblique lines number two (Luis's ellipsis, Mara's coffee cover), at the cap.

---

## Chapter verdict

**REGISTER-HOLDS (0 orders).**

All three Round-1 Plain Translation orders are verified executed in the current text and none produced replacement drift; the repaired sites (P14, P17, P22) now test as the strongest paragraphs in the chapter rather than the weakest. The gate-listed lines all clear zero tolerance on shown work. Standing conditions carried forward for Ch20, per the repair memo and this audit: the room/side/reach density license expires with this chapter; `The room after class` is title/label only; no third short-persistence closer ("kept on"/"anyway" family is spent); no new terminal-"anyway" construction; Theo's next chapter must not open in solitary setup mode.
