# Plain-Translation Audit — Chapter 16: What Your Partner Is Afraid Of

Target: `output/chapters/chapter_16.md` (post-integration revised text). Stance: generative-not-evaluative; every paragraph below was rewritten against its named binding sample and the rewrite compared on information density, dramatic content, and binding-standard fidelity. Samples used by name: **Theo close-third sample** (steadier syntax, logistical tenderness, concrete object/accounting thought, competence wobbling under pressure, no narrator-as-therapist gloss), **June dialogue sample** (clipped, optical, plain under pressure, self-protective but followable jokes), **Odile dialogue sample** (economical material orders, insults as diagnoses, logistics carrying meaning, never oracle speech or sentence diagnosis), **Cohort sample** (one practical/social care move per character, no chorus commentary).

## Locked text

- `LOCKED — skipped, listed under calibration's inviolable text` — chapter title `What Your Partner Is Afraid Of`.
- Assignment card (`*~~Paint the fear they can explain.~~ Paint what your partner is afraid of. If you use a symbol, make it carry its own chair.*`) — audited per the calibration's allowance before locking. Compared against the Odile dialogue sample: the struck first draft is her sanctioned card-correction tic; "make it carry its own chair" is a material order (a symbol must do furniture-level work in the room), not oracle speech, and the chair noun pays off in both the chair-count thread and June's fourteen-chairs canvas. No register failure found. `LOCKED` — remains an Odile card.

## Per-paragraph comparisons

1. `HOLDS — "Theo. You're famous," Mara said, and Theo lost his count at eleven...` (lines 5–9) — sample compared: Theo close-third sample + Cohort sample (Mara). Binding-register rewrite attempted: *"Mara came in with a flyer and showed it to Theo while he was counting chairs."* The rewrite is worse because: it loses the interrupted count (Theo's competence wobbling registered in his own accounting unit, not in mood), loses "the way you'd hand someone their own mail" (his domestic-logistics parsing of public exposure — already at the chapter's recognitional-simile cap of 1/1 per the comedy audit, not over), and loses "keeping him from a curb" (the kiss re-described in care-logistics, the only register Theo has for it). Density and drama both drop; fidelity to the Theo sample drops with them.

2. `HOLDS — "Priya printed forty," Mara said...` through the Sam table-drag (lines 11–19) — sample compared: Cohort sample. Rewrite attempted: collapsing the four arrivals into summary (*"The others arrived and set out the flyers near the door."*). Worse because: each arrival is a distinct owned care move — Priya's banker's box with clementines, Ben's three-zone route, Sam dragging the table six inches — and the summary converts four characterized moves into chorus behavior, which is exactly what the Cohort sample forbids. The recount beat ("counted fourteen chairs, distrusted the number, and counted again. The second count was still fourteen") was checked as a possible flattening target: it is the executed repair of the comedy audit's order 1 (correct count, broken trust in it) and carries information the plain version ("he counted the chairs again") deletes.

3. `HOLDS — The assignment cards were already out...` (line 21) — sample compared: Cohort sample (Luis, Priya). Rewrite attempted: *"Luis read his card without comment. Priya read hers and looked worried for June."* Worse because: "quietly moved the clementines to June's station" is Priya's entire reading of the fear card rendered as a material act; naming the worry converts a care move into chorus commentary. Luis's "began squeezing out paint without comment" is already the binding version of itself.

4. `HOLDS — June came in at 6:54...` / the "Okay" exchange (lines 23–29) — sample compared: June dialogue sample. Rewrite attempted: *"'It's a difficult assignment,' June said. 'I don't want to do it, but I understand it.'"* Worse on every axis: June's actual lines ("It's a clear assignment." / "I hate it. It's clear.") are clipped, plain under pressure, and the repetition of `clear` is her card-true compression — the rewrite adds syllables and removes the self-protective flatness. The umber mark "five days old now and apparently permanent by choice" was tested for trim; cutting it deletes continuity information (Ch14 jar refusal) and Theo's dry inventory register at once.

5. `HOLDS — Odile came out of the back at seven exactly...` (lines 31–35) — sample compared: Odile dialogue sample. The rules speech is already economical material order: poses, easels, photographs, props, "Paint through it. Leave the wrong where I can find it. Two hours." Rewrite attempted: removing the palette-knife tip-in and "as if the evening were about jars." Worse because: the knife turned tip-in is logistics carrying meaning (her care arriving as safety correction, no comment), and the jars clause is Theo's earned reading of her engineered indifference — eight jars, one per student, is reread-consistent conducting rendered through literal objects. The jars clause was the closest call in the chapter's narration (caption-shaped); it survives because the irony belongs to Theo's knowledge, the object is class material, and the plain version ("she decanted medium into eight jars") loses the only signal that Theo notices her not-watching.

6. `HOLDS — The partners split. That was the mechanics of it...` (line 37) — sample compared: Theo close-third sample. Rewrite attempted: *"The easels were turned away from each other. Theo set up across the room from June."* Worse because: "everyone's back to the person they knew best in the room" and "twenty feet and Ben's easel between them" carry the assignment's mechanics as spatial accounting — Theo's native unit — and "for the first time in six weeks he could not see what she was doing at all" is plain dramatic information the rewrite blurs.

7. `HOLDS — He started with what he knew: her lease ended...` (line 39) — sample compared: Theo close-third sample. Highest-risk clause: "he had kept the fact as if correct custody could make it harmless." Rewrite attempted: *"he had remembered it and done nothing with it."* The rewrite is worse because "correct custody" is archive vocabulary — Theo's literal job applied to a person, which is the chapter's diagnosis performed rather than stated; the plain version states it. The boxes/keys/wall inventory ("packed to different depths because nobody packs evenly") is concrete object thought; the rewrite cannot improve its density.

8. `HOLDS — The painting could hang in any hallway. That was the problem...` (line 41) — sample compared: Theo close-third sample. Rewrite attempted: *"The painting was competent and anonymous. He had painted leaving, not June's fear."* Worse because: the original gets there through the keys-repainting loop ("he repainted the keys three times, the keys were fine"), which is avoidance made visible in paint — cutting it removes the chapter's competence-wobble dial. "He had painted leaving, not June's fear" was checked against the banned not-X-but-Y false-profound family: the contrast here is a genuine factual diagnosis with both terms on the canvas, not a profundity shape. "kept the steps and missed the work she lost" decodes fully in the next paragraph; the plain version pre-explains and kills the recap's arrival.

9. `HOLDS — Week 5. The memory paintings...` (line 43) — sample compared: Theo close-third sample (documentary recall inside close-third). Rewrite attempted: compressing the priming sequence to *"she had painted over her own best wall for the job."* Worse on all three axes: the green/orange interval, dead-salmon bleed-through, second coat, Decorator's White, and the outlet plate are the paint-process details the calibration forbids smoothing into generic emotional language, and the sequence is the material June's canvas-reading depends on in line 65. "Almost fond. A thing that happened in a room once." was tested as gloss: it records how the Week 5 painting framed the memory (object, not speech) and is the hinge the fear-version turns on.

10. `HOLDS — Theo stood in front of his boxes...` / the repaint (lines 45–47) — sample compared: Theo close-third sample. "The real wall had been waiting in the wrong pile" was tested for object-agency drift (a flagged spent family): "pile" is filing vocabulary, the agency is Theo's misfiling, not the wall's will; rewrite (*"He had filed the real wall wrong"*) is flatter without being safer. The repaint paragraph is paint-process throughout (wet edge, roller's width, bleed-through, the loaded roller); per the calibration lock on process detail, no plain translation is admissible, and none would carry the boxes-ghosting-under-the-wall image that the critique circle needs.

11. `HOLDS — His hand shook enough to show in the outlet screws...` (line 49) — sample compared: Theo close-third sample. Competence wobble is rendered in craft failures (salmon too pink twice, complement-graying "like a first-year," the caught palette cup) — exactly the sample's dial. Highest-risk run: "the wrong fear was still down there, the easy one, the one you could explain to a stranger. The real one went over it." Rewrite attempted: *"the wrong fear was still down there. The real one went over it."* The rewrite is worse because the "explain" clause is the struck card line ("Paint the fear they can explain") paying off — the only place the chapter cashes that crossed-out draft — and it stays inside paint-layer logic (down there / over it) rather than therapist gloss. The generic-you is a real cost; it is outweighed by the card link. Recorded as the chapter's nearest interiority miss.

12. `HOLDS — She had painted his hands...` / `It was not cruel. That was the worst part...` (lines 53–57) — sample compared: Theo close-third sample. Rewrite attempted: *"June had painted him doing chores while his own canvas stayed empty."* Catastrophically worse: the original's density (label squared by its bottom corners, fourteen chairs count-visible, the twelve-by-sixteen size right, knuckle scar, flat left thumbnail) is what makes the canvas dangerous instead of thematic, and "the brightest light in the painting fell on the only thing in it he hadn't done" anchors the chapter's one sanctioned light image inside the painted object, not ambient mood. The intra-paragraph doubling ("the single thing… no hand had reached" → "the only thing in it he hadn't done") was tested as redundancy: the second instance converts description to indictment, a real transformation; cleared. "It was not cruel. That was the worst part." is allowed plainness, not gloss. Priya's peel stopping mid-tear is the concrete quiet-source the spent-family rule requires.

13. `HOLDS — Then the circle reached his...` through `"It was always yours," Theo said...` (lines 59–71) — sample compared: June dialogue sample + Cohort sample (Luis). Rewrite attempted for June's lines: *"'You understood it was my wall,' she said."* Worse: "You made it mine... The roller. In the memory painting it was just a roller. You made it mine." is optical (she reads the object, not the feeling), and the intra-speech repetition is her compression under exposure — the rewrite names the feeling and breaks the sample. Luis's "You left the underpainting." / "It's better than the assignment" is a material verdict closed by walking away, inside his one-move allowance. "like she'd been handed something heavier than its size" stays in Theo's weight-and-handling unit. (One narration echo in this span is ordered under the Verbatim-Echo Gate below; it is a phrase-level repair, not paragraph drift.)

14. `HOLDS — Odile came around last...` (lines 73–81) — sample compared: Odile dialogue sample. Her full inventory: eight seconds, "Don't touch it again," "You started with furniture," "And you used something she gave the whole class for this," the easel-leg tap (never the canvas), "Varnish neither. They're a pair now. Pairs hang together or they lie." Rewrite attempted: *"'These belong together now,' she said. 'Don't separate them.'"* Worse because: "You started with furniture" is insult-as-diagnosis in three words; "Varnish neither" is a real conservator's order for pendant canvases; and the rewrite's softer phrasing surrenders the pair/couple material clue her card sanctions without gaining clarity. She explains nothing; "for this" stops short of decoding. The aftermath (Ben skipping zone three, Mara's face-in carry, "nobody said *fear*. Theo counted that too") renders rawness through abandoned plans and absent words — the binding mechanism, not a translatable flourish.

15. `HOLDS — He caught June at the supply table...` (lines 83–103) — sample compared: Theo close-third sample + June dialogue sample. Rewrite attempted for Theo's deflection run: *"He almost told her about Odile, then talked about the show instead."* Worse: the original arms the unsaid sentence as an object ("it had gotten very short — *Odile's my aunt* — three words. The tap kept running.") — his confession measured in his accounting unit while a literal tap supplies the time pressure — and his actual spoken lines (chairs in eights, layout, ground at six coats) are usefulness performed as avoidance, which the summary names instead of staging. June's "Okay." / "Okay." compression breaking into her longest line is the sample's pressure-shape exactly. "In paint," he said — tested as a shine candidate: it is the shame itself, a qualification that indicts him, and the narration prices it two paragraphs later.

16. `HOLDS — June closed the brush cloth...` through the close (lines 105–109) — sample compared: Theo close-third sample. Rewrite attempted for the penultimate thought: *"He decided to wait until after the show, and knew he was stalling."* Worse: "He recognized the plan making itself useful and kept it anyway" names his specific pathology (disclosure converted to logistics — catalogs back, hands busy) without nobility or self-condemnation, satisfying the packet's hardest requirement; the rewrite is the therapist version. The closer (lights, front bolt twice, "Odile's keys in his pocket") is flat logistics whose last noun does the thematic work silently — the prior profundity-stamp ending was already cut per the tic audit, and this is the binding version of itself.

## Aphorism Gate (zero tolerance; Odile alone licensed for high-density lines per the style bible)

- `APHORISM-GATE — "Leave the wrong where I can find it." — PASSES` — Odile, inside her license, and not actually portable as wisdom: it is an inspection order with a verified on-page consequence (she finds it — "You started with furniture"; Luis finds it — "You left the underpainting"). The line is the chapter's mechanical premise, not a maxim about life.
- `APHORISM-GATE — "The painting could hang in any hallway." — PASSES` — verdict-shaped, not wisdom-shaped: it rates one specific canvas (the anonymous-competence put-down is working painter idiom) and is immediately consumed by "That was the problem." Out of context it carries no instruction; not epigraph material.
- `APHORISM-GATE — "The real one went over it." — PASSES` — pronoun-dependent fragment; unquotable without its antecedent layers. The portability risk in this run sits in "the one you could explain to a stranger," examined at paragraph 11 above and held for its struck-card payoff.
- `APHORISM-GATE — "Pairs hang together or they lie." — PASSES, narrowly` — the chapter's most pull-quote-shaped line and the one I tried hardest to fail. It survives on the calibration's explicit exception (Odile is the licensed speaker; "best lines, fewest words"), on its material truth (pendant canvases hung apart misrepresent each other — a hanging rule, aimed at the work), and on its sanctioned function (her card names pair/couple drift as a material reread clue; this is that clue, with no wink). The comedy audit's flattening order on the rules speech has been executed, so her aphorism count for the chapter stands at three, within guidance. Any future revision adding a fourth Odile line of this density tips the chapter; the budget is spent.
- `APHORISM-GATE — "Tonight was the most honest you've ever been in this room." — PASSES` — fails the portability test outright: tonight, you, this room are all deictic. It is June's plain-speech-floor sentence — an honest warning delivered straight, her card's licensed move — and it gets answered ("In paint"), so it functions as exchange, not epigraph.
- `APHORISM-GATE — "He recognized the plan making itself useful and kept it anyway." — PASSES` — antecedent-bound ("the plan" = catalogs back, hands busy) and specific to this man's documented mechanism; the mild abstraction-as-agent in "making itself useful" was weighed and tolerated because the sentence refuses both nobility and maxim (it ends on "kept it anyway," a confession of continued failure, which no one would tattoo).
- Sweep residue: "It's better than the assignment" (referential verdict, exits with the speaker), "It was not cruel. That was the worst part." (plain reaction, not portable), "Pairs hang together..." was the strongest candidate overall. No orders.

## Verbatim-Echo Gate

Named-word sweep:

- `clear` — June, line 29, twice in one speech ("It's a clear assignment." / "I hate it. It's clear.") — intra-speaker compression under pressure, transformative (first rates the task, second stands alone as the thing she hates). PASSES.
- `assignment` — cross-speaker at lines 61–63 ("That was the assignment." / "It's better than the assignment.") — checked against the banned paired-echo-confirmation family: this is reversal, not confirmation; the repetition is the pivot of Luis's verdict. PASSES.
- `wall` — high count (lines 39–59) but every instance is the literal referent of one of the four tracked fear objects; referential necessity, not echo. PASSES.
- `fear` — four instances, each transformed (painted object → wrong diagnosis → layer order → absent word at line 81). PASSES.
- `hands` — density is assignment-sanctioned (June's canvas is the Week 4 motif's licensed foreground). One non-transformative echo found — see ORDER 2.
- `count` — four firings, each varied (interrupted, distrusted-though-correct, painted into June's canvas, turned on an absence). PASSES.
- `chairs` — fourteen/eights instances each carry new plot information (promise-keeping, June's canvas, December layout). PASSES.
- `catalogs` — three instances, all advancing the armed thread. PASSES.
- `ground` — technical term, calibration-locked against smoothing; instances are referential (the After Class panel). PASSES.
- `ready` — five instances; the wall "ready for whoever came next" / "a room being made ready" / "It's ready whenever we are" chain is transformative irony (Theo offers June a "ready" ground minutes after painting her fear of rooms made ready), and "He had a sentence ready... He'd had it ready" is anaphora extending the timeframe. PASSES — strongest cleared candidate in the sweep; do not add a sixth instance in revision.

Full-chapter sweep beyond the named list — two failures:

- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "loaded, mid-job, nobody walking away from it" (line 47) / "The roller in the tray with nobody walking away from it." (line 65) — ORDER: vary the second instance.` The six-word phrase repeats verbatim in narration eighteen lines apart, and the second use closes the recognition beat — the narrational equivalent of the banned paired-echo beat-closer. It is non-transformative: the reception work is done by June's spoken lines immediately after ("You made it mine... The roller."). Vary toward the object (e.g. *"The salmon. The roller still loaded in its tray."*) — nothing is lost; June's dialogue carries the transmission.
- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "She'd painted the hands accurately, with the knuckle scar..." (line 57) / "the one that had painted his hands accurately and left the blank ground in the light" (line 101) — ORDER: vary the callback.` Near-verbatim summary echo (the/his), compounding a second recycled image (blank ground in the light, from line 55). The callback's function — identifying June's look with her painting — survives variation into the canvas's sharpest particulars (e.g. *"the one that had gotten the knuckle scar right and hung the bulb over his blank ground"*), which is denser than the summary it replaces. The repetition-as-identity argument was considered and rejected: line 101 paraphrases rather than re-enacts, so verbatim wording buys nothing.

Cleared structural candidate: the outlet-plate pair ("the only thing in the room that had been there the whole time," line 43 / "The only thing in the painting that stayed through every layer," line 47) — deliberate room-to-painting transformation, the chapter's central move; PASSES. The "only/single thing" construction now appears four times in the chapter; revision should not add a fifth.

## Dialogue Diagnosis Gate (zero tolerance)

Swept all speech and all narration about speech. **Zero instances.** Nearest misses, each examined:

- "It's a clear assignment." (line 29) — rates the task's inescapability, not the card's wording. PASSES.
- "You told it that way. I just heard it late." (line 69) — the chapter's closest approach. It locates ownership of the story's content as evidence for "It was always yours" — a fact claim with no craft adjective — and Theo's perceptiveness is carried by what he did with what he heard (the repainting), the rule's prescribed channel. PASSES. Standing advisory reaffirmed: no revision may add a manner-adverb or adjective to this line.
- "they'd all heard the wall story told as a story" (line 59) — categorizes the class's (and Theo's) filing of information, not June's delivery; no rating of phrasing, rhythm, or manner. PASSES.
- "tonight it had gotten very short — *Odile's my aunt* — three words" (line 93) — Theo counting the words of his own unspoken sentence: self-directed, never voiced, and the count is his accounting tic applied to his cowardice, not a caption on anyone's speech. PASSES.
- "whatever she was going to say she didn't say it there" (line 71) — records an omitted action and its audience cost, not the quality of language. PASSES.
- "On the way out, nobody said *fear*." (line 81) — records an absent word; rates no one's phrasing. PASSES.
- Odile's critique lines — every one targets the work or the person ("You started with furniture"), never a sentence. PASSES.

## Chapter verdict

Sixteen paragraphs audited, all HOLD against their named samples; the assignment card and title LOCKED; Aphorism Gate clear with the budget spent; Dialogue Diagnosis Gate clear with one standing advisory; two Verbatim-Echo failures in narration, both phrase-level, both with replacement direction that loses nothing.

**DRIFT-FOUND (2 orders)**
