# Plain-Translation Audit — Chapter 18, "Returned Scarf"

id: plain_translation | tier: risk | trigger: every-revised-chapter + flag:register-drift
Inputs verified: revised chapter (`output/chapters/chapter_18.md`), raw provenance (`output/drafts/claude/chapter_18.round_01.md`), reading guide, voice cards (`output/style_and_voice.md`), codex tic audit (TICS-FOUND 8, orders executed), mechanical gate (open findings: 0; WATCH only — note the gate's `qscan-07-finally` hit at line 99 references the pre-repair text; "finally" is absent from the current revision).

Stance: skeptical. No praise. Every verdict names the sample compared and shows the rewrite attempted or the counter-candidate cleared. Provenance was diffed against the revision: the repair passes excised more than twenty drift instances from the raw draft, including all five lines named in this audit's special calibration. Those excisions are treated as live tripwires, not credit — see ORDER 2.

**Form identification.** Close-third June narration throughout (compare: June voice card, not generic clarity). Documentary inserts: group-chat thread, Mara/Asha/Theo text messages (compare: each sender's voice-card samples; not plain-translated toward literary clarity per template §conversation-forms). One street dialogue exchange, Mara/June (compare: Mara and June voice-card dialogue samples). No assignment card and no calibration-locked text appears in this chapter — zero LOCKED entries. No amplification direction declared; no chaos_up handoff.

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## Per-paragraph verdicts

HOLDS — "On Wednesday June washed Mara's scarf..." — sample compared: June card, "what her body does under stress: packs, sorts, cleans" + "visual/craft nouns instead of big feeling words" — rewrite attempted ("She washed the scarf carefully so she could finally return it") is worse because: it states the intention the procedure performs. Wool soap, cold water, no wringing, standing on the towel roll barefoot is care rendered as craft protocol; "black again instead of black with six weeks of the city on it" is optical, not lyrical. Provenance note: raw's "wool soap she still had from sweaters she no longer owned" (backstory sentiment) and "and it worked" (self-confirming tag) were excised; the cabinet version is drier and holds.

HOLDS — "The apartment had been half packed since September..." — sample compared: June card interiority rhythm ("perception first, judgment second, self-rebuke third") — rewrite attempted ("She realized Theo's painting of her wall had been more accurate than she'd wanted to admit") is worse because: it converts the reassessment into a stated epiphany. "A wrong first pass" / "she could see the first pass differently" keeps the judgment inside her craft vocabulary (a first pass is a literal painting stage), and the colander-out-of-the-box is the card's documented ambivalence behavior. Provenance note, decisive: raw continued "he hadn't been wrong so much as early. The apartment had been rehearsing his underpainting for two months" — a balanced epigram plus an apartment-as-agent figure that would also have spent the underpainting motif's once-per-act metaphorical cap. Correctly excised; must stay dead. The em-dash list ("— boxes, keys, the emptied rectangle —") is gate-WATCHed; it is a literal inventory of Theo's Week-6 canvas and the chapter's only keys mention, transformed (his painting's contents, not a new key beat) — Ch17's keys-cluster order is satisfied.

HOLDS — "The eight catalogs came off the table next..." — sample compared: June card "packs, sorts" + smallness test (§8) — rewrite attempted ("She boxed the catalogs to mail back to the gallery") is worse because: spine-up so they won't warp, the colophon as address source, media mail at eight dollars, Greenpoint Avenue at nine are the non-portable logistics that make the return real; "she wouldn't have to see gray while she ate" is optical avoidance, card-true. Provenance note: raw's "like a job she hadn't billed for" (fiscal register, spent per Ch08–09 ledger) and "That was the whole plan, and it required no one." (the calibration's named watch line — thesis-button, "whole" family) were both excised. Confirmed absent from the revision; keep dead.

HOLDS — "The group chat had been going all morning..." — sample compared: documentary form against Sam/Ruth cards (Sam warm-rhythmic reframe; Ruth "calm, exact, dry" flat correction) — *crooked is dynamic* / *it's crooked* is each card executed in four words apiece; do not plain-translate. The narration's close ("Forty of those existed. Some were now in laundromats.") was checked at the Aphorism Gate and cleared below. Provenance note: raw's "the wet light" became "the dropped brush" — concrete flyer content replacing atmosphere; correct direction.

HOLDS — "Then Mara, midafternoon... / *Can't — working,* June typed..." — sample compared: Mara card ("Take the scarf. I brought two." — hosting via logistics) and June card ("jokes as smoke screen... then exits") — rewrite attempted ("June declined, feeling guilty that Mara didn't push") is worse because: it names the guilt. "It would even be true if she started a painting before Friday" shows the lie being retroactively laundered, and the turkey-and-a-heart non-interrogation lands without commentary. Provenance note: raw appended "and that, somehow, was the part that cost. Refusing an interrogation would have been easy. There was no interrogation to refuse." — a balanced explanation of the beat it followed (codex tic 5/7 territory). Excised; the silence now does the work. Keep dead.

HOLDS — "Theo texted at 11:40 that night... / She read it at the counter..." — sample compared: Theo card ("absorbs logistics"; "goes very plain") and the zero-tolerance dialogue-diagnosis rule — *Okay. No chair.* is his card compressed to four syllables. The narration "He had left the chair empty and asked for nothing back" was interrogated as possible diagnosis and cleared: it restates what he *did* (a logistical fact about Tuesday's room), not the rhythm or quality of his message. Provenance note: raw's "Three words, nothing to argue with, nothing asked" counted and characterized the message — diagnosis-adjacent — and was excised. Phone charging badly by the stove is displacement as object placement. Holds.

HOLDS — "Thursday was Thanksgiving, which she had forgotten until the street told her..." — sample compared: June card "perception first" — "the street told her" was checked as object-as-agent and cleared: it is idiom immediately cashed out in evidence (closed grates, the foil pan balanced flat). Provenance note: raw's "like a job interview" simile was cut; "so it would not crease" is the worse-on-no-axis replacement. Holds.

HOLDS — "The first study took the afternoon..." (highest-risk block 1) — sample compared: June card "notices edges before faces" / smallness test — rewrite attempted ("She painted the studio door from the inside and realized she knew the room by heart") is worse because: it deletes the doorframe out of square, paint sealed over one screw, the hallway's rectangle going dark first — the inventory that proves "knew it cold" instead of claiming it. The antithesis "*After Class* was supposed to be the room as two people kept it. This was the room as one person left it." was the gate's strongest candidate and cleared below. "She didn't let it try to be" is the painter's scope control, idiomatic. Provenance note: raw's "started the kitchen-of-the-evening cleanup that painting in a kitchen requires" (cute, self-noticing) became washed gouache / wiped yellow from the faucet base / brushes by the dish rack — denser and literal. Holds.

HOLDS — "That night she opened Nia's email... / Tasker: $49,500... / New York: Dana's room..." — sample compared: documentary notebook form (precedent: Ch15's cleared `Vandercook. W-2. Keys.` punch-list) — the two columns are punch-list register and must not be literary-translated. "Her nail holes" sitting in the New York column between storage unit and Asha is the chapter's quietest dramatic fact stated as a ledger item. Holds as form.

HOLDS — "She sat with the two columns for a long time..." (highest-risk block 2) — sample compared: June card "exits before asks" / "treats desire as evidence against herself" — rewrite attempted ("She couldn't bring herself to send the reply, so she saved it to drafts") is worse because: the revision already *is* the action version — she types the ventilation question, selects it, deletes it, leaves the floor-plan question in drafts. The typed-and-deleted second question performs exactly the held-open/held-back state the raw draft had to caption. Provenance note, decisive: raw closed this paragraph "Not a refusal. A held edge." — the calibration's named watch line, a fragment-stamp maxim in paint vocabulary — plus "would have nothing to do with ceiling height" (explaining the subtext). Both excised; confirmed absent. Keep dead.

HOLDS — "Friday she primed two more sheets and answered Asha... / *Hold my Kessler spot...* / *ok. before the 4th...*" — sample compared: Asha card ("rate, room, late, invoice, load-in"; "clipped and schedule-aware") — headcount by the 15th, kick the valve, bring a sweater is the card verbatim in spirit; *before the 4th gives me time to reshuffle* converts June's promise into Asha's logistics. Documentary form holds; the cross-speaker "before the 4th" echo is cleared at the gate below. Provenance note: raw's "which is dana for it doesn't work" and "rushing them is my job" were polished-zinger shapes (Nia-density problem from Ch15); the replacements are plainer and lose nothing a cold reader needs.

HOLDS — "The second study went faster... The third began that evening..." — sample compared: June card "uses edge, value, ground" — rewrite attempted ("She painted the chairs and then the table, cropped by the doorframe") is worse because: the floor scuffed pale where the same legs dragged, "she didn't count them," and the foreshortening are scene-work and refusal-of-sentiment in one. The residue figure "the last look got only a slice, and the frame took the rest" was interrogated: it is compositional description (threshold POV, doorframe crop) carrying its resonance silently. Provenance note: raw aphorized it — "which was the truth of leaving — you never got the whole room in the last look, just a slice with the frame eating it" — a portable maxim correctly stripped to its optical residue. Keep the maxim dead.

HOLDS — "At seven the chat filled with Mara's dinner..." — sample compared: June card "gets quieter, funnier, more exact, then exits" — rewrite attempted ("She skipped the dinner and ate alone, aware of the irony") is worse because: the revision renders the aloneness as objects (soup from a can, wet study against the toaster, phone facedown, rinsed bowl) with zero self-commentary. Provenance note: raw had "Ruth holding a drumstick like evidence" (evidence-figure default, watched since Ch05), "working girl," and a full self-captioning dry thought ("she'd told a lie to avoid a dinner in order to paint a room she was also avoiding... the thought didn't need a second lap") — irony explained is irony spent. All excised; keep dead.

HOLDS — "Saturday she de-pilled the scarf..." — sample compared: June card pigment exactness ("cadmium-adjacent") — rewrite attempted ("She found a fleck of orange paint from the class and picked it off") is worse because: it loses the provenance of the fleck (the Week-6 interval wall, the green and orange under the primer's wet edge) — the buried-underpainting fact a rereader needs — and the literal flat close "It left no mark," cleared at the gate below. Holds.

HOLDS — "She had meant to return the scarf the second Tuesday..." (highest-risk block 3) — sample compared: June card interiority rhythm + "mistakes being understood for being pitied" — rewrite attempted ("Theo's drawing of the scarf had been accurate, which now felt like part of the lie. The class was over, so she'd have to return it herself.") — worse on all three axes: it loses the escalation mechanics of the failed return (handed over, turned to Sam, cold snap, forty flyers), flattens "the exactness bothered her more than a mistake would have" (the chapter's epistemic engine: precision inside a false frame), and deletes the volitional landing "out here, on a weekend, on purpose." The two gate-risk sentences ("The knot was right; the room around it had been wrong..." and "There were no more next Tuesdays.") were checked and cleared below. Provenance note, decisive: raw ended "...which was the actual price of leaving a room: everything the room had been quietly handling came home with you as errands" — the calibration's named watch line, a colon-mounted portable thesis — and carried "filed differently and made herself stop filing at all" (clerical figure at cap since Ch07/08). Both excised; confirmed absent. Keep dead.

HOLDS — "She folded the scarf in thirds and texted Mara... / *Keep it!! I have two. That was the plan.* / *You told me that so I'd take it.* / *and it worked. ok. sonia's tomorrow...*" — sample compared: Mara card sample "Take the scarf. I brought two." — the calibration's watch line resolves here: raw's *That was the whole point* became *That was the plan.* — four words of Mara dialogue, plain, referring to her own scheme, instantly conceded ("*and it worked*"). It is followable text-message speech, not a thesis-button; the "whole" family is gone. June's *You told me that so I'd take it* is the plain-speech floor met inside a text. Holds; do not touch further.

HOLDS — "Sunday was bright and ordinary..." through "The tote with the scarf in it swung against her hip." (street exchange, grouped) — sample compared: Mara card ("touches sleeves, passes plates"; "Luis is circling the block" is host-logistics) and June card ("compresses when exposed"; self-interruption when vulnerable) — plain-speech floor verified: Mara asks "Are you eating?" and states "I'm glad you came"; June states "I'm painting," "I don't know about Tuesday," and "Thank you for October." Every exchange is followable as text: Mara converts the scarf return into a new loan (the blue dish) and an invitation; June refuses to commit and tries to say goodbye; Mara declines the goodbye ("October. It's almost December.") — deflection visible *as* deflection. June's broken "I don't think I—" is the card's vulnerability quirk. Provenance note: the revision excised "visibly decided that was the end of that" (dialogue diagnosis, codex-ordered), "You look like you're sleeping in shifts," the hostage-exchange zinger, "delighted, like June had tipped in a foreign currency," "not a question, just contact," and the zero-balance interiority ("no version of this crowd where you got to zero, that was the whole engineering of them" — the calibration's zero-family watch, "whole" family, raw-only and confirmed absent). The replacement — June holding the foil brick level and saying "I don't know about Tuesday" out loud — moves the debt logic into object and speech. Keep all six dead. Two clarity defects found in this block — see ORDER 1.

HOLDS — "June stood on the corner with the pie..." — sample compared: June card "exits before asks" — flyer in Sonia's window "low, by the register, crooked" pays the chat thread off as fact; "not past the gallery" is avoidance as route; "the foil level the whole time like she'd been told" is obedience to Mara's only instruction, literal. No rewrite improves it.

HOLDS — "She painted the last two studies Sunday night and Monday..." — sample compared: June card ("dry and exact" is her own register named as method) — rewrite attempted ("The last painting was her own empty chair, which she kept unsentimental") is worse because: "raw-umber gray" and "the front edge of the table lost in the dark" are pigment-true; "It was wood at an angle, viewed from the door." enforces the refusal the raw draft editorialized. Provenance note: raw's "if it was unbearable, that was a problem the viewer had brought with them" (portable, viewer-addressing epigram) excised; keep dead.

HOLDS — "Monday night she laid all five out... / She turned them over one at a time..." (highest-risk block 4) — sample compared: June card "leaves before anyone can watch her want" — rewrite attempted ("They were good, but showing them would send Theo a message, so she turned them face down") is worse because: it names the addressee the revision deliberately withholds. "Left face up, they were studies. Pinned up, they could become another thing in a window." was interrogated for over-balanced parallelism and ellipsis: the antithesis is functional (two physical states, two social states), and "another thing in a window" binds to Sonia's flyer one section earlier — followable without decoding. The turn-over sentence (gate-WATCHed three-part cadence) is a physical procedure, not thesis cadence. Provenance note: raw's "what they wanted to become" (paintings-as-agents, codex-flagged), "a counterweight... the answer panel," and "there was no one she was willing to be sending it to" were excised; the want now lives in "she could already feel the leaving side of *After Class* in them," which keeps the pull without giving the paintings volition. Keep the cut versions dead.

HOLDS — "Then she opened the laptop, because Monday night was when..." (highest-risk block 5) — sample compared: June card "perception first, judgment second" + stress behavior (re-checking) — rewrite attempted ("The offer was unchanged; only her reasons had. She still didn't send the email.") is worse because: it deletes the three concrete rupture anchors ("before the acknowledgments page, before Eileen Brennan's name, before the back stair" — anaphora carrying plot freight, at its cap for the chapter) and the cursor blinking until the screen dims — the decision *not* taken rendered as hardware. "Asha had until the fifteenth to reshuffle Kessler" replaces conclusion with logistics. Provenance note, decisive: raw ran "That was the arithmetic that mattered... his omission setting her zip code, his silence signing her W-2. He had chosen for her... She wasn't going to ratify it by fleeing on his schedule." — the calibration's named watch line: a balanced rhetorical pressure-pair plus thesis explanation (codex tics 7 and 10). Also excised: "She left it there." (refusal-to-conclude family, capped since Ch05). All confirmed absent. The reasoning survives implicitly — the terms haven't moved, the only new fact is his, the cursor blinks, the draft closes — and the chapter is stronger carrying it silently. Keep dead; no later pass may restore the W-2 pair in any form.

HOLDS — "She checked the flaps on the catalog box..." (close; calibration item) — sample compared: June card "physically busy" + tic-catalog ban on profundity-stamp endings — rewrite attempted ("She filled the first nail hole, a small start on staying") is worse because: it adds the meaning the revision refuses. The close as written — "She filled the first nail hole. Wet spackle sat white beside the brighter paint." — ends on a value observation (wet white against the brighter unfaded rectangles) that only a painter would make, states no decision, and quietly extends the chapter's fact that the holes are hers (planted in the New York column at l.29). Provenance note: raw ended "...the holes were hers to leave or fix, and tonight she felt like fixing one" — thesis-stamp with a "because" clause explaining the symbol. Excised; confirmed absent; keep dead. The nail-hole close HOLDS in its current form.

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## APHORISM-GATE (zero tolerance)

- CLEARED — "*After Class* was supposed to be the room as two people kept it. This was the room as one person left it." — strongest surviving candidate. Passes, narrowly: both halves are claims about two specific artworks (one named, one on the drawing board in the same paragraph), and the antithesis collapses without the title referent. The generalized form ("a room is what the people who keep it make of it") would fail; the proper-noun anchor is the protection, per the Ch17 "Same paint" precedent. Do not let assembly detach it as an epigraph.
- CLEARED — "The knot was right; the room around it had been wrong in a way she had not yet known how to see." — second-strongest; the calibration's exactness-line. The semicolon antithesis is epigram-shaped, but "the knot" and "the room" are definite referents (Theo's Week-3 drawing; the studio), and the trailing clause locates the failure in *her* seeing — the book's looking-thesis applied to herself, arc not ornament. Out of context the sentence is cryptic, not quotable. Passes on the cliff-edge; if any later pass trims it, cut the antithesis, never the trailing clause.
- CLEARED — "There were no more next Tuesdays." — reads epigraph-shaped in isolation but is a literal scheduling fact (she has stopped attending), and Mara contests it on-page two sections later ("Bring it Tuesday. Sit by me."). A line the plot immediately argues with is not portable. Passes.
- CLEARED — "Forty of those existed. Some were now in laundromats." — deflation joke with a concrete referent chain (flyers → Ruth's laundromat photo); June's self-aimed dryness per card. Passes.
- CLEARED — "It left no mark." — literal wool fact closing a literal de-pilling action; the symbolic charge is never named. Passes.
- APHORISM-GATE — raw-draft kills confirmed absent from the revision; ORDER: keep dead, no provenance reconciliation may restore them: "That was the whole plan, and it required no one."; "Not a refusal. A held edge."; "which was the actual price of leaving a room: everything the room had been quietly handling came home with you as errands"; "there was no version of this crowd where you got to zero, that was the whole engineering of them"; "his omission setting her zip code, his silence signing her W-2"; "which was the truth of leaving — you never got the whole room in the last look, just a slice with the frame eating it"; "if it was unbearable, that was a problem the viewer had brought with them"; "the holes were hers to leave or fix, and tonight she felt like fixing one"; "The apartment had been rehearsing his underpainting for two months."

## VERBATIM-ECHO

- CLEARED — "crooked" ×4 (Ruth ×2, Sam's reframe, Sonia's window) — the Sam/Ruth volley *is* the echo: his transformative respin (*crooked is dynamic*) against her flat reassertion (*it's crooked*) is both cards executed; the fourth instance converts the gag into melancholy fact at the register. Transformative at every step. **Watch order:** cluster is at cap; no fifth "crooked" in Ch19+.
- CLEARED — "before the 4th" (June l.37 / Asha l.39) — cross-speaker verbatim, but scheduling-confirmation idiom in text-message form; Asha's repeat adds consequence ("gives me time to reshuffle"). Transformative.
- CLEARED — "Tuesday" cluster (~8 instances) — the book's titular spine; every instance shifts function (mail deadline, class history, voided future, invitation, refusal, errand). Load-bearing motif, calibration-exempt by definition of the book's form.
- CLEARED — "nail hole(s)" ×3 (deferred chore l.5 → ledger asset l.29 → action l.97) — transformed each pass; this is the chapter's planted-and-paid object line, not echo.
- CLEARED — "the seventeenth" ×2 + "post office... at nine" ×2 — deliberate recheck architecture; second instances add resolve ("she would not be anywhere else at nine") or test ("as good as it had been"). Transformative.
- CLEARED — "wool soap" ×3 — prop continuity; Mara's instance is dialogue recognition ("Wool soap?"), different speaker, different function.
- CLEARED — "knew it... knew it cold" (l.23) — single-sentence anaphora in June's compression register, not inter-sentence echo.

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## Chapter verdict

**REGISTER-HOLDS** — 0 REPLACE orders; 20 paragraph/block verdicts (20 HOLDS, 0 LOCKED — no calibration-locked text in this chapter); both gates cleared on the revised text. All five special-calibration lines are raw-only or resolved: `That was the whole plan` (excised; Mara's *That was the plan.* holds as plain dialogue), `A held edge` (excised, replaced by the typed-and-deleted ventilation question), `what the room had handled quietly came home` (excised), the zero-balance family (excised, replaced by spoken refusal), `his silence signing her W-2` (excised, replaced by cursor action), and the nail-hole close holds in its de-stamped form. Ch17 forward-watch orders verified complied: zero "stop coming," zero "stranger," zero "the way" connectives, one transformed keys mention, no underpainting metaphor, one deliberate light image (the fourth study). Standing orders:

1. **ORDER (clarity, dialogue block):** (a) line 81 — '"Thank you for October," she said' follows a sentence whose subject is Mara (line 79, the glance at the Corolla); a cold reader misassigns the speaker until Mara's reply. Change to "June said." (b) line 83 — "gone toward a double-parked Corolla" uses the indefinite article after line 79 already introduced "the Corolla's hazards"; change to "the double-parked Corolla." Wording of dialogue unchanged in both.
2. **ORDER (standing):** the raw-draft lines listed under APHORISM-GATE above, plus the dialogue-diagnosis and caption excisions ("Three words, nothing to argue with, nothing asked"; "visibly decided that was the end of that"; "and that, somehow, was the part that cost. Refusing an interrogation would have been easy. There was no interrogation to refuse."; "the thought didn't need a second lap"; "what they wanted to become"; "She left it there."), are confirmed drift and were excised in revision; no subsequent pass, merge, or provenance reconciliation may restore them.
3. **ORDER (watch, forward):** "crooked" is at four instances and spent; the flyer-in-window object family ("another thing in a window") is now planted in two chapters — Ch19+ may pay it off but must not re-describe it; the "before" anaphora triple (acknowledgments page / Eileen Brennan's name / back stair) is at one use and must not become June's recap template for the rupture; the nail-hole line has one move left (filling the rest, or not, at the decision) — no intermediate spackle beats.
