Audit written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_14.narrator_publicist.md`. Full audit text follows.

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# Narrator-Publicist Audit — Chapter 14 ("Catalogs")

id: narrator_publicist | tier: risk | chapter: 14 | POV: Theo Brennan, close third past | trigger satisfied: flag:protagonist-heavy
Inputs: `output/chapters/chapter_14.md`; packet `output/model_prompts/claude/chapter_draft/chapter_14.md`; `output/style_and_voice.md`; `premise/READING_GUIDE.md`; mechanical gate `chapter_14_quality_gate.md`; `output/tics.md`.

## Step 4 (run first) — declared narrator stance

READING_GUIDE §1–2: close third past, warm/precise/lightly comic; no declared unreliable-publicist narrator, so no design excuse is available — findings stand on attribution and framing alone. Theo's voice card adds a binding constraint this audit must enforce: "narration transparency: Theo must know the nephew secret; his chapters can rationalize withholding but must not pretend ignorance." Free-indirect self-justification is therefore licensed only where the chapter visibly frames it as his pressure. That is the standard applied below.

## Per-line verdicts

### Theo (protagonist)

- `EARNED — "He did not have to count shelves. His hand found the third shelf before he reached for the light." (line 91) — the on-page action that backs it: "He had the answer ready if June ever asked. He shelved for Odile sometimes. He could say that." (line 91)` — Tested as marker 5 (effortless competence asserted by negation). Strip test: the concrete hand-to-shelf action remains. The competence is not admired; it is immediately converted into liability — this familiarity IS the nephew secret, and the next sentence shows him preparing a cover story. Indictment, not publicity.

- `EARNED — "tried to do the thing he could always do: inventory." (line 161) — the on-page action that backs it: "Nine catalogs. Which years? 1994. 1996. 1998. The faded top edge. Then nothing." (line 161)` — A competence assertion made in order to fail on the page within two sentences. The "could always do" claim is falsified in scene materials.

- `EARNED — "He made himself look at it standing up, as if it were a delivery manifest." (line 13) — the on-page action that backs it: "He typed *80lb matte* for Ben, sent it, and put the phone face-down next to the clipboard." (line 15)` — Discipline claim cashed in two concrete actions; the manifest figure is coping, not cool, and the paragraph it governs records his own eyes "on her instead of the lens" — evidence against his composure, not for it.

- `EARNED — "He got the canvas tote from under the front desk, the sturdy one, because nine catalogs on a subway in a flimsy bag was a dropped-spine disaster." (line 141) — the on-page action that backs it: June's puncture, "You're bagging them like produce." (line 143)` — Care rendered as object and procedure, and the chapter hands the deflating line to a named scene character rather than defending him. The narration lets him be laughed at.

- `EARNED — "His alternatives came up at once. He could flag the useful pages and she could shoot photos on her phone, ten minutes, done, books back on the shelf by lunch. He had almost started with that answer." (line 137) — the on-page action that backs it: "What he said instead was, 'There's a bag.'" (line 139)` — The narration shows the safer, more competent option existing and shows him discard it. This runs against any usefulness campaign; it is the chapter's arming beat rendered as choice.

**Highest-risk passage (focused check: rationalization vs. endorsement):**
"He ran the math on the way back out. Public documents. ... There was nothing in a public document that wasn't public. June wanted label language. The catalogs had it. He was helping." (line 97). Free indirect voicing of Theo's self-image — useful, harmless, decent — which per the pass condition counts as a finding **unless** the chapter frames that self-image critically. The chapter can point to: (a) "He ran the math" opens the passage as his calculation under pressure, not narrator fact; (b) "nothing in a public document that wasn't public" is visibly circular — a tautology only an anxious man needs; (c) "He told himself the showcase had made Odile generous. He squared the top catalog with the others." (line 109) names the mode (*told himself*) and supplies the displacement tell; (d) "He had the answer ready if June ever asked" (line 91) establishes he is running cover, which a genuinely innocent helper would not need; (e) the close — "He left the *returned* column blank, dated nothing" and the third measurement of a known dimension (line 163) — lands the dread the rationalization was suppressing. **Verdict: attributed rationalization, framed as his pressure. SURVIVES.** Caution forward: "He was helping" must not be quoted or echoed in later chapters without equivalent framing; unframed, it becomes publicity.

Counter-candidates collected and cleared (Theo): "moved the clipboard to the far end of the table so that the next mistake would at least require a walk" (line 3) — comedy at his expense; "His own panel he put beside it and looked at only as long as the job required. The tape was the part that worked. June had said so on Tuesday." (line 7) — self-deprecation with the one credit attributed to a named perceiver (June) and dated; "Theo was already on his feet." (line 89) — conditioned-nephew obedience tell, not eagerness staged for admiration; "He noticed the cuff before the coffee." (line 17) — attention report that incriminates his wanting rather than dignifying it; "he'd promised himself he would arrive with an opinion instead of a menu" (line 59) — self-directed, mocking his own menu habit.

### June via Theo's admiration (focused check: admiration must stay focalized and fallible)

- `EARNED — "She crossed to her panel and stood in front of it, head tipped, looking for the flaw first." (line 23) — the on-page action that backs it: "'The wash held.'" (line 23)` — Marker-4 test (gesture credited with character meaning): strip residue is "stood in front of it, head tipped" — concrete. The interpretive clause is confirmed by her own next utterance: she was in fact auditing for failure before accepting success. Attributable perceiver: Theo; the read matches June's documented edge-first habit and stays perceptual, not oracular.

- `EARNED — "June looked at the jar, and then at her own wrist, turning it over as if the mark belonged to someone else and she was appraising it for them." (line 27) — the on-page action that backs it: "'I'm keeping it.' ... She took the jar anyway and put it in her bag." (lines 27–31)` — Simile content is specific (detachment, appraisal), not flattery; and June then overrides Theo's offered fix, which keeps her unmanaged by his admiring read. Perceiver: Theo.

- `EARNED — "he watched her do her own math" (line 135) — the on-page action that backs it: "She looked at the stack, eight unread" and "'I read slow when it's good, and I want the bad examples too.'" (line 135)` — The admiring verb mirrors his own "ran the math" (line 97): paralleled, fallible focalization, with the object of her calculation on the table.

- Checked for marker 2 inversion: June's validation of Theo's size pitch — "'Okay,' she said. 'Small. You're right about the sprawl.'" (line 61) — is exactly the source fix's required form (one named character's specific reaction), and the narration undercuts it immediately: "So they had a size. What they did not have was anything else." (line 63). No competence glow survives the next sentence.

### Odile (focused check: practical manipulator, not endorsed oracle)

- `EARNED — "She picked her box back up and went out the way she'd come, and that was the entire visit." (line 89) — the on-page action that backs it: the visit itself — four utterances, two imperatives, an exit with a box (lines 77–89)` — "The entire visit" records a brevity the scene has just demonstrated. Strip residue: full concrete exit. Dry comedy, not applause.

- Counter-candidate checked, marker 1 (unreadability assertion): "there was no telling how much of the conversation she'd carried in with her" (line 77). Cleared: the content is a literal epistemic fact about timing — Theo did not see her come into earshot — and it is plot-required (her "Labels are not apologies" answers June's "people who weren't apologizing"). It claims he didn't hear the door, not that she is beyond comprehension. Perceiver: Theo by POV.

- Crucially absent: any narration confirming Odile's design or wisdom. The anomaly is established in dialogue and attributed — "'Does she do this?' / 'No.' ... 'She loans nothing. There's a sign about it in her head.'" (lines 103–105) — and the only narrator-adjacent gloss is "He told himself the showcase had made Odile generous" (line 109), explicitly marked rationalization that leaves her manipulation legible to the reader and invisible to him. No "as always," no arrangement-admiring caption. The trap proceeds unendorsed.

### Closing image

- `EARNED — "nine gray spines of Odile Marchetti leaving the building under the arm of June Park, and the flyer with the two of them on it queued up at a print shop somewhere in Queens, forty copies, eighty-pound matte." (line 159) — the on-page action that backs it: "he watched her cross the street with the tote listing her a few degrees to the left" (line 159)` — The elevation is stake-weight, not character flattery: every term is a concrete object (spines, tote-list in degrees, print queue, paper weight), and the full-name caption cadence enacts the chapter's label motif. Perceiver: Theo at the front window. This is the chapter's register ceiling; the full-name caption move should not recur without new cause.

Markers swept with no hits: marker 2 generalized-reaction framing (the only generalized line, "Nobody in the thread asked whether it had been real," line 15, is a checkable fact about four named people and operates as pressure on Theo, not glamour); marker 3 cosmic flattery (none); marker 5 adjective campaigning (no mysterious/dangerous/effortless vocabulary attaches to any character; "the sturdy one" modifies a tote).

## Chapter verdict

**CRITICAL-DISTANCE-HELD**

Most admiring surviving line: "nine gray spines of Odile Marchetti leaving the building under the arm of June Park, and the flyer with the two of them on it queued up at a print shop somewhere in Queens, forty copies, eighty-pound matte." (line 159) — earned by the concrete cargo and consequence it inventories, with Theo at the front window as the named, fallible perceiver; the formality is the label motif doing chapter work, not the narrator campaigning.

REVISION ORDERS: none. Zero PUBLICITY lines.

Forward cautions (not orders): (1) "He was helping" (line 97) survives only because lines 91/109/163 frame it as pressure — do not let later chapters echo it unframed. (2) The full-name caption cadence of line 159 is at one use; a repeat would begin to monumentalize.

Out-of-scope flag for the dialogue-diagnosis enforcement (READING_GUIDE §2, zero tolerance), not a publicity finding: "June stopped and re-aimed." (line 75) — "re-aimed" brushes against narration characterizing a speech act's delivery rather than showing the interruption plain. Refer to Plain Translation / dialogue audit for a ruling.
