Audit written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_12.narrator_publicist.md`. Full audit text follows.

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# Narrator-Publicist Audit — Chapter 12: The Memory He Chooses

id: narrator_publicist | owner: claude | tier: risk
chapter text: `output/chapters/chapter_12.md` · voice cards: `output/style_and_voice.md` · reading guide: `premise/READING_GUIDE.md` · calibration: `output/critiques/codex/chapter_12.initial_draft_assessment.md`

Stance: skeptical editor. Every narrator description of Theo (POV protagonist) and June (visibly favored) was collected and tested against markers 1–5. Per the template, passes are shown with the strongest counter-candidate considered, quoted, and ruled.

## Marker sweep (steps 1–2)

**Marker 1 — Mystique assertions.** Checked every narrator characterization of both leads for misunderstood/unreadable/underestimated claims. Strongest counter-candidate: "he no longer saw the instructions, only the word PARTNER, sitting there in pencil like it had always meant a specific person with a tote bag and opinions about edges" (line 9). Test: does it claim June is beyond comprehension? No — it reduces her to two concrete, in-scene-verifiable attributes (the tote is on the page at line 29; the edge opinions are in her mouth at lines 57 and 83). Ruled EARNED below. No other candidate: June's avoidances are described mechanically ("She looked past him at the stock shelf while she talked," line 63), not mystified.

**Marker 2 — Effect-on-others framing.** The only generalized-reaction construction in the chapter is "three days later there's a peach shadow at four in the afternoon and everyone pretends not to see it" (line 73) — it grades a pigment's behavior, not a person's presence, and it is June's dialogue, not narration. No narrator line grades either character by hypothetical or generalized reactions. The one in-scene reaction to Theo's preparations is specific and named: June's "Theo. It's two index cards. You set a table for two index cards" (line 33) — a particular perceiver, at his expense.

**Marker 3 — Cosmic-flattery figuration.** Full figuration inventory: "the paint coming off it in a long curl, like a fern" (line 43 — Theo's dialogue, about a pipe); "like it had always meant a specific person with a tote bag and opinions about edges" (line 9); "His own memory was gone, riding to Greenpoint under the rubber band" (line 101). Each figure's content is an object or a custody fact. No image whose only content is that a character is special. NONE found.

**Marker 4 — Gesture inflation.** Closest call: "She let the tote down onto the desk chair, keeping the strap a moment longer than the bag needed" (line 29). Strip test: delete the trailing clause and "She let the tote down onto the desk chair" remains — full action residue. Critically, the clause asserts only duration, not decoded meaning; contrast the source failure "conveyed entire paragraphs of unconcern." The held strap is left uninterpreted. Second candidate: "She held his look for a second before she bent and pulled the rolled drawings out of her tote" (line 61) — duration stated, no communicative power credited, action follows immediately. Both pass.

**Marker 5 — Adjective campaigning.** Swept all narrator adjectives applied to persons. Mysterious/dangerous/effortless/cool and synonyms: zero instances in narration about either lead. The chapter's competence displays are carried by process dialogue in June's own voice ("You unscrew it, you don't tape around it," line 69; the primer/Decorator's White sequence, line 73) and by Theo's transcription of it on the page (line 85) — the source's fix already executed: action shown, reader left to judge.

## Per-line verdicts (step 3 attribution included)

- `EARNED — "only the word PARTNER, sitting there in pencil like it had always meant a specific person with a tote bag and opinions about edges" (line 9) — the on-page action that backs it: "She let the tote down onto the desk chair" (line 29); "I'm telling you now, I'm not going to put laundry on the line to make it friendlier" (line 57); "Put the outlet plate in. ... If you're going to paint it, that's the true part" (line 83). Attributable perceiver: Theo, close-third, framed as fallible in the same chapter — his readings of the room are wrong twice on the page (chairs moved out and back, line 17).`
- `EARNED — "June came in under the half-lowered gate without waiting for him to lift it, one shoulder dipped, tote swung forward so it cleared the bar" (line 19) — the on-page action that backs it: the line IS action; pure mechanics of a body and a bag, no campaign clause present to strip.`
- `EARNED — "She let the tote down onto the desk chair, keeping the strap a moment longer than the bag needed" (line 29) — the on-page action that backs it: the put-down itself; the duration clause asserts no meaning. Perceiver: Theo.`
- `EARNED — "June laughed once, low, and wrote chicken thighs on the back of his card stock before he had offered it" (line 53) — the on-page action that backs it: the writing-before-offered IS the intimacy claim; nothing is asserted beyond what she did.`
- `EARNED — "He had four questions and three of them were repairs. ... 'Who decided your wall was the one that had to be ready' came with the other two, fast enough to pass for help" (line 75) — the on-page action that backs it: "'Why didn't the--' he said, and stopped with the middle pen already in his hand. He pulled a blank card toward him. 'What white, exactly?'" (lines 75–77). The framing clause indicts Theo (his help-impulse disguised as help) rather than campaigns for him; the growth is enacted as an aborted sentence and a redirected question, never asserted as virtue.`
- `EARNED — "He turned the lamp off last, as usual, so the room went dark in the right order" (line 103) — the on-page action that backs it: the lamp sequence itself; "the right order" is Theo's free-indirect fussiness ("as usual" marks it as his routine), comic rather than admiring. Perceiver: Theo.`

No line in the chapter produced a PUBLICITY verdict. Strip tests on every flagged candidate left full action residue.

## Step 4 — declared narrator stance

Reading guide §1–2: close third, dual POV, "Feelings are rendered through action, object, and dialogue first; named directly only when the naming *is* the event." No unreliable/publicist narrator is declared anywhere in the guide, so no design excuse was needed or used; the chapter passes on its own evidence.

## Focused extra checks

**1. Does narration protect Theo by explaining his growth too generously?** No. Hunted for narrator clauses awarding Theo credit for restraint. The two candidates: line 75 (ruled above — self-indicting, growth enacted not asserted) and line 93 ("*Fine* still fit. *Just the assignment* did not: June's outlet plate was under his pen, and his own airshaft was under her rubber band"), which records what changed in object-custody terms, not virtue terms; it registers exposure, not achievement. Where the narration could have cushioned Theo it mocks him instead: "He had, in the intervening twenty-two hours, made it a thing" (line 17), "the dead one already exiled to the drawer" (line 17), and June's "You set a table for two index cards" (line 33) lands without narratorial repair.

**2. Does narration over-admire June's memory or turn her erased wall into a badge of depth?** No. Hunted for narrator grading of the memory (brave, devastating, enormous, gift-language): none. Post-telling, the narration handles it strictly as material — "her memory sat in his block capitals beside the two glasses" (line 101). The anti-nobility rule is stated by June, in dialogue, against precisely this failure mode: "And don't make me noble about it. ... No standing figure gazing upon the white wall. ... Paint the wall. The wall's the thing" (line 87) — and the narration obeys her for the rest of the chapter; there is no subsequent narratorial reframe of the wall as depth. The closest depth-adjacent narrator move, "His own memory was gone, riding to Greenpoint under the rubber band" (line 101), is a custody fact, not a eulogy.

**3. Does the final note over-market the chapter's theme?** No, in the current revision. The chapter ends on "*GREEN FIRST. ORANGE INTERVAL RIGHT SIDE. DEAD SALMON BEFORE WHITE.*" with the justification "because the orange had to go gray before it went away and the green had to read through the first coat" (line 105). Strip test on the because-clause: what remains is paint-sequence fact, all sourced from June's own speech (lines 69–73). The codex assessment confirms the earlier draft note read "GREEN FIRST. THE WHITE HAS TO COVER SOMETHING." — a thesis caption; the integrated text replaced it with process. The closing action ("put the card in his inside pocket, behind his keys, and rode the rest of the way home without taking it out again," line 105) is restraint, not marketing. Watch item only: if a later revision re-abstracts the because-clause toward meaning ("had to cover," "had to disappear"), it crosses back into thesis; current language stays inside pigment behavior.

## Chapter verdict

`CRITICAL-DISTANCE-HELD` — no unattributed publicity. Most admiring surviving line: "only the word PARTNER, sitting there in pencil like it had always meant a specific person with a tote bag and opinions about edges" (line 9). Perceiver: Theo, close-third and fallible on the page (line 17's chair-and-glass staging). Earning actions: June's tote handling (line 29) and her stated edge opinions ("I'm not going to put laundry on the line to make it friendlier," line 57; "Put the outlet plate in. ... that's the true part," line 83).

REVISION ORDERS: NONE — zero PUBLICITY lines found. Per the template, orders attach only to PUBLICITY verdicts; none were issued.
