I've read the audit template, the revised chapter, the raw draft, the chapter packet, both voice cards, the reading guide and pattern bans, and the mechanical gate report. What follows is the audit itself.

---

# Audit: Plain-Translation Audit — Chapter 17, "The Acknowledgment Page" (binding-register defense)

id: plain_translation | tier: risk | trigger: flag:register-drift + every-revised-chapter
Inputs verified: `output/chapters/chapter_17.md` (revised), `output/drafts/claude/chapter_17.round_01.md` (raw), chapter packet, `output/style_and_voice.md`, `premise/READING_GUIDE.md`, `premise/patterns/reading_guide_bans.tsv`, `output/critiques/codex/mechanical/chapter_17_quality_gate.md` (0 open findings, WATCH-only).

**Form identification.** The chapter is uniform close-third June narration (compare: June voice card — interiority rhythm "perception first, judgment second, self-rebuke third"; samples "I'm not leaving because I hate it here. I think that's the problem." / "I don't know what to do with wanting it." / "That part works. Sorry. I realize that makes things worse."), one documentary insert (the acknowledgment page — locked), one documentary citation (`Catalogs (9) – J. Park – out Thurs 11/19` — checked against its own form, Ch14 log format, verbatim match, correct), and one extended exchange form (the back-stair confrontation — June dialogue against June samples, Theo dialogue against Theo samples "I should have told you. I know that." / "I can handle the labels. I know that's not the problem." / "I said boss because it was true. It just wasn't the whole truth."). No narrator-essay form appears; nothing here may be checked against essayistic register.

**Provenance note (load-bearing for the gate sections).** Diffing raw against revised shows the revision pass already executed at least ten de-drifting cuts, which this audit confirms below rather than re-litigates: the raw aphorisms "That's the whole grievance. It fits in one sentence. I've checked." (raw L79), "Strangers know the way out." (raw L123), and "pairs that don't hang together lie" (raw L125, Odile's Ch16 line re-run as narration maxim) are all absent from the revised chapter; so are the dialogue-diagnosis/self-observation lines "in the voice of an employee explaining shift work" (raw L43), "Then the facts came, the way she'd known they would" (raw L81), "She heard her own voice come out level and was distantly grateful to it" (raw L89 — a watching-herself-feel violation), "And then, with everything practical stripped off it" (raw L93 — delivery-rating), "which was the first honest thing his face had done since the door closed… which was its own information" (raw L107), "because his hands had to hold a job even now" (raw L125), and the maxim-shaped "By the fourth it was a problem with a history" (raw L73, replaced with Theo-plain "I didn't know how to say it without asking you to fix what I hadn't said"). These cuts were correct. The audit below is of what remains.

## Per-paragraph verdicts

- `HOLDS — "June got home at ten-forty…" (L3) — sample compared: June voice card, narration/interiority + physical tells ("aligns/corrects edges") — binding-register rewrite is worse because: "tea she had no plan to drink," the face-down phone with the Dec 4 thread named-and-deferred, and the spines pulled into "one straight line" carry the packet's required private-pressure object and June's edge-alignment tell in three sentences; a flatter version loses the deferral logic ("neither was tonight's problem") that establishes her control project.`
- `HOLDS — "Label work. That was the assignment…" (L5) — sample compared: June voice card (self-assigned-task compression) — rewrite tested: "She wanted to find how Odile titled paintings before she slept." Worse: loses "out of precedent instead of feeling" (the chapter's desire line: facts to stay stable) and the hands-replaying-the-night clause that grounds the Ch16 aftermath physically. The "precedent instead of feeling" contrast is informational, not false-profound; cleared against the not-X-but-Y ban.`
- `HOLDS — "So she didn't let them stop…" (L7) — HIGH-RISK, full comparison. Sample compared: June voice card (visual/craft nouns; "The left edge is good. Don't fix it."). Binding-register rewrite: "Odile titled paintings by time of day — Corner, 6 p.m. North Wall, Late. Two Chairs, Quarter to Ten — so After Class (6 p.m.) and After Class (9:40) would match the house style." The rewrite is measurably worse: it loses the catalog production facts ("typeset close, plates printed slightly too dark" — the smallness-test detail), and it loses "wouldn't be a cute idea she and Theo had invented," which is the last warm we-beat before the rupture and gives the betrayal its before-state. "They'd be grammar the room already spoke" was tested at the Aphorism Gate (cleared below: referential "They'd," non-portable). HOLDS.`
- `HOLDS — "The ninth catalog…" (L9) — sample compared: June narration — pure procedure; "exactly where Theo had pushed it for transit" re-plants the care-object provenance the engine needs. Nothing to translate.`
- `HOLDS — "The slip marked a plate…" (L11) — sample compared: June painter-eye ("the room going brown at the edges") — a plain version drops the twelve-by-sixteen, which must land here so L13 can refuse to think about it.`
- `HOLDS — "June looked at the dimensions…" (L13) — sample compared: June interiority rhythm — the verbatim "dimensions… the dimensions" repetition enacts avoidance and is transformative (look → refuse); de-echoed rewrite ("She put the size out of her mind") names the emotion instead of performing it and is worse on fidelity.`
- `HOLDS — "The colophon was on the last left-hand page…" (L15) — HIGH-RISK, full comparison. Sample compared: June narration. Rewrite: "The facing page had eleven lines of type under a single word, and she read it without deciding to." Worse: "the way you read anything facing" is the on-page proof the discovery is accidental and undeniable — the packet's hardest structural requirement (not snooping, legitimate reason). The generalization is doing forensic work, not ornament. Tested at the Aphorism Gate for its gnomic shape: cleared — it is a mechanic of reading, not a quotable truth-claim. HOLDS.`
- `LOCKED — "ACKNOWLEDGMENTS" (L17) — skipped, listed under calibration's inviolable text.`
- `LOCKED — "These rooms had one winter… He still knows. —O.M." (L19) — skipped per calibration. Clarity check only, as permitted: names and relations are unambiguous on first read (sister Eileen Brennan; her son Theo Brennan); mechanical formatting clean (italic insert, attribution em-dash). No formatting defect. Factual reveal intact: Eileen is Odile's sister; Theo is Eileen's son; Odile is Theo's aunt.`
- `HOLDS — "June read it once as back matter…" (L21) — HIGH-RISK, full comparison. Sample compared: June voice card under stress ("gets visually exact," measurement idiom). Rewrite: "She read it three times, word by word, looking for the error." Worse on all three axes: the original's three beats are three different reading modes (back matter → English → measurement), which is the reclassification engine itself, and "the way she checked a measurement she didn't like" is her card's exactness converted to procedure. Checked against the packet's triple-beat-false-emphasis ban: cleared — each beat changes content, not just cadence. HOLDS.`
- `HOLDS — "Eileen Brennan. My sister. Her son…" (L23) — sample compared: June allowed-plainness — fragments as fact-check; "There was no error" is the verdict of the procedure above. Untranslatable without loss.`
- `HOLDS — "She checked the cover…" (L25) — sample compared: June voice card (procedure under stress; pencil "parallel to the card" = edge-alignment tell) — the checked/checked anaphora is the procedure performed; see Echo Gate. Raw's three-sentence version was compressed to two in revision; correct direction.`
- `HOLDS — "Once, at a museum…" (L27) — sample compared: June painter-eye + packet's sanctioned metaphor domain ("a label changing… recategorizing a room") — this is the chapter's one licensed comparison, kept concrete (technicians, weekend, "Same paint."). Rewrite into plain statement ("the facts hadn't changed, only the label") deletes the only image the packet explicitly commissioned. "Same paint. Not one thing on the canvas had moved." tested at the Aphorism Gate; cleared below.`
- `HOLDS — "Nothing about Theo had moved either…" (L29) — HIGH-RISK, full comparison. Sample compared: June voice card (judgment beat of her rhythm) + sanctioned label metaphor. Rewrite: "Theo hadn't changed. His aunt gave him the keys. He knew the stockroom because he grew up in it. She's my boss was true on the payroll and hid the family. The log entry was real and the label was chosen." The rewrite is worse: "He had keys because his aunt had given him keys" is a deliberate tautology — the same fact wearing its new label, which is the felt experience the packet ordered ("betrayal as sudden reclassification"); "accurate on a form, false about the rooms behind it" is denser than any paraphrase because "rooms" does double duty (the form's abstraction vs. Marchetti Rooms literally behind it); "staff was the label he'd chosen to wear in front of her" extends the sanctioned label figure. The two not-X-but-Y-shaped contrasts here ("hadn't memorized… he'd grown up on its floor") were checked against the false-profound ban: cleared — each is old-label/new-label information, the chapter's commissioned mode, not profundity performance. HOLDS.`
- `HOLDS — "And every Tuesday she had walked…" (L31) — HIGH-RISK, full comparison. Sample compared: June narration at the grievance. Rewrite: "Every Tuesday she had risked being thrown out as a lying stranger, and Theo had told the same lie with keys in his pocket and family to catch him." Worse: loses "the lie public behind her" (the reputational stake her L71 speech depends on) and "Sunday dinner waiting on the far side of any disaster" — the asymmetry made into one concrete object, which is the wound the packet defines. The parallel "every Tuesday… every Tuesday" is transformative (her clause and his clause carry opposite stakes); see Echo Gate. HOLDS.`
- `HOLDS — "She thought, briefly, about the fact that Odile had named the shelf…" (L33) — sample compared: June interiority — this paragraph protects the Odile reveal exactly as ordered (inference available, nothing stated); "She had enough that fit" is her compression. A plainer version risks either explaining Odile or losing the plant.`
- `HOLDS — "The kettle had boiled and gone quiet…" (L35) — sample compared: June physical tells (sorts, squares, exits) — "leaving a mess behind her was not who she was going to be tonight" is judgment-beat plainness, not ornament; cutting it deletes the motive for the squared cards and the single-catalog tote, which the ending needs.`
- `HOLDS — "She walked it. Twenty-five minutes, fast…" (L37) — sample compared: June compression — packet ordered no transit montage; this is one sentence plus one simile that is literally true ("a parcel she was returning"). Raw's self-captioning tag ", which it was" correctly cut.`
- `HOLDS — "The front of Marchetti Rooms was gated…" (L39) — sample compared: June narration — revision replaced raw's dialogue-diagnosis ("in the voice of an employee explaining shift work") with "Weeks ago he had told her which nights he closed. Tonight she used it." — plainer and colder, an improvement the rewrite test cannot beat.`
- `HOLDS — exchange ""June." / "Say it anyway."" (L41–49) — samples compared: Theo "I should have told you. I know that." / June "Can I see it again?" — "so she wouldn't be talking uphill" is scene logistics per her transparency rule; "He looked at the cream slip and not at the page" shows guilt through object, no diagnosis; "Say it anyway" is her plain-speech floor beat. Followability: a cold reader knows she is demanding he speak the page aloud.`
- `HOLDS — "Eileen Brennan is my mother. Odile's my aunt." + payroll list (L51–55) — content fact-locked (the reveal must remain; it does, verbatim-clear). Sample compared: Theo card under pressure ("lists facts… payroll service, I clock in, all of that is real") — matches the card's escalation exactly: facts first, the cut-off "before I—" left unfinished. June's "Stop." / "He stopped." is the exchange form doing its own work; no translation possible.`
- `HOLDS — packing exchange (L57–65) — samples compared: Theo "I said boss because it was true. It just wasn't the whole truth." — "I want to say I don't know. I knew it was in one of them. I didn't open them to find out which." is the card's qualifies-when-guilty-then-forces-himself-plain mechanic on the page; June's "So you carried it to my table and hoped I'd only read the plates" is accusation-as-fact per her card. Narration "That was probably true, and it changed nothing" correctly replaced raw's mannered "filed it where true useless things went." Theo's "I didn't hope anything that organized" tested for wit-drift: cleared — it is a precision correction (refusing imputed planning), not banter.`
- `HOLDS — ""How long has boss been the word?" + timeline (L67–69) — samples compared: June compression; Theo confession ladder — revision already replaced the maxim-shaped "a problem with a history" with "I didn't know how to say it without asking you to fix what I hadn't said," which is Theo-plain and self-indicting. "There wasn't a week where it got smaller. I watched it not get smaller." — the echo is transformative (the second sentence adds his passivity as agency); see Echo Gate. The narration's "neither of them was going to stand on this stair and name the kiss" is June's inference, allowed under close-third; it does not rate his delivery.`
- `HOLDS — "Here's what I knew…" through "…knowing she couldn't." (L71–75) — samples compared: June "I'm not leaving because I hate it here. I think that's the problem." (the plain, declarative grievance register). "You'd have helped her stack the chairs after" is the single most June sentence in the chapter — concrete, room-true, devastating without abstraction. The one-sentence grievance the packet ordered lands at L75 and is June-specific (her room, her ejection, his immunity). Raw's appended self-rating ("That's the whole grievance. It fits in one sentence. I've checked.") is confirmed cut — see Aphorism Gate.`
- `HOLDS — keys beat + fix-it list + task speech (L77–87) — samples compared: Theo "I can handle the labels. I know that's not the problem." — his offer-cascade is the card's logistics-spiral verbatim in spirit; June's "You're trying to get a task… You're not getting a task" converts his care language into the charge, with "the way you carried the catalogs" closing the loop on the engine (care object becomes evidence). "He took his hands out of his pockets. The keys stayed." — physical tell, not echo-confirmation closer; the keys are the uncuttable plot object. Revision correctly deleted raw's "was distantly grateful to it" self-observation.`
- `HOLDS — "I was scared you'd stop coming…" through "…kept the answer." (L89–91) — samples compared: Theo allowed-plainness ("I was scared" is on his card verbatim); June "I don't know what to do with wanting it." — "I would have stopped coming. Probably. That was mine to decide." is her card's grammar: particular, first-person, the deflecting-then-true cadence. "You did my math for me and kept the answer" picks up his own "you'd do the math" and turns it into the charge — transformative; see both Gates.`
- `APHORISM-GATE FINDING at L95 — see Gate section. The surrounding exchange otherwise HOLDS.`
- `HOLDS — car beat + "Ask your aunt." + Tuesday exchange (L97–105) — HIGH-RISK on the Tuesday line, full comparison. Samples compared: June compression; Theo "Do you want coffee? I can also just sit here." (his kettle plea is that sample under rupture pressure — exact card match). Rewrite of L105: "I won't be there Tuesday. Don't keep my spot." Worse on all three axes: the original answers his literal question ("Tell me what Tuesday looks like") in his own terms — followability holds, a cold reader knows she is quitting the class — and "Don't set one for me" refuses his specific love language (logistics, hosting) rather than generic attendance. Checked against the spent chair-count-comedy family: cleared — one grim chair fact, no count gag, no joke shape. "He flinched at the word" stands clean after revision cut the raw paragraph's two trailing self-commentary clauses.`
- `HOLDS — catalog placement + "One of nine…" + walk refusal (L107–117) — samples compared: June physical tells + "That part works. Sorry. I realize that makes things worse." (the cruelty-through-accuracy register of "you'll want the record straight, you're staff"). "the way stock went back on a shelf" is the care-loan formally terminated as an object action — the packet's commissioned ending mode. "I've been a stranger here the whole time" is first-person particular and survives; its portable sibling ("Strangers know the way out.") is confirmed cut — see Aphorism Gate. "before the rest of it arrived" tested for vagueness: cleared, the referent is the next spoken sentence.`
- `HOLDS — "She went down the rest of the iron stairs…" (L119) — sample compared: June narration — "heard him not following, heard the box scrape" renders restraint through evidence (the scrape), not captioned psychology; revision correctly cut raw's "because his hands had to hold a job even now" and the "pairs that don't hang together lie" maxim, replacing the latter with the factual "as Odile had ordered them kept," which also keeps the Odile plant inert as required.`
- `HOLDS — "The tote was light on her shoulder…" (L121) — sample compared: June compression; packet's end-on-action order — the lightness is the eight refused catalogs, unstated. No maxim, no summary. Rewrite test fails: any addition explains.`

## Aphorism Gate (zero tolerance)

The three lines named for focused judgment:

- `APHORISM-GATE — "That's the whole grievance. It fits in one sentence. I've checked." — RAW DRAFT ONLY (raw L79); verified absent from the revised chapter. The cut was mandatory: it is a portable maxim AND self-rating meta-commentary on her own sentence. ORDER: confirm cut holds — must not be reintroduced in any later pass.`
- `APHORISM-GATE — "Strangers know the way out." — RAW DRAFT ONLY (raw L123); verified absent from the revised chapter. Gnomic, fully portable, epigraph-shaped. Cut correct; same standing order.`
- `APHORISM-GATE — "Saying *I know* isn't giving it back." (L95) — FAILURE. Judged as ordered: this is the chapter's one gnomic-present sentence in June's mouth. Her entire calibration sample set is particular and deictic — "I'm not leaving because I hate it here," "I don't know what to do with wanting it," "That part works. Sorry." — first person, this-situation, with the corrective second beat. L95 has no person, no tense anchor, and generalizes cleanly to all apology ("acknowledgment is not restitution"); it would survive on a quote page with zero context, which is the template's test. It is the strongest line in the chapter and that is precisely the symptom. The fix is one word: anchoring the subject deictically kills portability while keeping the refusal, the rhythm, and the plain-speech floor beat intact. ORDER: REPLACE L95 with: "Saying that isn't giving it back." (Out of context the line no longer parses; in context its force is identical. Do not expand it; do not add a tag.)`

Strongest counter-candidates considered and cleared, with reasoning:

- `"They'd be grammar the room already spoke." (L7) — cleared: referential "They'd" makes it non-portable; content is house-style fact, not truth-claim; checked against the object-as-agent ban, which covers paper/receipt/label figures — a room "speaking" a grammar is house-style idiom, and the page itself is never given agency anywhere in the chapter (verified: the page "marked," "had," "was" — never accuses, waits, decides, or tells).`
- `"Same paint. Not one thing on the canvas had moved." (L27) — cleared: anchored to the specific museum anecdote two sentences earlier; quoted alone it is opaque.`
- `"Tuesday looks like a room with one less chair in use." (L105) — cleared: an answer to a quoted direct question, meaningless without the class; character-pressure speech.`
- `"You did my math for me and kept the answer." (L91) — cleared: second-person particular, built from his own preceding words; non-portable.`
- `"Every Tuesday I stood in her room knowing she could throw me out, and you stood in it knowing she couldn't." (L75) — cleared: this is the packet-ordered one-sentence grievance, first/second person, fully situation-bound.`

## Verbatim-Echo Gate

- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "checked/check": "the way she checked a measurement" (L21), "She checked the cover… She checked the colophon and the acknowledgment again" (L25), Theo's "I didn't check the back pages" (L59) — CLEARED: the narration anaphora performs June's measurement procedure (voice-card tic, load-bearing), and was already compressed from three sentences to two in revision; the cross-speaker instance is transformative — her triple-checking against his chosen not-checking is the asymmetry in miniature. The only non-transformative speaker echo ("I've checked," raw L79) is already cut. No order.`
- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "moved": "Not one thing on the canvas had moved." (L27) → "Nothing about Theo had moved either." (L29) — CLEARED: transformative bridge; the second instance applies the museum case to Theo, which is the sanctioned reclassification comparison doing its one job. No order.`
- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "math": Theo "you'd do the math" (L89) → June "You did my math for me" (L91) — CLEARED: she converts his framing into the charge; classic transformative pickup between speakers. No order.`
- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "keys": seven instances (L29 ×2, L31, L51, L77, L85, L87) — CLEARED AT CAP: the L29 doubling is a deliberate relabeling tautology; the rest are the literal plot object and Theo's card tell, each doing distinct work (asymmetry image, confession fact, pocket tell, refusal beat). WATCH: the count is at ceiling — no new key beats may be added in the editor pass. Mechanical gate independently flags the "key" vocab cluster (L31) as WATCH; consistent.`
- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "catalog(s)": ~12 instances — CLEARED: literal prop of the chapter; literal use free. No figurative catalog instances found (verified: no "catalog prose" drift in Theo's inventories either).`
- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "room(s)": proper name (Marchetti Rooms), locked quotation, and three dialogue beats — "anyone in that room" (L71), "I wanted you in that room" (L89), "a room with one less chair in use" (L105) — CLEARED: the three beats form a transformative chain (her reputation in it / his wanting her in it / her absence from it); none repeats another's function. No order.`
- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "fact(s)": L25, L33, L69 — three instances, three functions (narration verdict, deferred thought, Theo's confession-vs-fact distinction) — CLEARED. "truth": single instance (L85) — CLEARED.`
- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "smaller": "There wasn't a week where it got smaller. I watched it not get smaller." (L69) — CLEARED: within-speaker, single beat, transformative (second instance converts passivity to admitted agency).`
- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "the way" connective: four instances (L15, L21, L85, L107) — CLEARED AT CAP: this is June's visual-analogy connective; revision already converted two raw instances to "as" (L39, L119), showing the sweep was applied. WATCH: at ceiling; editor pass must vary, not add.`

## Mechanical gate cross-check

`chapter_17.md`: 0 open findings, 0 allowlisted; WATCH-only hits (hands ×8, em-dash density 14 in the confession exchange, iron ×2 on the literal iron stairs, "key" cluster, one "shifted" at L121 — "shifted the strap," literal). None converts to an order; the `load-bearing` ban (rg-eight-tuesdays-load-bearing) is clean — verified zero hits in the revised text.

## Chapter verdict

**DRIFT-FOUND (1 order)**

Orders:

1. **REPLACE, L95:** "Saying *I know* isn't giving it back." → "Saying that isn't giving it back." One-word de-quotablization; keeps the refusal, the rhythm, and the plain-speech floor beat; removes the gnomic shell that makes it the chapter's only quote-page-portable line and the only sentence in June's mouth outside her sample grammar.
2. **Standing (no text change):** the raw-draft lines confirmed cut must not be reintroduced by any later pass — "That's the whole grievance. It fits in one sentence. I've checked."; "Strangers know the way out."; "pairs that don't hang together lie"; "in the voice of an employee explaining shift work"; "Then the facts came, the way she'd known they would"; "with everything practical stripped off it"; "was distantly grateful to it"; "the first honest thing his face had done"; "because his hands had to hold a job even now."
3. **WATCH (no text change):** "the way" connective (×4) and key beats (×7) are at cap; the editor pass may vary or cut but may not add instances of either.

Everything else holds. The register survives this chapter because the revision pass did the cutting the raw draft needed; the one residue is L95, and it is a one-word fix.
