I've read the full manuscript and verified the load-bearing specifics against the source (word counts, the ban registry, and the exact contradiction lines). The ban itself is clean in this repaired candidate — no `load[ -]?bearing` survives — but the continuity and structure are not clean. Report follows.

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# FINAL ASSEMBLY COLD READ — *Eight Tuesdays*

## FINDINGS

**1. Whole-book length falls under the contracted floor; the middle is logistics, not story.**
- **Location/category:** Whole-book / missed committed element + pacing. Reading guide §1: "Length: ~80K; band 75–88K."
- **Evidence:** Measured, the manuscript runs ~69,000 words — roughly 6K under the 75K floor. The shortfall is concentrated in a slack middle: chs 14–15 and 20 are near-continuous errand-and-arithmetic. Ch15 is a phone call rendered as a punch list — "W-2, full-time, six months funded... Benefits after ninety days" — and ch20 stacks three of them (Nia, Asha, Kessler) plus a two-column ledger.
- **Why a cold reader stumbles:** The romance goes quiet for long stretches while June itemizes rent and W-9s; a reader coasts. The book is contractually a cozy at 80K and reads thin of it.
- **Revision order:** Add ~6–9K of *scene* (cohort life, studio craft, June/Theo presence) in the Act-2 trough (chs 11, 14, 15) rather than more logistics; convert at least one of the ch20 phone calls into a scene with another body in the room.

**2. Theo's years of service contradict themselves — and the arithmetic of the central secret.**
- **Location/category:** Ch01 vs Ch21 / continuity + canon.
- **Evidence:** Ch01, Theo: "I'd like to tell you nothing like that has ever happened here, but I've worked for her six years." Ch21, Odile: "You have worked under my name for eleven years." Ch02 anchors the start: "I started the summer I was nineteen." A thirty-year-old (canon) who started at nineteen has been there eleven years, not six. (Compounded because June *also* carries a "six years" in the same opening chapter — "I haven't [painted] in six years" — so the number is already doing other work.)
- **Why a cold reader stumbles:** This is a book about a hidden nephew whose tenure is the whole point; a reader tracking "how long has he been her creature" is handed two numbers that don't reconcile.
- **Revision order:** Change ch01's "six years" to "eleven years" (or drop the figure) so ch02's "since nineteen" and ch21's "eleven years" agree.

**3. Mara's borrowed scarf is black everywhere except the kiss chapter, where it turns orange.**
- **Location/category:** Ch13 vs chs 3/5/18 / continuity + motif.
- **Evidence:** Established black — ch03: "The woman wore a black wool scarf looped twice… Mara put the black scarf in her hands"; ch18 after washing: "black again instead of black with six weeks of the city on it." But ch13, twice: "Orange is doing things for you," and "Her arms were folded over Mara's orange scarf." (Sam separately owns an orange scarf — ch20, "orange scarf bright in the stairwell" — so the error also invites the reader to think June is now wearing *Sam's*.)
- **Why a cold reader stumbles:** The scarf is a tracked care-token in forty flyers; changing its color at the emotional apex (the cover kiss) breaks the object at the exact moment it matters.
- **Revision order:** Change both ch13 instances to black; if the "orange" association is wanted, move it to the ch16 painting's orange interval, where orange is already legitimately in play.

**4. The finale is overstuffed and roughly half again over the chapter ceiling; the coda imports a fresh conflict.**
- **Location/category:** Ch23–24 / form binding + pacing + ending.
- **Evidence:** The guide sets chapter shape at "~2,000–3,500 words" and calls the showcase "the final chapter," a coda. Ch24 runs ~5,285 words (ch23 ~4,238) against mid-book chapters near 2,150 (ch17, ch19). Into that one chapter the book packs: the showcase read, scarf-and-dish returns, Ruth's "You didn't start this together," the turned study, the Odile-ledger reveal, June tearing the page out ("June tore the page clean out along the perforation"), first snow, and the final kiss.
- **Why a cold reader stumbles:** The coda the contract wants "warm" acquires a late, sharp June-vs-Odile confrontation and four other beats; the ending crowds rather than settles.
- **Revision order:** Push the Odile-ledger reveal and the page-tear earlier (into the emptying-gallery beat, or a short ch24-A), and let the true final chapter carry the showcase, the snow, and June's exit only. Trim ch24 toward the band.

**5. The cohort origin story (ch4) contradicts the meeting the reader watched (ch1), and the narration insists it doesn't.**
- **Location/category:** Ch04 vs Ch01 / continuity + narrator reliability.
- **Evidence:** Ch01 stages their first meeting at the crowded opening (two labels *switched* — "Those two are switched" — which Theo fixes by re-setting the printed cards; program lists "Fifty-one works"). Ch04's table version relocates and rebuilds it: "I came the Thursday after," a single label with *flipped dimensions* fixed by pencil in place, and "'One label. Out of, what, forty?' / 'Forty-three.'" The narration then asserts: "Nothing they had said was false… June had invented nothing."
- **Why a cold reader stumbles:** A reader who remembers ch1 sees the Thursday, the pencil-fix, and "forty-three" as fabricated — so "invented nothing" reads as the narrator lying or losing track, and the reader can no longer tell which "true" details (the recurring pencil) are real.
- **Revision order:** Either mark ch4 explicitly as June building a cover from reshuffled truth (Theo admiring the invention, not certifying it), or align the anecdote to ch1's actual event (switched labels, opening night). Reconcile "43 labels" with "51 works."

**6. Who signed the class list is contradictory across the first two chapters.**
- **Location/category:** Ch01 vs Ch02 / continuity + setup clarity.
- **Evidence:** Ch01 ends with June writing her name and handing Theo the pen: "'Your turn,' she said, and handed him the pen." Ch02 finds the list with the pairing in Odile's hand: "After it, in Odile's blue ink: an ampersand, and T. Brennan" (blue ink is established as Odile's alone). Theo separately signs the *receipt* at ch02's close.
- **Why a cold reader stumbles:** The enrollment mechanic underpins the entire premise; the reader can't tell whether Theo signed the list (ch1 says he's about to) or Odile wrote him in (ch2 says she did), and the two documents blur.
- **Revision order:** Show the ch1 beat resolving as intended — Theo takes the pen but doesn't write, or writes and Odile overwrites — so ch2's blue-ink attribution is prepared, not contradicted.

**7. The loan ledger — the book's own emblem of accuracy — dates the returned catalog wrong.**
- **Location/category:** Ch21 vs the class timeline / continuity (date).
- **Evidence:** Class weeks are consecutive Tuesdays "OCTOBER 20 TO DECEMBER 8," so Week 6 (ch16) is Nov 24; ch17 shows June discovering the acknowledgments and walking the catalog back that same Tuesday night ("as it was every Tuesday when he closed"), and ch18 runs "On Wednesday" into "Thursday was Thanksgiving" (Nov 26). Yet ch21's sheet reads "1 rtn'd 11/22" and "nothing from her since the twenty-second." The return was the 24th/25th. (Checkout is correctly "out Thurs 11/19.")
- **Why a cold reader stumbles:** The book fetishizes this ledger's exactness ("the record should be accurate, whatever else it was"); a two-day slip in it is a self-inflicted irony for the attentive reader.
- **Revision order:** Change "11/22" and "the twenty-second" to the 24th (or 25th).

**8. Kessler's gig is "six weeks" in ch9 and "three weeks" in ch20/22.**
- **Location/category:** Ch09 vs Ch20/Ch22 / continuity (logistics).
- **Evidence:** Ch09, Asha: "Kessler's got an armory build-out in January… Six weeks. Pays late." Ch20: "three weeks minimum, maybe a fourth," and the math confirms three: "$3,840" (= 32 × 40 × 3). Ch22: "Thirty-two an hour for three weeks."
- **Why a cold reader stumbles:** The book invites exactly this arithmetic elsewhere (June's columns); a reader who trusts the numbers finds the duration halved between introduction and payoff.
- **Revision order:** Set ch09 to "three, maybe four weeks."

**9. The assignment cards — a "binding flourish" — drift their own header format.**
- **Location/category:** Chs 3/5/7 vs 10/13/16/19 vs 24 / continuity of a locked element.
- **Evidence:** Cards read "TUESDAY ONE," "TUESDAY TWO," "TUESDAY THREE," then switch to "WEEK FOUR," "WEEK FIVE," "WEEK SIX," "WEEK SEVEN," then revert to "TUESDAY EIGHT."
- **Why a cold reader stumbles:** The guide says these cards must read as deliberate, "her wording, her voice." The TUESDAY→WEEK→TUESDAY swing reads as authorial drift, not Odile's fussiness, and undercuts the reread promise.
- **Revision order:** Standardize to one form (the spine is "the eight Tuesdays" — use "TUESDAY ONE…EIGHT" throughout).

**10. *Winter Kitchen*, the declared thesis-image, disappears after ch14.**
- **Location/category:** Motif distribution.
- **Evidence:** Foregrounded in ch01 (the title is "Goodbye to Winter Kitchen") and reduced to a catalog cover in ch14 — "'This the famous one?' / '*Winter Kitchen.* It was on a postcard for a while.'" It is never named again. The thesis is instead carried by an *unnamed* echo: ch17's "*Back Room, Ten Past Nine*… twelve by sixteen inches" → the joint piece *After Class* (also 12×16, titled toward "9:40").
- **Why a cold reader stumbles:** A reader told by the opening that this canvas is June's origin and the book's thesis will expect it to close the loop; the closure is real but buried under a different title, so the thesis lands only for a reader who connects the dimensions.
- **Revision order:** Give the coda one quiet, non-winking *Winter Kitchen* touch (June sees the two cups in *After Class*'s two water jars, or names the debt) so the front-loaded image pays off by name.

**11. June's residence after the move-out is left blank.**
- **Location/category:** Ch20 / dropped logistic.
- **Evidence:** Ch20 she gives notice — "out January 31" — and secures a *studio* ("Dana's room, the wall share"; Ridgewood is "a shared floor, six painters"). Where she lives after Jan 31 is never addressed.
- **Why a cold reader stumbles:** In a book this scrupulous about rent, W-9s, and net-45, the one unpriced item is where the protagonist sleeps.
- **Revision order:** One line in ch20 or ch24 — she's holding the apartment month-to-month, or has a sublet — closes it.

**12. Copyedit/tic cluster.**
- **Location/category:** Ch01 heading vs later; Ch04 / copyedit + tic catalog.
- **Evidence:** Heading style switches from numeral to words: "# Chapter 01" vs "# Chapter Two." And Ben's one-word reaction — ch04, "'Oh.' Ben blinked." — spends a beat the guide reserves for a single earned "Oh." at the confession (used, correctly, in ch22: "'Oh,' June said.").
- **Why a cold reader stumbles:** Minor, but the heading inconsistency is visible on the contents page, and the early "Oh." pre-spends a rationed move.
- **Revision order:** Normalize chapter headings; recast Ben's reaction ("Ben blinked. 'That's also data.'").

---

## ENGAGEMENT BATTERY

**Where did you feel like skimming?**
Chs 14–15 and the front of ch20. Ch15 is a job offer delivered as a spec sheet — "W-2, full-time, six months funded… Benefits after ninety days" — and immediately re-itemized in the notebook ("*Vandercook—gripper, return stroke*"). Ch20 opens three phone calls in a row (Nia's decline, Asha, Kessler) around a two-column ledger. The romance and the cohort vanish; the prose becomes a competent errand list. Ch11's frame-shop form ("RELEASED TO. RELATIONSHIP TO TICKET HOLDER. PHONE.") is thematically earned but procedurally slow.

**A character you couldn't place?**
Two spots. (a) The cohort arrives in a six-name burst in ch03 — "You're June? I'm Mara. That's Luis," then "Sam," "Ruth," then "Priya. That's Ben" — over tray labels "VALDEZ, VALDEZ, NAIR, ADLER, KIM, RIVERA," and the text never pins Priya/Ben to Nair vs Adler; the first read is a scramble to map first names, surnames, and couples. They differentiate by ch04, so it self-corrects. (b) Ch09 introduces June's freelance world in one load — Asha, Marisol, Marta Oduya, Nia, Dana, Kessler — and Nia arrives only as an unglossed text ("Nia Torres. She had not seen the name on her screen since March") before carrying two later chapters; when she returns in ch15 a reader may not immediately place her.

**Did the chapter ordering lose you?**
Nowhere. Candidates checked: the two consecutive June chapters (17–18) — survives because it's the sanctioned rupture flex (§1) and reads as one continuous stretch (discovery night → "On Wednesday June washed Mara's scarf" → "Thursday was Thanksgiving"); and ch02's return to opening night — survives because it's plainly Theo's next-morning cleanup POV ("The caterers left at ten forty"), not a confusing flashback. The strict J/T alternation otherwise holds and is audible.

**Where did interest drop off?**
Same trough: chs 14–15. The joint piece and the cohort recede while the machinery of June's exit (catalogs, the Nia call) takes over. Interest returns hard at ch16 (the fear paintings) and ch17 (the acknowledgments page).

**Did any plot beat confuse you?**
Two, both in the setup and both listed above: the ch1→ch2 signing (June "handed him the pen," but the list is "in Odile's blue ink"), and the ch4 origin story asserting "June had invented nothing" while relocating the meeting to "the Thursday after" the opening the reader just watched. Both leave a first-time reader unsure what actually happened.

**Any recurring exchange that felt like a slog?**
Three refrains run long. (a) "Did you eat?" and the produced clementine — ch03 "Priya. That's Ben. Did you eat? You'll be standing a while," recurring through chs 5, 7, 8, 13, 16; the beat is warm but nearly identical each time. (b) The scarf runner — "Give it back next Tuesday" / "Keep it through Tuesday" — from ch03 to ch10, which lands the same note repeatedly before ch18 finally retires it. (c) Theo's chapter-closing deflection into logistics — ch04 "'Quarter to seven next Tuesday,' is what came out," ch16 "She wants the chairs in eights for December" — a deliberate structural tic that, by the fourth instance, telegraphs the chapter is ending.

**Where were you surprised, and where did you see it coming?**
Saw it coming: Theo-is-the-nephew (ch17). It is heavily pre-wired — ch02's "'On paper.' / 'It's true on the payroll,' he said, and opened the receipt book," Odile's blue-ink authorship, the childhood keys — so the *fact* is expected even though the *mechanism* (the acknowledgments colophon) is clean. Also predictable: June staying, and the ch16 fear-paintings (the reader knows precisely what each will paint before they lift a brush). Genuinely surprised: Ruth's turn in ch04, "The slot… Is it comped?" — the first sign someone is auditing the couple; Odile's ch01 "Repair that before you leave"; Sam's ch11 waiting-room story landing on "I was forty feet from the desk"; and the concreteness of the ch24 ledger artifact, "*Park, J. – Brennan, T. Last slot*," which turns a foreshadowed idea into a dated object.

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## AFTERMATH BATTERY
Not declared in the reading guide — skipped.

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## BOOK VERDICT: **FINDINGS-OPEN**

Register and the two zero-tolerance gates hold in this candidate — I found no surviving `load-bearing` and no true dialogue-diagnosis (nearest miss, ch04's "It defended nothing and wasn't asked to," rates an utterance's *effect*, not its phrasing/rhythm/delivery, so it stays outside the rule). The blind-POV test survives even in June's ledger-heavy chapters because her idiom stays optical ("read her own page like it was someone else's punch list… holes, thin patches, places where wanting had been scumbled over need"). The earned-stay test passes cleanly: she declines Tasker on Dec 4, mid-rupture, before any reconciliation, and for the wall, not the man ("I'm staying, Theo. It isn't for you.").

But the manuscript is not continuity-clean and is structurally out of band. Three highest-leverage findings:

1. **Finding 4 — the overloaded, over-length finale.** The ending is where a cozy either settles or crowds; ch24 runs ~5,285 words and stacks a showcase, a reveal, a study-turn, a page-tearing June/Odile confrontation, and the snow. Fix the shape of the coda first.
2. **Finding 2 — Theo's six-vs-eleven-years contradiction.** It sits on the book's engine (the hidden-tenure secret) and is a one-word fix that currently breaks the arithmetic a reader is invited to do.
3. **Finding 1 — under the 75K floor with a logistics-heavy middle.** The book is ~6K short and sags through chs 14–15/20; the remedy is scene, not more errand.

Highest-leverage *line-level* fix, separately: **Finding 3**, Mara's scarf turning orange in the kiss chapter — trivial to correct, maximally visible where it currently sits.
