The audit spec, chapter text, snapshots, reading guide, and both repair memos are read. The three repaired sites are all verified in the current text. Here is the completed audit document:

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# Narrator-Publicist Final Verification — Chapter 19

id: narrator_publicist | owner: claude | tier: risk | round: final (post-repair)
Chapter: `output/chapters/chapter_19.md` ("Empty Side", Theo POV)
Prior repairs consulted for context only: `chapter_19.narrator_publicist_repair_memo.md`, `chapter_19.plain_translation_repair_memo.md`. All findings below are made against the current text, not the memos' claims.

## Narrator-stance check (reading guide)

Guide §1 declares close third past, dual POV, no unreliable or publicist narrator by design — so publicity findings stand at full strength; there is no "narrator-as-characterization" excuse available. §2 binds interiority to action/object/dialogue and bans dialogue diagnosis; §5 bans captioning care moves ("it was these little things that…"); §6 bans characters watching themselves feel things; §8 requires the blind-POV test. Consequence for this audit: any close-third self-appraisal by Theo counts as a finding unless the chapter itself frames it critically, and any cohort care move narrated with motive or generalized benefit is a captioned care move and a publicity hit.

## Per-line verdicts

Every narrator description of Theo and the favored cohort (Odile, Mara, Luis, Priya, Ben, Ruth, Sam) was collected and tested against markers 1–5. Admiring or borderline lines get formal verdicts; the pure-action sweep follows.

- `EARNED — "the bones of a room he could have drawn with the lights off" (¶37) — the on-page action that backs it: "Theo found theirs by size before he read the tape on the back" (¶5) and the whole opening sequence — easels flush, jars filled on habit, warm water "because the pipes ran cold by seven" (¶7). Perceiver: Theo, close third. The chapter also frames the competence critically rather than admiringly — "before he noticed what he had done" (¶5), "before he could decide otherwise" (¶7) render the room-knowledge as compulsion, which is the wound his voice card assigns him, not a credential.`

- `EARNED — "The drawing was sound. The room was recognizable, the values honest, the big shapes placed by seven weeks of Tuesdays. It was a good beginning, and from this side there was no missing what it was a beginning of." (¶71) — this is the marker-5 risk line of the chapter: close-third self-appraisal in evaluative adjectives. It passes on both required grounds. Attribution: the perceiver is Theo, seated in June's spot, and the judgment targets the work in checkable craft terms. Critical framing on the same page: the appraisal pivots immediately to "eight inches of primed ground sat with nothing on it but a stain the size of a thumb" (¶71); his visible failures are kept in the record — the run that crossed the pencil line (¶41), the corrected table line that "dried darker than the rest of the edge" (¶63); and the cohort has already contested what the "good beginning" is a beginning of — "You can't leave it half" (Luis, ¶57), "Everyone counted, Theo… Everyone" (Mara, ¶53). The narrator does not adjudicate between Theo's appraisal and their rebuttal.`

- `EARNED — "He did not hear Odile come up the aisle. He knew she was there because his stool moved." (¶65) — strongest mystique candidate for Odile (marker 1: the unheard approach). Backing action: "She had it by the seat, out from under where he had half been leaning, and she carried it around the table and set it down on the bare side, square to the work. 'From here,' she said." (¶65–67). The not-hearing is Theo's specific absorbed state — he was working the last inch standing, "brush at arm's length" (¶63) — not a generalized stealth claim about her; strip the clause and the entire stool relocation survives as concrete action.`

- `EARNED — "her face reported nothing about any of it" (¶69) — marker-1 candidate (unreadability claim). It is a single specific negative observation by a named in-scene perceiver (Theo, watching her inspect his seam), not a generalized "no one could read her." Backing action: her response arrives as logistics rather than expression — she has just moved his stool to the bare side, and she moves on to "one quiet thing to Ruth that made Ruth take a rag to a corner" (¶69), which is marker 2 satisfied in the correct direction: a named character's specific reaction, not a hypothetical crowd's.`

- `EARNED — "It was going cold and she gave it to him anyway. She went back to her station without explaining it." (¶59, Mara) — the strongest counter-candidate in the narrated-tact class that produced the original Sam finding. Tested and passed: "without explaining it" reports an absence of speech as scene fact; it attributes no motive and generalizes no benefit (contrast the repaired Sam clause, which did both). Strip test: the actions — cup set on the taboret next to his rag, return to station — survive whole. Against Mara's established tic ("explains before asked," voice card), the silence is characterization by action, and the narrator declines to say what the cup means.`

- `EARNED — "It was harder from this side. He did it anyway." (¶73) — faint heroizing rhythm, tested under marker 5. No adjective is asserted about Theo; both sentences are factual, the difficulty is established by prior physical evidence (the shoulder, the wavering line, ¶63), and the choice's merit is left contested — Luis and Mara's objections from ¶51–57 are never overruled by narration.`

Pure-action sweep (no marker hits; the line is its own residue):
- Theo: stool returned to the stack (¶7); catalog spine squared "and stopped there," flyer avoided (¶11); the run wiped and the stain left "small and visible" (¶41) — the narrator preserves his errors; "He wrote her name first. He pressed the tape down with his thumbnail" (¶79) — devotion as uncaptioned fact.
- Sam: doorway survey and snack table move (¶33); rack slot opened, "Got it" (¶75–77).
- Luis: table shifted a hand-width, "Glare" (¶17); jars in the sink, one look at the single stool, "Nobody's going to ask what" (¶51).
- Mara: hooks checked before stations, tray shifted, hands changed (¶13); "I over-bought coffee" (¶15) — tact carried by her dialogue, not by narration.
- Priya: "one plain second" look, dal instruction, palette laid "in the order she always laid it" (¶23–31).
- Ruth: sign-in sheet squared before signing (¶33). Ben: rotation paper refolded "along its existing crease" (¶19) — mildly unflattering, repaired inside the scene by Theo's line, not by the narrator.
- ¶61 ("underpainting a room that was waiting: jars filled, stool turned out… at the angle of someone coming right back") — checked as the surviving half of the former double explanation: the recognition is immediately framed as limitation, "He did not know how to paint the room any other way. He did not have another version of it," which is self-indictment, not campaign.

## Special current-text checks

1. **Sam snack-table line (¶33).** Current text: "Sam came in last, took the room in from the doorway, and moved the snack table three feet toward the radiator." The flagged clause ("so that nobody reaching for the kettle all night would have to stand in the sightline of Theo's empty half") is confirmed absent. Strip test is now vacuous — the whole line is action; no motive inference, no generalized beneficiary. VERIFIED.
2. **Kept-room double explanation (¶71).** The colon-appositive after "no missing what it was a beginning of" is confirmed cut; the paragraph proceeds directly to the bare eight inches and the stain. Theo's self-judgment now stops before naming or grading his intention; only the ¶61 recognition remains, and it is framed as inability, not generosity. VERIFIED.
3. **Final jar caption (¶83).** "and left the clean jar there, ready to be filled" is confirmed absent. The close now runs: jar dried, set "upside down on the shelf at the right end of their ground, below the stain he had not been able to lift and was no longer sure he wanted to. Then he turned off the lights and locked the door." The jar's placement is uncaptioned action; the surviving interiority is ambivalence about a mistake, not nobility; the chapter ends on lights and lock, and the narrator makes no closing claim on Theo's behalf. VERIFIED.

## Chapter verdict

`CRITICAL-DISTANCE-HELD` — no unattributed publicity. Most admiring surviving line: "the bones of a room he could have drawn with the lights off" (¶37) — perceiver: Theo, close third; earned by the opening setup actions (finding the ground by size before reading the tape, ¶5) and held at critical distance by the same page's framing of that fluency as unexamined habit ("before he noticed what he had done").

REVISION ORDERS: none — zero PUBLICITY lines in the current text. The two nearest misses if the chapter is touched again: the ¶71 self-appraisal depends on its immediate pivot to the stain and empty ground — do not separate them; and ¶59's "without explaining it" is safe only while it stays motive-free — any added clause about why Mara stayed silent recreates the repaired Sam failure.
