# Plain-Translation Audit — Chapter 19, "Empty Side"

id: plain_translation | tier: risk | trigger: every-revised-chapter + flag:register-drift
Inputs verified: chapter (`output/chapters/chapter_19.md`), reading guide §§1, 2, 5, 6, 8 (`premise/READING_GUIDE.md`), voice cards (`output/style_and_voice.md`), calibration (`output/tics.md`, `output/model_prompts/claude/chapter_draft/chapter_19.md`), adjacent summary (`output/rolling_summaries/chapter_18.md`). No raw-draft provenance was supplied for this pass; verdicts are on the chapter text as it stands.

Stance: skeptical. No praise. Every verdict names the sample compared and shows the rewrite attempted or the counter-candidate cleared.

**Form identification.** Close-third Theo narration throughout (compare: Theo voice card, not generic clarity). Documentary inserts: Odile's Week 7 assignment-card epigraph (compare: Odile card voice + 10–40-word card rule; per calibration this card is NOT locked and is audited), the subject strip *The room after class.*, and the rack tape label (compare: house-label documentary form; not plain-translated toward literary clarity). Dialogue exchanges: Mara/Luis arrival, Ben/Priya arrival, the Luis–Mara–Theo confrontation, Odile's four utterances, Sam at the rack (compare: each speaker's voice-card samples). Locked text: chapter heading only. No amplification direction declared; no chaos_up handoff.

**Standing-order compliance sweep (mechanical):** "crooked" 0; "load-bearing" 0; "the way" connective 0; "stranger" 0; "stop coming" 0; ledger/debt/fiscal narration 0 ("I over-bought coffee" is Mara dialogue-hosting, not narration; "her face reported nothing" cleared below); "finally" 0; "something"-as-placeholder 0; clementines 0; chair-count comedy — interrogated and cleared below; one deliberate light image (the peg's shadow); one foregrounded hand beat ("kept his hand on his knee"). Odile quotability: one card + four plain functional lines ("Cards are on your tables. Read them twice." / "From here." / "Brushes" / "Same time next week.") — complies with the post-Ch16 one-card-plus-plain-lines order.

---

## Per-paragraph verdicts

LOCKED — "# Chapter Nineteen: Empty Side" — skipped, listed under calibration's inviolable text (heading may remain).

HOLDS — "*Week Seven. One ground. Two reaches. Paint the side you can reach. Leave the other side workable. — O.*" (audited, not locked) — sample compared: Odile voice card ("few words, clean verbs, no cushioning"; cards are "her covert instrument"; 10–40 words) — 16 words, five clipped units, all material nouns and imperatives; no whimsy, no oracle. The reread clue is material, per the chapter card's order: "Two reaches" assumes two bodies at one ground on a night she has arranged to know may seat one, and "Leave the other side workable" keeps June's half open without saying so — passes the pre-reveal guardrail because on its face it is wet-media technique. Aphorism check on the card's strongest unit: "Paint the side you can reach" detaches as advice, but the assignment-card epigraph is the book's sanctioned binding flourish (reading guide §1) and the instruction is cashed literally three times in the body (blocking in his half; refusing the open-side reach; reaching her side without straining). Counter-candidate quoted, cleared. Card HOLDS.

HOLDS — "Theo unlocked the studio at ten past six..." — sample compared: Theo card ("under stress: ... straightens labels, checks locks, setup tasks, performs competence"; interiority rhythm "inventory of needs ... delayed recognition") — rewrite attempted ("He set up the room early and realized too late that he had set two places at their table") is worse because: it deletes twelve-by-sixteen, six coats, pickup Thursday, and the eight-inch fields (smallness test, §8), and it converts "lined two stools on opposite sides before he noticed what he had done" — the card's delayed-recognition rhythm performed as blocking — into a stated realization. Register note: the solitary-maintenance cold open is the retired Ch06/08/10 template; re-licensed once here by the chapter card's explicit opening obligation (obey "No chair" in public space, start with action). Forward-watch only, see orders.

HOLDS — "He carried one stool back to the stack by the sink..." — sample compared: Theo card + the Ch16 standing order ("chairs are pressure now," no count-shaped joke) — rewrite attempted ("There were only seven stools now, so his station got one") is worse because: "It did not sit flush with the others no matter how he angled it" renders the wrongness as object behavior, not mood; and the two-jar fill "before he could decide otherwise" performs the hedge the whole chapter will price. "Seven stools. Three stations got two. His got one, on the wall side of the table." was interrogated as count-shaped comedy and cleared: it is the arithmetic of absence with no joke turn, and the staccato is genuine emphasis (the count is the wound), not false emphasis.

HOLDS — "The card at his station was clipped to the far corner..." — sample compared: Odile operation snapshot ("makes people stand where truth has better light, then denies she moved them"), rendered strictly from Theo's outside view — the clip placement forcing him around the bare side is the seating/ground reread clue the chapter card ordered, planted without speech. The strip *The room after class.* is a documentary micro-insert; checked against its own form (her handwriting, subject slips from three weeks ago), holds. Rewrite attempted ("Odile had clipped the card where he would have to walk the empty side to reach it") is worse because: it decodes her intention, which the guardrail says must stay material.

HOLDS — "Their fear canvases from Week Six still hung..." — sample compared: Theo card (restraint via object handling) + the Ch16 order that fear canvases carry as object memory, not exposition — rewrite attempted ("Reminders of June were everywhere — the canvases, the returned catalog, the flyer") is worse because: it inventories grief in summary, where the original grades restraint across three objects with three behaviors: left as hung; squared "and stopped there"; "he did not go near it." The gradient is the interiority. Also carries Ch17's single returned catalog as a shelf fact ("a half inch proud of its neighbors"), zero exposition.

HOLDS — "At twenty to seven the door opened on Mara..." + "I over-bought coffee..." + Luis "Glare" — samples compared: Mara card ("fills gaps ... passes plates"; hosting via logistics) and Luis card ("Move left. You'll see it better." — placement diagnosis, minimum words) — rewrite attempted (Mara saying "There's a spare coffee, since June isn't coming") is worse because: it spends the directness the scene saves for her "Everyone counted," and it erases the deflection-visible-as-deflection mechanics: she sees the one stool, shifts the tray, changes hands, then offers the surplus as an over-buying error. Followable cold: a reader can say what she saw and what she declined to say. "Glare," plus a hand-width table shift, is Luis's card in four words and one action.

HOLDS — "Priya and Ben came in together at ten to..." + "It's a good rotation," — samples compared: Ben card ("more words when nervous"; calendars as fear management; the "not a personality" family is retired) and Theo card (host reflex) — rewrite attempted ("Ben launched into a rotation plan, then realized his mistake and apologized") is worse because: the self-interruptions ("Priya gets-- I can print one for--") and the refold "along its existing crease" are the contingency spiral as object handling, with new stakes (a rotation for a pair that is present, swerving around the pair that is not) and no train/route reuse. Theo's "It's a good rotation" is the warmth floor doing repair inside the scene.

HOLDS — "Is June coming?" through "She did not look at him again." — sample compared: Priya card ("Did you eat?"; "practical diagnosis with humor; direct questions"; care as condition-control) — this block is the plain-speech floor as written: "Is June coming?" / "No. Not tonight." / "Is she sick?" / "No." — four lines, each party's ask and refusal legible without decoding. "There's dal in the green tub. Eat at break, not after." is card-true feeding with a condition attached, and "She did not look at him again" is refusal-to-interrogate as action. No rewrite removes anything; nothing here is angled.

HOLDS — "Ruth arrived and squared the sign-in sheet..." — samples compared: Ruth card ("folds napkins/paper edges square"; one sharp editorial line maximum — she uses zero, cap intact) and Sam card ("moves chairs/creates room") — rewrite attempted ("Ruth and Sam arrived and settled in") is worse because: it deletes both owned care moves (sign-in squared before signing; snack table moved three feet toward the radiator — Sam making the room warmer where people will stand). Two tells, no captions.

HOLDS — "Odile came at seven exactly..." — sample compared: Odile card ("removes choices by arranging the room"; "under pressure: fewer words, more imperatives"; every scene consistent with her knowing) — "Cards are on your tables. Read them twice." is two imperatives; at Theo's station she looks at the pencil line and the two filled jars "and she moved nothing, and went on." Rewrite attempted (adding any acknowledgment, e.g. "she noted the second jar without comment") is worse because: the withheld correction IS the knowing, and naming the noting would wink. Reread test passes: forward it is a teacher's round; backward it is her checking that her arrangement took.

HOLDS — "He read the card twice, as told..." — sample compared: Theo card (domestic noticing; "his noticing is domestic where hers is optical") — rewrite attempted ("He began painting the familiar room from memory, steady until he reached the dividing line") is worse because: it deletes burnt umber thin with medium (fat-over-lean craft truth, §8 smallness), the dented top rail, and "the one hook that had been hers since October" — the chapter's quietest plant. "The inventory steadied him until he got to the seam" was checked against the catalog-prose tic warning: one clause converting task into arc, and the naming ("steadied") is priced immediately by its failure at the seam. "The bones of a room he could have drawn with the lights off" checked as near-idiom and cleared: competence claim, not lyric.

HOLDS — "The composition ran the room straight across both halves..." (highest-risk block) — sample compared: Theo card interiority rhythm ("inventory of needs, risk calculation, delayed recognition") — binding-register rewrite attempted: "Her half held the window end. He was not to touch it. But her stool sat in the middle of the composition, so he let the drawing of it straddle the line." — the rewrite is measurably worse because: it deletes the recursion that is the paragraph's actual content — "in the middle of the room, in the room he was painting, which was the room after class, her stool stood where it had stood for seven Tuesdays" — the depicted room and the actual room being the same room tonight is WHY the stool cannot be composed away; the spiral syntax enacts the trap rather than describing it (five "room"s in one sentence, each shifting frame: physical room → middle of the depicted room → the painting → the subject title — see echo gate). "Half of it on his side, half of it promised to hers" was interrogated for intention-campaigning: cleared — "promised" is the single verb carrying his intent, and the plot prices it within a paragraph (the run crosses the line and stains her side).

HOLDS — "The wash was too thin..." — sample compared: Theo card + card-instruction discipline — rewrite attempted ("He accidentally got paint on her side and could not fully remove it") is worse because: the causal chain is craft-true and character-true in four verbs — too-thin wash, run, wipe leaving a ghost, dry-working widening it — every fix worsens, which is the chapter's thesis about him, executed not stated. The italic *Leave the other side workable.* recurs as quoted instruction stopping his hand — transformative echo (instruction → brake), cleared below. "The stain stayed, small and visible." is flat fact, not stamp.

HOLDS — "Around him the other stations had found their rhythm..." — samples compared: each cohort card, one owned clause apiece — rewrite attempted ("The others worked steadily around him") is worse because: it deletes four care-move payments in a single pass (rotation running with the paper pocketed; Ruth on edges, Sam on mass; Mara's short damp strokes; Luis's knife flat against the palette) — the cohort not-prying rendered as work.

HOLDS — "Luis crossed behind Theo..." through "Everyone counted, Theo... Everyone." and Theo's stammer — samples compared: Luis card ("adjusts placement, then states one direct fact"; Ch19 arc order: he says the unsmoothed thing, Mara cannot smooth it in time) and Mara card (stress response: fills silence) — the arc order is executed on the page: "Mara was there before he finished it," and what she fills the silence with is not smoothing but her own direct fact. "Nobody's going to ask what." interrogated at the aphorism gate and cleared below — it is a broken-off retort bound to Theo's "It's the room" (the question in the room is not *what*), meaningless detached. "Everyone counted, Theo. The second we walked in. Everyone." interrogated as maxim and cleared: "counted" is literal stool arithmetic, disambiguated by her second sentence; the repeated "Everyone" is same-speaker rhetorical frame under stress, not inter-speaker echo. Theo's "I set the station up because the piece needs two eventually, and the jars, I thought if the water was already there--" is the card's over-explaining-when-ashamed, visibly failing; "I can move the stool. In the painting. I can move it." is stammer-echo, licensed stress speech. Plain-speech floor: Luis states a fact, Mara states a fact, Theo hedges and the hedge is visible as a hedge. Followable cold.

DRIFTED — original: "'Move it or paint it,' Luis said. He ran his jars under the tap and went back to his station." — binding-register version: "'You can't leave it half,' Luis said. He ran his jars under the tap and went back to his station." — what the rewrite preserves: the refusal of Theo's hedge (the stool is riding the pencil line, half-committed — "half" binds the line to the object on the table), the demand to decide, and Luis's card shape (one flat fact, then exit via placement/action — compare "I heard her. I disagreed quietly."); what drift it removes: a balanced imperative pair that detaches cleanly as studio-wall advice ("Move it or paint it" is tattoo-able, pull-quote-shaped, and echoes the epigraph's imperative card form — a second assignment card in a cohort mouth, when the style contract licenses only Odile for high-density memorable lines), and a third verdict-shaped punch past Luis's two-per-appearance material-verdict cap (this appearance already carries "Glare" and "Nobody's going to ask what"). The dialogue-change license is met: the line violates the aphorism gate and the voice contract. ORDER: REPLACE. (Cross-listed under APHORISM-GATE.)

HOLDS — "Mara stayed a moment longer..." — sample compared: Mara card (care via passed objects; tic: "explains before asked," which her arc must break) — rewrite attempted ("She handed him the cold coffee as a peace offering") is worse because: it names the meaning of the cup. "It was going cold and she gave it to him anyway. She went back to her station without explaining it." was interrogated as a caption-of-restraint: cleared — "without explaining it" negates her own card tic, which is the Ch19 arc beat (she cannot smooth this and does not try), stated once, with no gloss of what the cup means.

HOLDS — "He painted. He committed the stool to his side of the line..." (highest-risk block, full comparison) — sample compared: Theo voice card ("interiority rhythm: inventory of needs, risk calculation, delayed recognition of his own desire"; "narration transparency: his chapters can rationalize withholding but must not pretend ignorance") — binding-register rewrite attempted: "He painted the stool onto his side, the hook without her coat, both jars. The room in the picture was ready for someone to come back. He could not think how else to paint it." — the rewrite is measurably worse on all three axes. Density: it loses the quarter-inch pull "so that none of it trespassed" (obedience performed to the letter while the intent trespasses wholesale), the peg's shadow "longer than the light justified" (the chapter's one light image, doing falsified-evidence work — he is painting more of her presence than the light supports), and the far jar painted "full." Drama: it loses "understood while he was doing it" — the delayed recognition arriving mid-brushstroke, which is the card's rhythm occurring as an event; under the interiority-discipline rule this is the licensed case where naming IS the event. Fidelity: it loses "He did not have another version of it. If she had one, he had never seen it." — the chapter card's obligation to carry June's five leaving-side studies by contrast, through Theo's ignorance, in exactly one breath of dramatic irony. Checked "underpainting a room that was waiting" against the underpainting motif cap: literal use (he is literally underpainting), cap-free. This paragraph spends the chapter's one license to name the kept-room reading. The drift is that a later paragraph names it AGAIN — see the DRIFTED verdict below.

HOLDS — "The seam gave him trouble all night..." — sample compared: Theo card (performs competence; body under stress) — rewrite attempted ("He stubbornly worked the seam from his own side all night, and his shoulder ached") is worse because: refusing to walk around to the open side "where the reaching would have been easy" is the psychology as blocking — penance chosen over convenience, uncaptioned; and "the corrected place dried darker than the rest of the edge" is paint-true (reworked passages dry darker) consequence with no comment attached. The register carries the cost in the medium itself.

HOLDS — "He did not hear Odile come up the aisle..." + "From here," + "...one quiet thing to Ruth" — sample compared: Odile card ("becomes more practical, moves people and objects rather than explaining"; "allowed plainness: 'Again,' 'No,' 'Eat' can carry scene work") — "He knew she was there because his stool moved" is her operation snapshot from outside; "From here," is two words bound to the carried stool, cleared at the gate below. Two counter-candidates interrogated against the zero-tolerance dialogue-diagnosis rule: (1) "her face reported nothing about any of it" — a face, not language; and the single "reported" is not a ledger/fiscal figure (Ch18 standing order intact); cleared. (2) "said one quiet thing to Ruth that made Ruth take a rag to a corner" — "quiet" is acoustics (out of Theo's earshot), not a rating of delivery, and the content is rendered by what Ruth *does* with it — the rule's own prescribed mechanism. Cleared.

DRIFTED — original: "It was a good beginning, and from this side there was no missing what it was a beginning of: a kept room, jars full, stool angled for return, painted by a man who had done the setup right, right up to the pale pencil line." — binding-register version: "It was a good beginning, and from this side there was no missing what it was a beginning of." (then straight to "Past it, eight inches of primed ground sat with nothing on it but a stain the size of a thumb.") — what the rewrite preserves: the entire discovery and its optical mechanism — Odile moved him into June's seat; "his own half opened up whole for the first time all night"; the drawing sound, the values honest, the shapes placed by seven weeks of Tuesdays; and the paragraph's devastating close (he can reach her whole side without straining, and puts the brush down) — because the earlier underpainting paragraph already performed the naming ("a room that was waiting: jars filled, stool turned out from the table at the angle of someone coming right back") as an in-the-act recognition. What drift it removes: (a) the second, near-verbatim inventory of the same reading — "jars full, stool angled for return" repeats "jars filled, stool turned out... coming right back" almost term for term; the chapter explains the kept-ready room twice, which is precisely the over-explanation this audit was calibrated to catch; (b) the third-person self-caption "painted by a man who had done the setup right" — Theo watching himself feel it, the reading guide's banned mirror-move, and the closest the chapter comes to campaigning for his intention; (c) a triple-beat list against the draft contract's structural commitments; (d) the "right ... right up" doubling. The colon-mounted appositive is also the chapter's most epigraph-shaped narration. Not worse on any axis; the rewrite replaces. ORDER: REPLACE.

HOLDS — "He worked the rest of the session from her side..." — sample compared: Theo card (delayed recognition converting to act) — rewrite attempted ("He accepted the empty side and kept working") is worse because: the physical inversion — "leaning left now, reaching back into his own half" — is the chapter's whole argument as body mechanics (to keep his own side honest he must now work from hers). "It was harder from this side. He did it anyway." checked for arc-stamp shape: cleared — referent-bound, an action report, not a claim about life; five words a cold reader cannot detach.

HOLDS — "At nine Odile said, 'Brushes,'..." + "Got it," + the label paragraph — samples compared: Odile card (one-word imperative carries scene work, licensed), Priya payment ("because she was watching" — condition enforced, no gloss), Sam card ("makes physical room" — opens a slot wide enough that no wet corner touches; "Got it," two words) — the tape label *The room after class. June / Theo. Wk 7.* is documentary house-order form, not plain-translated. "He wrote her name first." interrogated as stamp: cleared — a literal writing-order fact, one sentence, no comment appended. "So it would still be legible in six weeks" is logistics-as-hope left uncaptioned, and plants the horizon materially. Rewrite attempted ("He labeled the rack, putting June's name before his own, a small act of hope") is worse because: it does what the original refuses to do.

HOLDS — "The others left in twos..." + "Same time next week." — sample compared: Odile card (scheduling idiom; exit without ceremony) — "Same time next week." is a teacher's sign-off on its face and, said at the door of a room she has kept two-sided all night, the counter to Ch18's "There were no more next Tuesdays" (June's line) — reread-consistent without a wink; cleared at both gates below. "Mara's tray abandoned by the sink with one untouched cup still seated in it" pays the coffee arithmetic from the top of the chapter silently. "The click it always made" checked against the familiar/usual watch: literal door hardware, one instance, cleared.

DRIFTED — original: "Then he turned off the lights and locked the door, and left the clean jar there, ready to be filled." — binding-register version: "Then he turned off the lights and locked the door." — what the rewrite preserves: the entire close, because the preceding sentence already does all of it — the jar dried and set upside down "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" — object placement, the chapter's one earned clause of named ambivalence, and an ending on action and lock-up in Theo's exact register (checks locks). What drift it removes: the re-mention of the jar plus the caption "ready to be filled," which names the symbol's meaning and hands the reader the hope the object was carrying silently — the same thesis-tail shape the Ch18 audit killed at that chapter's close ("the holes were hers to leave or fix, and tonight she felt like fixing one") and epigraph-shaped as a final cadence. The rest of the closing paragraph (all seven stools up, easels flush, one jar dried) HOLDS — it is the opening's setup ritual run in reverse with one changed object, and no rewrite improves it. ORDER: REPLACE (end the chapter at "locked the door").

---

## APHORISM-GATE (zero tolerance)

- APHORISM-GATE — "Move it or paint it," — ORDER: de-quotablize (REPLACE per the DRIFTED verdict above). A balanced two-imperative disjunction about art-commitment, fully portable out of context, marketing-pull-quote-shaped, and formally a twin of the assignment card's "Paint the side you can reach" — the card form is Odile's licensed instrument, and this puts it in Luis's mouth. The chapter's own action (Theo commits the stool whole in the next scene) survives intact with the flat-fact replacement.
- CLEARED — "Nobody's going to ask what." — strongest surviving candidate. Passes: it is a broken-off retort whose meaning depends entirely on Theo's "It's the room" (the coming question is not *what*, it is *whose*); detached, the line is cryptic, not quotable. It also discharges the chapter card's Luis/Mara arc order, and it is followable — Mara's "Everyone counted" immediately cashes it into plain text. Note: with the "Move it or paint it" repair executed, this becomes Luis's second and last verdict-shaped line, restoring his cap.
- CLEARED — "Paint the side you can reach. Leave the other side workable." — card text; detachable as advice but the assignment-card epigraph is the reading guide's sanctioned binding flourish, and the body cashes the instruction literally three times. Do not let assembly quote it outside the card form.
- CLEARED — "Everyone counted, Theo. The second we walked in. Everyone." — "counted" is literal stool arithmetic, pinned by the second sentence; detached, the line inverts to a greeting-card claim it does not make in context, and the context is one clause away.
- CLEARED — "It was harder from this side. He did it anyway." — referent-bound action report; "this side" has a table under it. Epigram-adjacent in rhythm but collapses without the seating.
- CLEARED — "He wrote her name first." — a fact about tape. The charge is entirely contextual; no claim is made.
- CLEARED — "From here," / "Same time next week." — action-bound and calendar-bound respectively; Odile's licensed plainness, not epigram.
- NOTE — the two DRIFTED narration items above ("a kept room, jars full, stool angled for return, painted by a man who had done the setup right" and "ready to be filled") are the chapter's epigraph-shaped narration cadences; both are removed by the REPLACE orders. After those repairs the chapter contains no portable maxim.

## VERBATIM-ECHO

- CLEARED — "room" ×17, peak: five instances in one sentence ("the middle of the room, and in the middle of the room, in the room he was painting, which was the room after class") — transformative spiral, each instance shifting frame (physical room → depicted middle ×2 → the painting-in-progress → the subject title); the recursion is the paragraph's argument (he is inside the thing he is painting). Elsewhere the noun is the chapter's literal subject. At ceiling: Ch20 must not inherit "room" as an incantation device.
- CLEARED — "side" ×26 — the title word and the assignment's mechanic; instances are distributed across distinct referents (stool sides, wall side, palette side, canvas halves, seating, "wet side clear"), and the his-half/her-half variation prevents flattening. Load-bearing by the chapter's premise; at cap — no Ch20 inheritance of side/half as default spatial diction.
- CLEARED — "reach" family ×6 (card ×2; blocking his half; "the reaching would have been easy"; "could reach her whole side without straining"; "reaching back into his own half") — full transformation arc: instruction → refusal → capacity → inversion. Each instance changes who can reach what and what it costs. This is the card's instruction being paid, not echo.
- CLEARED — "jar(s)" ×12 — planted-and-paid object line (fill ritual → two-before-deciding → painted into the picture, far one full → Luis's dirty jars → Sam drying one → the final clean jar under the rack). Function shifts every pass. The final instance's caption is removed by the REPLACE order; the object itself is the chapter's spine and holds.
- CLEARED — "stool" ×12 — object spine with function shifts: count → returned to stack → evidence Mara sees → depicted object riding the line → Odile's instrument ("his stool moved") → all seven up. No two adjacent instances do the same work.
- CLEARED — "The room after class" ×3 (Odile's strip → "which was the room after class" mid-composition → tape label *The room after class. June / Theo. Wk 7.*) — assignment → recognition → archival record; transformative at each step. Spent: from Ch20 the phrase is a title only, not a narration device.
- CLEARED — "same time" ×1 — no intra-chapter echo. Cross-chapter: Odile's "Same time next week." answers Ch18's "There were no more next Tuesdays" by asserting the calendar June voided — transformative, different speaker, different function, and the chapter's cleanest reread clue.
- CLEARED — "I can move the stool. In the painting. I can move it." — same-speaker stammer under shame; Theo card stress behavior, self-repair not echo.
- CLEARED — "seven stools" (open) / "all seven" (close) + "seven Tuesdays" / "seven weeks of Tuesdays" — plant/payoff and varied forms.
- VERBATIM-ECHO (watch, no order) — "before he noticed what he had done" (P1) / "before he could decide otherwise" (P2) — the same delayed-agency coin twice in adjacent paragraphs. Cleared as a deliberate paired tell establishing the chapter's engine (his hands act ahead of his permission), but the construction is now spent: no third "before he could/noticed" hedge in Ch20+.

---

## Chapter verdict

**DRIFT-FOUND (3 REPLACE orders)** — 26 verdicts: 22 HOLDS, 3 DRIFTED, 1 LOCKED. The close-third register, the cohort dialogue, the assignment card, and both documentary inserts hold against their samples; the plain-speech floor is met in every exchange; all Ch18 standing kills stay dead; zero dialogue diagnosis after two counter-candidates were interrogated and cleared. The drift is concentrated exactly where the calibration predicted: one portable maxim in a cohort mouth, one double-explanation of the kept-ready room with a self-captioning mirror clause, and one symbol-decoding tail on the final object.

1. **ORDER (REPLACE, dialogue):** "Move it or paint it," Luis said. → "You can't leave it half," Luis said. (aphorism gate + Odile-only quotability license + Luis material-verdict cap; action framing unchanged).
2. **ORDER (REPLACE, narration):** cut the colon-appositive from "It was a good beginning..." — retain "It was a good beginning, and from this side there was no missing what it was a beginning of." and proceed directly to "Past it, eight inches of primed ground..." (the kept-room reading is named once, in the underpainting paragraph, where the naming is the event; the second naming and the "painted by a man who had done the setup right" self-caption are drift).
3. **ORDER (REPLACE, close):** end the chapter at "Then he turned off the lights and locked the door." — cut ", and left the clean jar there, ready to be filled." (the jar's placement sentence already carries the meaning; the tail captions it).
4. **ORDER (watch, forward):** "room"/"side" density and the room-spiral device are at ceiling — Ch20 inherits neither; "The room after class" is a title only from here; the "before he noticed/could decide" delayed-agency construction is spent; the Theo solitary-maintenance cold open was re-licensed once by the chapter card and is retired again — the next Theo chapter opens in company, mid-dialogue, or off-task; the clean jar and the umber stain each have one payoff move left (filled, or lifted/kept — at the reunion or the showcase) and must not be re-described in the interim; Odile's "Same time next week." must not be answered or explained by narration in Ch20 — let the calendar do it.
