# Plain-Translation Audit — Chapter 21: Prying Loose / Faced to the Wall (Round 1)

id: plain_translation | owner: claude | tier: risk | round: 1
chapter: output/chapters/chapter_21.md (drafter stage)
verdict: **DRIFT-FOUND — 13 orders** (9 REPLACE/CUT, 2 Aphorism-Gate, 2 Verbatim-Echo)

## Calibration state

- Locked text: no inviolable passages are declared for Ch21 in the supplied calibration artifacts (tics.md, chapter card). No LOCKED entries below.
- Standing retests verified against current text: the flagged triad "findable, dated, and named" (tics: Performance Check cleared, Plain Translation to retest) is **absent** from the current text — the label is now the literal pencil inscription; retest passes by removal. "keeping its own counsel" (object-agency ceiling test ordered in tics) is also **absent**. Both confirmed by search of the current chapter.
- Odile quotability: tics row says "at mass ceiling, no new zingers." Her aphorism-grade mass is counted below and held at ceiling; revision must add nothing.
- Samples used, by name: **Theo voice card** (interiority rhythm: "inventory of needs, risk calculation, delayed recognition of his own desire"; never-says: "polished aphorisms about care"); **Theo dialogue spec** ("I said boss because it was true. It just wasn't the whole truth."); **Odile dialogue spec** ("Eat. Then decide to be tragic." / "If praise would help, I would give it. It would not."); **June dialogue spec** (compression: "That part works. Sorry."); **Reading-guide §2 plain-speech anchor** ("So if you quit, I lose the class." / "Yes."); **documentary text-message form** (Ch18/Ch20 thread register per tics ledger).

## Per-paragraph verdicts

Form ruling: close-third Theo narration (compare: Theo voice card), three dialogue exchanges (compare: Odile/Theo dialogue specs + §2 plain-speech floor), two text messages (documentary form; not plain-translated, checked against their own form only).

### Section 1 — returned catalogs and the Odile confrontation

**P1 (L3, "The box was inside the freight door...")** — close-third Theo. Highest-risk #1.
DRIFTED — original: "That was the order his hands did things in: count first, feel later." — binding-register version: cut the sentence; the paragraph already performs the order ("He had the utility knife out of his pocket before he had his coat off. Eight catalogs, each one wrapped in tissue...") and the feeling arrives after the count exactly as staged (the June-wrapping memory follows the inventory). — What the rewrite preserves: the full count-then-feel sequence, the knife-before-coat reflex, the tissue interleaving, the "none of the route was him" landing. What drift it removes: a colon-mounted portable maxim ("count first, feel later" is pull-quote-shaped and already sits on the tic audit's default-elegant watch list) plus a self-caption of his own behavior — Theo narrating his hands' policy is the character watching himself feel (§6 bans that family), and his card bars polished aphorisms. — ORDER: REPLACE (cut sentence).
Rest of P1 HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card, interiority rhythm — strongest remaining candidate checked: "She had packed these to survive a route she had also arranged, and none of the route was him." Rewrite tested: "and none of it went through him" — worse: blurs the referent and severs the setup for his L53 "I'm done being the route." The route/route repetition inside the sentence is plain-register noun repetition, not elegant echo; the being-vs-path conflation is the boundary speech's fuel. Rewrite loses fidelity; original stands.

**P2 (L5, "He had the 1994 in both hands...")**
DRIFTED — original: "his thumbs kept checking the headcap anyway because they didn't know what else to be." — binding-register version: "his thumbs kept checking the headcap anyway because there was nothing else for them to do." — Preserves the displaced-grief beat and the irony of "a book his own carefulness had carried into June's apartment," which stays: the care-move-as-harm irony is card-mandated. Removes the poetic elevation of "to be" and one instance of the hands-as-independent-agents device, which runs five deep in this chapter (P1, P2, L49, L91, L103) against a hands ledger already at 16 gate hits. — ORDER: REPLACE.

**P3 (L7, shelf)** — HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card (cataloguer specificity) — binding-register rewrite is worse because: "a clean stripe on the steel where nine spines had kept the dust off... and a dustless nothing since the nineteenth of November" plained to "a bare stripe since November 19" deletes the dust logic (the stripe is the absence's evidence) and the dated wound. "He knew what the acknowledgments page said. June knew. Odile knew." is the repaired knowledge-state list; smoothing it back toward flow re-installs the philosopher line the tic audit cut.

**P4 (L9, eight/nine gap)** — HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card (risk calculation) — rewrite is worse because: "Eight books did not fill a nine-book gap" is ledger arithmetic anchored to the plot, and the unlogged-first-return explanation is pure procedure; any translation deletes the bookkeeping-honesty information the chapter trades on. Gate-tested the arithmetic line: dies out of context; not a maxim.

**P5 (L11, loan sheet)**
DRIFTED — original: "he didn't have to check the date because some dates filed themselves." — binding-register version: "he didn't have to check the date for that one." — Preserves the fact that 11/22 is seared in (the "for that one" isolation does the work) and the whole accuracy passage around it. Removes a clerical metaphor in narration ("dates filing themselves") from a family the ledger has repeatedly repaired to zero (Ch13 "clerical/legal narration figures: 0 after repair"; Ch18 standing order: no ledger-figure narration) and an aphorism-adjacent portable shape. — ORDER: REPLACE.
Remainder HOLDS — echo-gate-tested "That was accurate. It was accurate on purpose, from her end, and he made himself write it accurately from his" (accurate ×3): each instance shifts referent — fact, then her intent, then his discipline; the flattened rewrite ("That was accurate, and he matched it") loses the third term, which is the paragraph's actual event. Cleared as transformative.

**P6 (L13, phone reflex)** — HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card (performs usefulness, then stops hiding) — rewrite is worse because: the fully-formed unsent text ("All eight arrived safe. Nothing damaged.") is the caretaking reflex rendered as a concrete object; narrating "he almost texted her" loses what he didn't send. "for a moment" is a lone watch-tier hit, licensed.

**D1 (L15–33, catalog-arrival exchange)** — conversation form; checked against Odile's own form sample, not literary clarity.
HOLDS for all speech — sample compared: Odile dialogue spec ("If praise would help, I would give it. It would not."). "I opened the door. There was nothing to sign." and "I sent you for nine catalogs" sit exactly at her modal mass — correction as content. "Anyone with a library card could have read it to you" is her one high-density line in the exchange, inside her license and the post-repair ceiling; no new zinger may be added in revision. Plain-speech floor met and followable: Theo asks whether she engineered it; she concedes the page placement and refuses the comfort.
DRIFTED (narration inside L33) — original: "'No,' she said, and drank her coffee, and did not claim it was." — binding-register version: "'No,' she said, and drank her coffee." — Preserves her refusal and composure (the coffee does it). Removes a narration caption on her speech content: her "No" already concedes it is not an answer, so "did not claim it was" re-states the dialogue as narrator wit — under the §2/§6 zero-tolerance rule any narration about speech is a defect, and this is the chapter's one instance. — ORDER: REPLACE (cut clause).
Also checked L21 "she looked back at him with no more preparation than she gave a wall" — demeanor, not speech; reread-consistent (she is not caught out because she has known all along); the plain rewrite ("she looked back at him calmly") is measurably worse on reread fidelity. HOLDS.

**D2 (L35–51, true-partial confession)** — conversation form. Highest-risk #2a.
HOLDS throughout — samples compared: Odile dialogue spec + §2 plain-speech anchor ("So if you quit, I lose the class." / "Yes."). This is the exchange most likely to have been over-polished, and generative comparison says it is not: "I wrote that page. I paid the printer." is material deflection (card: "she deflects materially"); "It was partly your fault." / "Partly mine," she said is anchor-grade plain speech — echo-gate-tested: the repetition reassigns the fault between speakers, fully transformative, and the flattened "It was both our faults" destroys the apportioning the chapter card requires ("Odile refuses false comfort"). "I stopped waiting." is spec-register. "Eat before you decide anything else about yourself." gate-tested: matches the named calibration sample "Eat. Then decide to be tragic." nearly move for move — in-register by sample. Theo's "I need you to tell me it wasn't my fault" is card-allowed plainness and the exchange's floor line; "Did you want her to find it, or did you want me to finally say it, and she was just in the path?" is followable as text and states both hypotheses without decoding. Narration L49 ("He noticed his hands had picked up the utility knife... folding the blade in, folding it out") is one of the two licensed hands-agency instances (card stress tell: performs competence); with P1/P2/P20 repaired, the family drops to two. Confirmed against the card's dialogue-risk rule: Odile never claims ignorance anywhere in D1–D3 — her closest approach, "I put that page where you would find it. On purpose," is an admission, not innocence.

**D3 (L53–59, boundary + initials)** — conversation form. Highest-risk #2b.
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo dialogue spec ("I said boss because it was true. It just wasn't the whole truth.") — under pressure he "goes very plain": "I'm keeping the keys... That's the job, and I'm good at it, and I want it. But I'm done being the route." Binding rewrite tested: "I'm done carrying things you won't say" — worse: more quotable, less literal; "the route" is the chapter's own established noun. "you're going to ask them, out loud, with your own mouth" is angry-plain, not fake-sharp. Odile's "You will be less convenient." is her spec register exactly — insult as acceptance — and her wordless counter-signature ("O.M., small and square," the clipboard "one degree straighter than he'd left it") is material deflection and a reread plant. One echo order arises at the L115 reprise, below.

### Section 2 — fear canvas

**P7 (L63, soup and work)**
DRIFTED — original: "Then he worked, because the building didn't stop needing things just because he had opinions about needing." — binding-register version: "Then he worked. There was a pallet of frame stock to break down and a humidity log to fill in..." — Preserves the he-works-anyway beat (the task list states it) and the paragraph's real cargo: the half-inch-low wire and "Fixing it would have meant standing in front of it." Removes a narrator-as-philosopher clause (the needing/needing polish; the tic audit names this exact tendency for this chapter) that Theo's card bars. — ORDER: REPLACE.
Gate-tested "Fixing it would have meant standing in front of it": anchored to a specific wire on a specific wall; unquotable without the canvas; cleared.

**P8 (L65, stepladder)** — HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card (performs competence: drill and D-ring as alibi) — rewrite is worse because: the self-deception is rendered entirely through objects and there is no abstraction to remove. Note: the paragraph closes on "the drill stayed in his pocket," which is why P10 cannot also say it.

**P9 (L67, fear-canvas description)** — Highest-risk #3.
DRIFTED — original: "And in the upper right, where a window would go if the painting were merciful, she had put his twelve-by-sixteen." — binding-register version: "And in the upper right, where a window would have gone, she had put his twelve-by-sixteen." — Preserves the compositional fact and the cruelty of the placement; the reader sees no-exit-except-the-blank-panel without help. Removes "if the painting were merciful" — mercy attributed to the canvas is literary-essay editorializing inside Theo's close-third; his card bars art-oracle framing, and June's painting should be allowed to be merciless without the narration saying so. — ORDER: REPLACE.
Remainder HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card + §8 smallness test — rewrite is worse because: "jars in a row, the paper towel roll seated on its dowel, a filled nail hole a shade off from the wall around it" cannot be plained without deleting information; "she had actually found the filled nail hole and given it four square inches" is the card's delayed-recognition rhythm; "loaded the white with enough yellow that it read as lit from somewhere" is craft-true. Gate-tested "a small clean rectangle of nothing that the hands in the foreground were too busy to walk toward": a reading of painted content, not a portable claim — cleared, but it makes P10's restatement redundant.

**P10 (L69, "He stood there with a drill in his pocket...")**
DRIFTED — original: "He stood there with a drill in his pocket, having taken the painting down in order to service its hardware, and saw the bright twelve-by-sixteen sitting beyond the reach of both painted hands." — binding-register version: cut the paragraph. — Preserves: everything; P8 already closed on the drill staying in the pocket, P9 already placed the blank panel beyond the busy hands, and P11 delivers the diagnosis. This paragraph only re-states both, and its one new element — "having taken the painting down in order to service its hardware" — is performed irony, the narrator nudging the reader about a joke the objects already made. Removes a full paragraph of self-aware restatement between image and recognition that blunts P11's landing. — ORDER: CUT.

**P11 (L71, "Fear of what, had been the assignment...")** — the diagnosis naming.
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card operation snapshot ("a man who can run a room without standing in it as himself"). "She had painted a man maintaining the perimeter of a room so that he would never be required to stand in the middle of it" is the chapter's strongest aphorism candidate and was tested hard at the gate: it is quotable-shaped, but (a) its grammatical subject is the canvas — "She had painted a man..." describes painted content, not free-floating life-wisdom; (b) this is §2's naming-is-the-event exception — the recognition is the scene's action; (c) it matches the voice-card snapshot nearly term for term, i.e., it is the calibrated reading of this character, not new coinage. The de-quotablized rewrite ("She had painted a man who kept to the edges of rooms") loses "required," which carries his whole alibi structure — measurably worse on fidelity. Cleared, contingent on P10's cut so the insight lands once, not three times. "hung it above the flat files and walked under it forty times" is concrete cost; nothing to translate.

**P12 (L73, rehang)** — HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card — rewrite is worse because: re-hanging the canvas and leaving the wire low is the choice rendered as hardware, the transformative inverse of P7's avoidance beat; and the reach behind the backing boards is pure staging.

### Section 3 — the portrait

**P13 (L77, glassine and origin)** — Highest-risk #4a.
APHORISM-GATE (the paragraph's only defect) — original: "because a man who paints a woman he is pretending to date, from memory, without telling her, does not get to call it a study out loud." — the generic-man armature ("a man who X does not get to Y") is a portable-maxim shape, epigraph-cadenced — exactly what the gate exists for. — binding-register version: "because he had painted a woman he was pretending to date, from memory, without telling her, and he had known better than to call it a study out loud." — Preserves every indicting clause and the self-judgment; removes only the third-person-generic mounting that makes it pull-quotable. — ORDER: de-quotablize (REPLACE as above).
Rest HOLDS — "scarf knotted low and slipping left, head half turned back into the room" is voice-card June through Theo's memory; "in a state he had refused at the time to name" respects the interiority discipline by noting the non-naming rather than naming.

**P14 (L79)** — HOLDS — one sentence of looking before touching; nothing to translate.

**P15 (L81, door angle)** — Highest-risk #4b.
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card (hinge-spec register; "he knows where every key is"). Full generative comparison run: "He had painted the door too far open. It had been half open, her hand on it, undecided." — measurably worse on all three axes: density (loses "a generous welcoming angle that made the whole picture a frame around her," which states what the flattery did compositionally), drama (loses "a door that could complete its swing in either direction," the paragraph's engine), fidelity (the original is already his register — carpentry as moral audit). Gate-tested "He had flattered the moment into an invitation. It had been a maybe.": "a maybe" cannot travel without the door; "flattered" is one word doing the confession. Cleared.

**P16 (L83, hair edge stopped)** — HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card — rewrite is worse because: "Bare ground, a cowardly inch of nothing" plained to "he had left it blank" deletes the verdict; "admitting how closely he had been looking" is the confession the whole portrait section turns on. Noted at the echo gate: "getting that edge right would have meant admitting..." repeats P7's "X would have meant Y" template — transformed (wire→avoidance; edge→confession), cleared at two; Ch22 must not extend it.

**P17 (L85, fixing the door)**
VERBATIM-ECHO (see gate section) — "It made the picture harder to look at. He kept it." collides with P18's "He kept it because he had it." two sentences later. — ORDER: vary (Echo #1).
Otherwise HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card — rewrite is worse because: "he narrowed the angle until the geometry said what the night had said" is earned by the carpentry inventory before it (the reveal, the switch plate, the strike plate's vertical gleam); the plain "until the angle was right" deletes the standard he is holding himself to — memory over mercy.

**P18 (L87, hair edge painted)** — HOLDS aside from the echo order — sample compared: Theo voice card + §8 smallness test — rewrite is worse because: "he was not going to invent a cheekbone he'd never witnessed just to close a shape" is the consent ethic stated as craft procedure; "So he painted the light doing that" is process, not figure. Tested "from paint to glow to gone" for alliterative performance: the plain "from paint to glow to nothing" is not measurably better and loses the edge-death sequence a painter would track; cleared, but Ch22 should not multiply this triple shape. "the scarf knot got its half hour" and "He kept it because he had it" carry the witnessed-only rule.

**P19 (L89, stepped back)**
DRIFTED — original: "When he stepped back the panel stood as a finished thing. The door stayed half open. The unpainted cheek stayed unpainted." — binding-register version: "When he stepped back it was finished. The door stayed half open. The cheek stayed bare ground." — Preserves the completion beat, both withholdings, and the structural door/cheek parallel ("stayed/stayed" mirrors the two fixes). Removes "stood as a finished thing" (object-dignity elevation) and the unpainted/unpainted tautology — a designed epigraph-cadence closing triplet, against a voice card that bars polished shapes. "Bare ground" is a transformative callback to P16: the same inch, cowardice recharacterized as choice. — ORDER: REPLACE.

**P20 (L91, glassine reach)**
DRIFTED — original: "The glassine lay open beside the easel. His hands went toward the top fold before he stopped them." — binding-register version: "The glassine lay open beside the easel. He started to fold it back over the panel and stopped." — Preserves the re-hiding temptation intact. Removes the third surplus instance of hands-acting-without-him; with P1 and P2 repaired, the device keeps its two licensed stress-tell instances (L49 knife, L103 thumbs) and stops being a chapter-wide tic against a 16-hit hands ledger. — ORDER: REPLACE.

**P21 (L93, label and faced-to-wall)** — Highest-risk #4c, the consent paragraph.
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card (cataloguer's hand as love language; straightens labels). Full generative comparison run: the paragraph is already the binding-register version — pencil, stretcher bar, the label text itself ("Study - J. Park - begun wk 3, finished 12/4 - T. Brennan"), and the consent logic stated as pure placement: "the labeled bar outward where anyone walking through the stockroom could read exactly what was there and no one could see it." Every translation attempt ("declared but not displayed"; "honest but private") converts placement back into thesis — the exact drift the earlier repair batch cut ("only honest object" et al., confirmed absent). "He did not put it in a crate." is the plain-register close. Confirmed: no "keeping its own counsel," no object agency, no apology-object framing — the card's rule that the portrait is offered after the Ch22 apology, not as the apology, is respected because here it is not offered at all.

### Section 4 — texts and shutdown

**P22 (L97, brushes and the phone)** — HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card — tested "the phone, which had been in his coat by the door for twelve hours saying nothing" for personification: "saying nothing" is literal (no messages) and the twelve-hour count is his cataloguer clock; the umber-to-gray-to-clear wash water is process, not mood-weather. Rewrite adds nothing and removes the clock.

**P23 (L99)** — HOLDS — drying his hands and working paint out from under the thumbnail before touching the screen is the care register at its most material; nothing to translate.

**P24 (L101, his message)** — documentary form; checked only against its own form sample (Ch18/Ch20 thread register). HOLDS — also matches the chapter card's dialogue rule ("Theo asks June plainly and briefly"): "Can we talk? Sonia's. You pick the day and time and I'll be there." is ask, venue, and ceded control in three moves — no managing, no case-building. Not plain-translated further per form rule.

**P25 (L103, the deletion)** — Highest-risk #5a.
HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card ("qualifies when guilty, then forces himself plain"). Full generative comparison run: the drafted-and-killed "If you'd rather not, I completely under" cut off mid-word is the qualify-reflex caught in the act; the binding-register alternative (narrating "he almost added a way out and didn't") is measurably worse on drama (loses the visible mid-word kill) and fidelity (tells the reflex instead of showing its corpse). "his thumbs started the next part on their own" is the second licensed hands-agency instance — the typing reflex is the message's whole danger — retained by design after the P1/P2/P20 repairs. The consent logic is clean and un-narrated: he gives her the choice of day and time rather than pre-forgiving a refusal; deleting the pre-forgiveness is his new boundary applied to himself, shown not captioned.

**P26 (L105, the wait)** — HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card (risk calculation, set down). Gate-tested "The wait was terrible in an ordinary way.": no general claim; "ordinary" only means something against his usual contingency-building, which the next sentence names and renounces — anti-melodrama register work, not a maxim. "Each time he set it down like the drill" is transformative reuse of the P8 object. "contingencies for each of her possible openings" is the card's planning idiom being renounced in real time — the chapter card's "he must wait without managing," rendered.

**P27 (L107)** — HOLDS — finishing seating the brush, bristles up, before looking is the discipline as action; nothing to remove.

**P28 (L109, her reply)** — documentary form. HOLDS — sample compared: June dialogue spec (compresses when exposed). "Sunday. 9. Just coffee." — three fragments: terms set, scope capped. Her card's shape verbatim. Not translated per form rule.

**P29 (L111)** — HOLDS — echo-gate-tested "He read it four times" against P25's "He read it over once": transformative asymmetry — his own message once, hers four; the imbalance is the information. Gate-tested "he was not going to spend them building anything": anchored to the renounced preparations; cleared.

**P30 (L113)**
DRIFTED — original: "*Okay,* he typed, and sent it, and that was all." — binding-register version: "*Okay,* he typed, and sent it." — Preserves the one-word answer and the shutdown that follows. Removes "and that was all" — narration certifying his own restraint, i.e., announcing the care move, which §5 bans ("use, vary, don't announce"); the next paragraph's routine already proves the restraint. — ORDER: REPLACE (cut clause).

**P31 (L115, shutdown)**
VERBATIM-ECHO (see gate section) — "*O.M.* square and small beside his own writing" flips L59's "small and square" without transformation. — ORDER: vary (Echo #2).
Otherwise HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card (checks locks, initials logs) — rewrite is worse because: the loan sheet "with every column full for the first time in two weeks" closes the ledger plot materially, and the study "stretcher bar out, pencil label legible from the doorway, painted side against the brick" restates the consent state as pure object inventory.

**P32 (L117, final image)** — HOLDS — sample compared: Theo voice card operation snapshot + §4 hands motif (this close is the chapter's one sanctioned hands foreground). Full generative comparison run: "walked home through the cold with his keys in his pocket and both hands empty" — rewrite tested: "walked home in the cold, carrying nothing" — measurably worse on all axes: "keys in his pocket" is the kept job (his D3 sentence made keys mean exactly that), "both hands empty" is the resigned route (no box, no delivery, no cargo). The image is the boundary restated as inventory and dies out of context. Cold is literal December (temperature-watch cleared in tics). Gate-cleared: an image, not a maxim.

## Aphorism Gate (zero tolerance)

1. APHORISM-GATE — "count first, feel later" — colon-mounted portable maxim in the opening paragraph; already on the tic audit's default-elegant watch list. — ORDER: cut the carrier sentence (P1 order; the paragraph performs the sequence without it).
2. APHORISM-GATE — "a man who paints a woman he is pretending to date, from memory, without telling her, does not get to call it a study out loud" — generic-man epigraph armature. — ORDER: de-quotablize to close-third (P13 rewrite above).

Strongest candidates considered and cleared, with reasons:

- "She had painted a man maintaining the perimeter of a room so that he would never be required to stand in the middle of it." — subject is the canvas (painted content, not free wisdom); §2 naming-is-the-event exception; matches the calibrated voice-card snapshot. Cleared contingent on the P10 cut so it lands once.
- "Eat before you decide anything else about yourself." — matches the named Odile calibration sample "Eat. Then decide to be tragic."; her license, at ceiling; add nothing near it.
- "Eight books did not fill a nine-book gap." — ledger arithmetic; dies out of context.
- "Fixing it would have meant standing in front of it." — anchored to a specific wire; unquotable without the canvas.
- "It had been a maybe." — unquotable without the door.
- "The wait was terrible in an ordinary way." — no general claim; meaning depends on the renounced contingencies.
- "with his keys in his pocket and both hands empty" — chapter-bound image, not maxim.

Enforced by absence (must not re-enter in revision): "only honest object," "thirty-nine years... design," "I got tired before you got brave," "Put it on my side of the ledger" — all confirmed absent from the current text per prior repairs.

## Verbatim-Echo Gate

1. VERBATIM-ECHO — "It made the picture harder to look at. He kept it." (P17) / "He kept it because he had it." (P18) — same finite clause twice in ~60 words; the second instance is the load-carrying one (his witnessed-only rule). — ORDER: vary P17 to "It made the picture harder to look at. He left it that way." so P18's sentence stands alone.
2. VERBATIM-ECHO — "she wrote her own initials, *O.M.*, small and square" (L59) / "*O.M.* square and small beside his own writing" (L115) — inverted but non-transformative descriptor pair; the reprise needs the initials, not the adjectives. — ORDER: L115 → "*O.M.* beside his own writing."

Strongest candidates considered and cleared:

- "It was partly your fault." / "Partly mine." — between speakers, fully transformative: the repetition reassigns the fault; this is the plain-speech anchor doing its job.
- "accurate / accurate / accurately" (P5) — each instance shifts referent (fact → her intent → his discipline); the third is the paragraph's event.
- "You sent me for those." / "I sent you for nine catalogs." — correction-as-content, Odile's spec register.
- "route... route" (P1) and "the route" (L53) — plain-register noun repetition feeding a paid-off setup; flagged only for Ch22 non-inheritance.
- "would have meant" template (P7, P16) — transformed across objects; capped at two, none in Ch22.
- "He read it over once." / "He read it four times." — the asymmetry is the information.
- "June knew. Odile knew." — knowledge-state list installed by prior repair; not echo-poetics.

## Order summary

9 REPLACE/CUT + 2 Aphorism-Gate + 2 Verbatim-Echo = **13 distinct orders.**

1. P1 — cut "That was the order his hands did things in: count first, feel later." (= Aphorism Gate #1)
2. P2 — "...because there was nothing else for them to do."
3. P5 — "he didn't have to check the date for that one."
4. D1/L33 — cut ", and did not claim it was."
5. P7 — cut "because the building didn't stop needing things just because he had opinions about needing."
6. P9 — "where a window would have gone."
7. P10 — cut the paragraph.
8. P13 — de-quotablize the "a man who paints..." sentence to close-third. (= Aphorism Gate #2)
9. P17 — "He left it that way." (= Verbatim-Echo #1)
10. P19 — "When he stepped back it was finished. The door stayed half open. The cheek stayed bare ground."
11. P20 — "He started to fold it back over the panel and stopped."
12. P30 — cut "and that was all."
13. P31/L115 — "*O.M.* beside his own writing." (= Verbatim-Echo #2)

## Chapter verdict

**DRIFT-FOUND** — 13 orders. The chapter's spine holds under generative comparison against the named samples: the confrontation dialogue, the fear-canvas reading, the door/hair/label/faced-to-wall sequence, and both text messages are already at binding register. The drift is concentrated where this draft's documented tendency lives — narration polishing Theo's interiority into portable shapes (P1, P5, P7, P13, P19), narrator wit about speech and about its own irony (L33, P10), and residual echo-poetics (P17/P18, L59/L115). All 13 orders are local REPLACE/CUT; none require re-scening.
