# Narrator-Publicist Audit — Chapter 19

id: narrator_publicist | owner: claude | chapter: 19 | tier: risk
Inputs: `output/chapters/chapter_19.md`; `output/style_and_voice.md` (Theo, Odile, Mara, Luis, Priya, Ben, Ruth, Sam); `premise/READING_GUIDE.md` §§1, 2, 5, 6, 8; `output/tics.md` Ch17–Ch18 rows.

## Declared narrator stance (step 4)

READING_GUIDE §1–2 declare close third past, dual POV, warm-precise interiority; no unreliable or publicist-by-design narrator is declared, so no design exemption applies — findings stand on their own. Ch19 is a Theo chapter; his licensed interiority is "logistical tenderness... a habit of cataloguing what people need" (§2), which licenses inventories of tasks, not evaluations of persons. §5 binds this audit's edge cases directly: care moves are to be used, "never announce[d]" — "it was these little things that..." reflection is banned. §8's smallness test means concrete craft/place detail is the sanctioned register, which is what most of this chapter's competence prose turns out to be.

## Description inventory and per-line verdicts

### Theo (protagonist, POV)

EARNED — "He filled wash jars for every station because he always filled wash jars, two per pair, warm water because the pipes ran cold by seven." (line 7) — the on-page action that backs it: the whole opening ritual is executed on the page (easels put flush, grounds found "by size before he read the tape," jars filled at every station); the clause gives a plumbing reason, not a virtue. The narration also lets his order fail in the same paragraph: "It did not sit flush with the others no matter how he angled it."

EARNED — "the bones of a room he could have drawn with the lights off" (line 37) — marker-5 candidate (effortless-mastery hyperbole), checked: strip test leaves "He worked the big shapes first: the long table foreshortened toward the window, the radiator with its dented top rail..." The mastery claim is familiarity, not talent, and it is demonstrated by 400 words of him running the room from habit before anyone arrives — then priced as the wound, not a credential, by the line-71 passage. Attributable perceiver: Theo.

EARNED — "By eight his shoulder hurt. He kept on." (line 63) — grit-assertion candidate, checked: the narration immediately charges the persistence to the work as a defect: "The line of the table wavered where his arm ran out of steadiness. He corrected it, and the corrected place dried darker than the rest of the edge." Stubbornness produces visible damage; no applause.

EARNED — "The drawing was sound. The room was recognizable, the values honest, the big shapes placed by seven weeks of Tuesdays. It was a good beginning" (line 71) — close-third self-assessment of the protagonist's work; per spec this counts as a finding unless the self-image is framed critically somewhere the chapter can point to, and it is framed critically in the same sentence: "and from this side there was no missing what it was a beginning of: a kept room, jars full, stool angled for return, painted by a man who had done the setup right, right up to the pale pencil line. Past it, eight inches of primed ground sat with nothing on it but a stain the size of a thumb." The craft praise exists to sharpen the indictment. Attributable perceiver: Theo, sitting where Odile moved him.

EARNED — "It was harder from this side. He did it anyway." (line 73) — checked as grit campaigning: strip test leaves the full action in the same breath ("worked the rest of the session from her side, leaning left now, reaching back into his own half"); "anyway" records compliance with Odile's correction at a stated mechanical cost, not heroism.

EARNED — "He wrote her name first." (line 79) — the source's fix executed: an interpretable act stated flat, no gloss; the reader decides what the label order means.

Anti-publicity evidence noted for special check 1: the narration catches Theo red-handed twice without softening — "before he noticed what he had done" (line 5) and "he filled two before he could decide otherwise" (line 7).

### Odile

EARNED — "She looked at the pencil line, and at the two filled jars, one on each side, and she moved nothing, and went on." (line 35) — backing action: her teaching is rendered as physical logistics throughout (she later moves the stool herself); "moved nothing" is a checkable negative act at a specific station, not a mystique caption.

EARNED — "He did not hear Odile come up the aisle. He knew she was there because his stool moved." (line 65) — silent-authority candidate, checked: the mechanism is physical and stated ("She had it by the seat"); Theo's deafness is established by his posture (working the seam standing, brush at arm's length). No presence-grading.

EARNED — "her face reported nothing about any of it" (line 69) — marker-1 candidate (unreadability), checked: scene-specific, one moment, not a generalized reputation claim (no "few people could read her" shape). Attributable perceiver: Theo, looking for a verdict he does not get. Her actual response is material: she moves his stool and says two words.

EARNED — "said one quiet thing to Ruth that made Ruth take a rag to a corner." (line 69) — marker-2 candidate, checked: the reaction is one named character's specific act, which is exactly what the fix requires; the content is withheld consistent with Theo's earshot across the room, not to inflate potency.

### Cohort

PUBLICITY — marker 2 — "Sam came in last, took the room in from the doorway, and before doing anything else moved the snack table three feet toward the radiator, so that nobody reaching for the kettle all night would have to stand in the sightline of Theo's empty half." (line 33) — strip test: what action remains: "Sam came in last, took the room in from the doorway, and moved the snack table three feet toward the radiator" — a strong concrete residue. — attributable perceiver: Theo for the action; NONE for the purpose clause. "So that nobody reaching for the kettle all night would have to..." grades the gesture by a generalized, hypothetical, whole-evening beneficiary, asserted as fact at a moment when Sam has said nothing and Theo has no basis beyond inference the narration does not mark as his. This is the narrator decoding and advertising Sam's tact — announcing a care move (banned as reflection by READING_GUIDE §5) instead of letting a specific person's specific reaction reveal it. "Before doing anything else" is part of the same halo (prioritization flag).

EARNED — "At his table she saw the one stool, shifted the tray higher against her chest, and changed hands." (line 13, Mara) — the correct execution of what the Sam line botches: one named character's specific physical reaction shows the counting; the narrator asserts nothing.

EARNED — "It was going cold and she gave it to him anyway. She went back to her station without explaining it." (line 59, Mara) — announcement candidate, checked: every fact is scene material (cup, taboret, rag, exit); no meaning is assigned to the gesture. Note for the tic tally, not this verdict: "without explaining it" (line 59) and Sam's "without a word" (line 75) are two restraint-flags in one chapter; a third would start captioning silence as eloquence.

EARNED — "began laying out her side of the palette in the order she always laid it. She did not look at him again." (line 31, Priya) — habit fact plus withheld attention as action; her care arrives as dialogue orders ("Eat at break, not after"), never as narrator praise.

EARNED — "Luis hung his coat, walked the aisle once, and shifted his and Mara's table a hand-width left. 'Glare,' he said, and got out his palette." (line 17) — pure placement-and-craft narration; see special check 2.

## Special Ch19 checks

1. **Theo's shame and competence → narrator admiration: HELD.** Every competence beat is either materially motivated (line 7, the pipes), immediately failure-checked (line 7 stool won't sit flush; line 63 wavered / dried darker), or converted into the chapter's indictment (line 71, "painted by a man who had done the setup right"). The shame is likewise rendered as object and action — the widened umber ghost he cannot lift (line 41), the label pressed legible (line 79) — never as narrator sympathy.

2. **Luis's directness → mystique: HELD.** Zero narrator captions on Luis's delivery, presence, or effect; his narration is placement and craft ("walked the aisle once," "mixed gray with the knife flat against the palette," "ran his jars under the tap"). Strongest counter-candidate checked: his cryptic "Nobody's going to ask what." (line 51) — the narration adds no decoding, no pause-weighting, no reaction-grading; Mara's arrival simply cuts the exchange.

3. **Odile's material pressure → oracle publicity: HELD.** Her interventions are all objects and bodies: grounds left on newsprint, the taped subject strip, stopping and moving nothing (line 35), moving the stool and "From here" (lines 65–67). Strongest counter-candidate: "her face reported nothing about any of it" (line 69) — ruled scene-specific perception of Theo's, per verdict above. Her total dialogue is five short imperatives ("Cards are on your tables. Read them twice." / "From here." / "Brushes." / "Same time next week.") — plain, compliant with the Ch16 note that post-ceiling Odile "should be plainer or absent."

4. **Final clean-jar action → campaigning for Theo as noble: HELD.** "Then he turned off the lights and locked the door, and left the clean jar there, ready to be filled." (line 83) — strip test residue is the whole sentence minus "ready to be filled," and "ready to be filled" states the jar's physical condition, not its moral one. The gesture cannot read as narrator-endorsed nobility because the scene already prosecuted this exact behavior on the page: Mara's "Everyone counted, Theo... The second we walked in. Everyone." (line 53), Luis's "Move it or paint it" (line 57), and Theo's own recorded ambivalence inside the same closing sentence ("the stain he had not been able to lift and was no longer sure he wanted to"). The reader is left holding the verdict; the narrator does not vote.

## Calibration cross-check (tics.md Ch17–Ch18 rows)

- "Ch19 must add no ledger/debt figure narration" — zero instances found.
- Ch17 "the way" connective at 4/4 cap — zero instances in Ch19.
- Ch18 "crooked" cluster spent for Ch19 — zero instances.
- "No Ch19 throat/gaze inheritance" — zero throat; looking-narration is literal object attention throughout.
- Out of scope for this audit, logged for the tic tally: Ch19 reopens on the solitary-maintenance cold open declared spent after Ch06/Ch08/Ch10 (Ch10 row: "next Theo chapter must open in company, mid-dialogue, or off-task"). Here the solitary setup is itself the beat under critique (the two stools, the two jars), a defensible exception, but the tally should record it.

## Chapter verdict

PUBLICIST-FOUND (1 line).

## REVISION ORDERS

1. Line 33 — "Sam came in last, took the room in from the doorway, and before doing anything else moved the snack table three feet toward the radiator, so that nobody reaching for the kettle all night would have to stand in the sightline of Theo's empty half." Cut "before doing anything else" and everything from "so that" onward; end on the concrete act: Sam takes the room in from the doorway and moves the snack table three feet toward the radiator. If the move's meaning must be legible before Mara's "Everyone counted" retroactively prices it, replace the generalized all-night beneficiary with one named character's specific reaction in scene materials — for example, at the line-71 beat, when Theo sits on June's side for the first time, he registers the geometry himself: Ben stands at the kettle with his back to the empty half, and Theo works out what the table's new position did. The purpose must arrive as a character's observed consequence or marked inference, never as narrator-asserted intent; keeping the clause with softer wording is not compliance.
