# Narrator-Publicist Audit — Chapter 17, "The Acknowledgment Page"

**Stance:** Skeptical editor. The chapter is a rupture chapter in June's close third — the highest-risk configuration for this failure, because free indirect fury gives the narrator cover to campaign for the wronged party and to flatten the guilty one. Every clearance below shows its work; nothing passes bare.

**Inputs verified:** chapter text (`output/chapters/chapter_17.md`), voice cards (`output/style_and_voice.md`), reading guide and premise (`premise/READING_GUIDE.md`, `premise/premise.md`), chapter packet (`output/model_prompts/claude/chapter_draft/chapter_17.md`). No calibration notes exist for this chapter.

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## Step 1–2: Narrator descriptions of June and Theo, collected and marker-tested

Every narration-level description of either favored character (appearance, movement, gesture, presence, reputation), with marker sweep:

**Marker 1 (mystique assertions):** No narration claims June or Theo is misunderstood, unreadable, or beyond comprehension. The nearest candidate is "I've been a stranger here the whole time" (line 119) — but it is dialogue, June's own self-mythology, and it is *false against canon* (the cohort adopted her socially; the premise states "the found family was never fake"). The voice card pre-frames exactly this error: "assumes choosing herself requires choosing alone." The book lets her say a wound-distorted thing and does not ratify it in narration. Cleared, with the perceiver named: June, fallible by design.

**Marker 2 (effect-on-others framing):** Strongest candidate examined: "by the weekend people stood in front of that painting twice as long" (line 27) — a generalized crowd reaction, but it grades a *painting*, not a protagonist, and it is a specific event June personally watched at a named occasion ("Once, at a museum, she'd watched two technicians swap out a wall label"). Second candidate: "Sunday dinner waiting on the far side of any disaster" (line 31) — a hypothetical scenario, but hostile rather than admiring, and plainly June's extrapolation (she has known Theo is family for under an hour; she cannot know his Sundays). See the high-risk rulings below. No admiring effect-on-others framing of either lead exists; in-scene reactions are specific and named: "He flinched at the word" (line 103).

**Marker 3 (cosmic-flattery figuration):** None. The chapter's figuration runs consistently *deflationary*: the catalog knocks her hip "like a parcel she was returning" (line 37); she places it "the way stock went back on a shelf" (line 109); his half-truth is "payroll-true, the way the front room of a house is the house" (line 29). Each simile's content is logistics, not specialness. This is the source fix executed correctly.

**Marker 4 (gesture inflation):** Strongest candidate: "in the careful hand of staff, because staff was the label he'd chosen to wear in front of her" (line 29) — handwriting credited with identity-performance. Strip test: a dense residue survives ("He'd logged the catalogs out under her name, `Catalogs (9) – J. Park – out Thurs 11/19`"). The motive-claim is June's reclassification, and Theo confirms it on the page in his own mouth: "I kept not telling you on purpose, every week, because I wanted you in that room" (line 89). Attributed and corroborated. Contrast the chapter's default mode, which refuses to gloss gesture at all: "He took his hands out of his pockets. The keys stayed." (line 87) — no clause telling the reader what the keys mean.

**Marker 5 (adjective campaigning):** Swept narration for mysterious / dangerous / effortless / cool and synonyms. The only evaluative adjective applied to either lead in narration is "careful" (the staff hand, line 29), which characterizes a register of handwriting, not glamour. Theo's entrance is anti-publicity: he comes out carrying "a flattened cardboard box" — recycling, not mystique (line 39). June's approach is tactical, not cool-asserted: "She came up the last three steps so she wouldn't be talking uphill" (line 43).

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## Step 3: Per-line verdicts on the high-risk and admiring lines

- `EARNED — "Same paint. Not one thing on the canvas had moved." (line 27) — the on-page action that backs it: "Once, at a museum, she'd watched two technicians swap out a wall label — *attribution revised*, a name where there hadn't been one"` — attributable perceiver: **June**, via an explicit memory frame with provenance. This is the line likeliest to curdle into authorial thesis, and the chapter inoculates it six lines later: "She set that thought down next to the dimensions of the back-room painting and decided the pile could wait. *She had enough that fit*" (line 33) — the narrator showing, on the page, that June's tidy analogy is *curated*, built by shelving the evidence (Odile naming the shelf; the twelve-by-sixteen) that doesn't fit her grievance. The analogy stays hers and stays marked as partial.

- `EARNED — "Nothing about Theo had moved either... staff was the label he'd chosen to wear in front of her" (line 29) — the on-page action that backs it: "He had keys because his aunt had given him keys. Third shelf, left side... 'Eileen Brennan is my mother. Odile's my aunt.' (line 51) ... 'I kept not telling you on purpose, every week' (line 89)"` — attributable perceiver: **June**. Strip test residue: keys, shelf knowledge, payroll, the log entry — all previously established scene material. The single mind-reading claim (chosen label) is confirmed by Theo's confession in scene, not by narrator fiat.

- `EARNED — "And every Tuesday she had walked into Odile Marchetti's room as a stranger telling a lie that could end her there... and every Tuesday he had walked in beside her telling the same lie with a key ring in his pocket and Sunday dinner waiting on the far side of any disaster." (line 31) — the on-page action that backs it: the spoken, contestable restatement: "Every Tuesday I stood in her room knowing she could throw me out, and you stood in it knowing she couldn't." (line 75), to which Theo begins an objection — "That's not—" (line 73)` — attributable perceiver: **June**. This is the whole-grievance sentence and the closest call in the chapter. Two things keep it focalized rather than thesis: the stakes asserted are canon (premise Turn 3: "she alone risked humiliation while he had a safety net"), and the polished interior version is immediately cashed out as *dialogue Theo is allowed to start disputing* — the narration never adjudicates the dispute. The "Sunday dinner" clause is her invention and reads as her invention. **Guard note for the editor:** this is the one line that converts to PUBLICITY (marker 2, prosecution-inverted) if any future revision loosens the free-indirect frame around it — it must stay inside June's reclassification sequence.

- `EARNED — "Then the facts came, the way she'd known they would, his hands finding his pockets and the keys in them." (line 77) — the on-page action that backs it: "I'll tell her tomorrow morning... You keep the slot... I'll move the pair into storage tonight... I'll redo the labels myself" (line 79)` — attributable perceiver: **June**, and the prediction rests on sixteen chapters of established stress behavior (voice card: "lists facts, tries to solve logistics"), not on asserted acuity. Critically, the chapter then *breaks* her read: Theo abandons the task-seeking and goes plain — "I was scared you'd stop coming. That's the actual reason." (line 89). Her legibility model of him is shown to be good but incomplete, which is the opposite of campaigning for her exactness.

- `EARNED — "The third time she read it the way she checked a measurement she didn't like: each word separately, in order, looking for the error." (line 21) — the on-page action that backs it: "She checked the cover... She checked the colophon and the acknowledgment again. The facts stood where they'd stood the last three times" (line 25)` — attributable perceiver: **June**; the rigor is performed in full on the page before being characterized.

**June flawless-exactness check (focused check 1):** The narrator does not campaign for her as flawlessly exact or morally superior. Evidence checked: narration concedes Theo's defense against her own accusation — "That was probably true, and it changed nothing" (line 65); she concedes her own counterfactual is uncertain — "I would have stopped coming... Probably." (line 91); narration exposes her motivated evidence-curation — "She had enough that fit" (line 33); and her exit line (line 119) is canon-false wound-speak the book's earned-stay thesis (§8, reading guide) exists to correct. She is emotionally correct *and* visibly partial. Held.

**Theo object-lesson check (focused check 2):** Not flattened. He is given a true, ordinary, selfish motive in his own voice (line 89), a defense the narration rates "probably true" (line 65), specific unglossed body behavior (lines 87, 103), and restraint the narration records without comment ("he didn't follow past the second step; she heard him not following, heard the box scrape as he picked it up again," line 121). The narration's one summarizing claim about him is the one he confirms himself. He exits the chapter guilty and dimensional. Held.

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## Step 4: Reading-guide narrator stance

`premise/READING_GUIDE.md` §1–2 declares close third past, dual POV, with June-chapter interiority running "perception first, judgment second, self-rebuke third." No publicist-by-design narrator is declared, so no finding could be excused as narrator characterization — every clearance above instead rests on attribution to June plus on-page fallibility framing, which §2's interiority discipline and the voice card's "what she gets wrong" entries supply. The packet's metaphor directive ("a label changing... recategorizing a room") sanctions the wall-label analogy as the chapter's single comparison family, and the chapter keeps it to that family.

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## Chapter verdict

`CRITICAL-DISTANCE-HELD`

Most admiring surviving line: *"The third time she read it the way she checked a measurement she didn't like: each word separately, in order, looking for the error."* (line 21) — earned by the action it describes, performed in full on the page (three readings, then cover, colophon, and acknowledgment re-checked, line 25); perceiver: June's own procedural habit, shown before characterized.

**REVISION ORDERS:** None — zero PUBLICITY lines found. One standing guard for the editor stage, attached to its line above: the grievance sentence (line 31) is load-marked as focalized June and must not be detached from her reclassification sequence in any future cut; restated as narration-fact, it becomes a marker-2 finding.

`CRITICAL-DISTANCE-HELD`
