# Voice Check — Chapters 01–05

Scope: `chapter_01.md`–`chapter_05.md` against `style_and_voice.md`, READING_GUIDE §2/§4/§6, `reading_guide_bans.tsv`, tics tracker, and the Chapter 05 calibration sample (ch05 lines 79–91, "The card had removed every reason…" through "The mouth, lower on the left…"). Mechanical gate state: open=0, allowlisted=0, WATCH=326.

**Calibration sample rhythm signature (step 1, for the record):** Long perception sentences built by accretion — each clause adds one verified optical fact and the sentence only ends when the looking does ("The line went out along the temple arm to where it hooked his ear, and the ear was wrong, lower than the glasses pretended."). These are punctuated by flat two-to-six-word declaratives that close the circuit: "He did not know. She was not going to tell him." / "She kept her eyes up. The card said." Diction is craft-technical (temple arm, collar point, catalog version); abstraction is admitted only after it is paid for in objects ("Stenographers did not editorialize."). Self-deflection arrives mid-clause, not as a staged punchline ("because hardware was easy and she was a coward"). Stops are periods; no em-dashes; no balanced parallel pairs; pressure rises by the sentences getting longer and more patient, never by figurative escalation.

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## 1. Rhythm mismatches

- "Three minutes is nothing. Three minutes is a pop song, a subway stop, the time it takes to lose an argument. … She knew duration." (ch05, line 77) — anaphora + triadic list + two-word profundity stamp, immediately before the calibration sample. The sample escalates by observation ("the ear was wrong, lower than the glasses pretended"); this escalates by rhetorical figure. Essay cadence, not June's looking cadence.
- "Wrong. Wrong in every particular he could name. And still nearer the truth than the version the rest of the table had adopted with fries, because her version and the true one shared a wall, and from where he sat the wall was thin." (ch04, line 131) — oratorical repetition plus a metaphor-coin closer in Theo's POV. Theo's register per his card is domestic/logistical inventory; his own best rhythm in this span is "He did the arithmetic standing up, because the arithmetic was the part he could do" (ch02, line 9). The wall conceit is a narrator performing, not Theo thinking.
- "a work conflict for the frame, politeness for the walls, one boring lie at the door. Nobody had ever inspected one of hers; checking would have been rude. The early train out of the weekend. The email sent at a civilized hour, regretting." (ch01, line 111) — a built conceit with a parallel fragment catalog. The frame/walls/door vocabulary is defensibly June's trade; the two-fragment list that follows is a rhetorical set-piece shape the sample never uses (the sample's fragments are findings, not exhibits).

## 2. Banned phrases

Verbatim sweep of all five chapters against `reading_guide_bans.tsv` and the §6 tic catalog:

- `\bload[ -]?bearing\b` — **0 hits.** The two known legacy instances (ch01 ~line 111 narration; ch02 line 87 June's "load-bearing language") are confirmed replaced ("It was a good exit…"; "That's a lot of rule for an evening class.").
- breath-catching variants — 0. stomach/chest flips, flutters, pooling, electricity — 0 (the only "flipped" hits are literal label dimensions, ch04 lines 79/111/167). "something shifted between them" / "the air changed" / unspecified tension — 0. smirk/chuckle/"a beat" — 0 (nearest: "Mara grinned into her coat collar," ch03 line 127 — grin is not on the list). One-word reaction paragraphs — 0 standalone (nearest: "'Oh,' June said. 'We're not—'" ch01 line 79, which continues; Odile's "Mm." ch01 line 57 opens a longer paragraph). Beauty-unawareness framing — 0 (round-1 "made her beautiful" now reads "made her recognizable," ch05 line 103). Postcard NYC / "city that never sleeps" / "only in New York" — 0. Mirror epiphany — 0 ("reflection in a kettle," ch05 line 89, is a shape simile, not self-watching). Weather-as-feeling, rain-at-peaks, umbrellas, skyline, "golden hour" — 0.
- **Dialogue diagnosis (§2 zero tolerance, narration included) — 2 findings:**
  - "his voice got wider when contradicted" (ch01, line 7) — narration characterizing a speaker's delivery. The guide bans captioning delivery "in any speaker's mouth or in narration about speech," with no per-chapter allowance.
  - "She had lied the way a good hang lies, by deciding what goes on the wall and what stays in the rack, and she had done it without once glancing at him for a cue. … every interruption making it truer in six other memories." (ch04, line 119) — Theo captioning the conversation's technique and delivery. The guide's rule: perceptiveness is shown by what a character *does* with what he heard — and Theo already does it, on the receipt at lines 165–169. The caption is redundant and banned.
  - Strongest counter-candidates that survive: "*Accurate.* June turned the word over and found nothing wrong with it" (ch01, line 119) — she is testing the claim about the class, not rating the sentence's manner; "don't give me the edited version. People always edit the first one" (ch04, line 55) — licensed verbatim from Mara's voice card.

## 3. AI-sounding constructions

- The trailing evaluative ", which …" clause as default punchline. Raw ", which" counts: 8 / 11 / 11 / 10 / 7 by chapter; the evaluative subset is the same reflex in both POVs: "which she filed in his favor" (ch01, 131); "which he suspected was the only acceptable format" (ch02, 31); "which was either a kindness or a bet, and she declined to grade it" (ch03, 29); "which June noticed and declined to interpret" (ch03, 127); "which she chose not to develop as a thought" (ch05, 21); "which June had been in enough crit rooms to recognize as the expensive kind of nothing" (ch05, 103). Voice-true in isolation; at this density it is a sentence template, and because Theo runs it too ("which he respected," ch02, 51), it erodes the blind-POV test.
- The refusal-to-conclude move as a fixed mechanism — "declined to grade it" / "declined to interpret" / "chose not to develop as a thought" / "decided not to have an opinion about that" (ch03 29, ch03 127, ch05 21, ch02 47): five occurrences of one deflection gesture wearing both leads' clothes. Correction-as-punchline by another name; the tics tracker ordered this pressure halved from ch05, and it migrated rather than halved.
- Not-X-but-Y scaffold: "Ruth wasn't reading romance into anybody. She was reading an arrangement" (ch04, line 131); hedged thesis: "Being looked at, it turned out, was mostly being measured" (ch03, line 105) — the "it turned out" hedge plus aphorism is an LLM default; the sample states its discoveries without hedges.
- Theo-POV epigram stamps above the established ceiling (Comedy Doctor: 2/chapter): "carrying things was his best method of standing still" (ch04, 11); "Tonight it had a motor in it" (ch04, 53); "There was no procedure for it being easy" (ch04, 119); "the two silences were now a matched set" (ch04, 151); "All the signature did was agree" (ch02, 163). His card: never polished aphorisms about care. Four-plus coins in ch04 is performed quotability.

## 4. Anachronistic language

- "she had been done being looked at since roughly 1998" (ch03, line 159) — June is twenty-eight (ch01, line 9) and the class calendar (Tuesdays, Oct 20–Dec 8) fixes the year as 2026; she was born ~1998, so the idiom dates her aversion to her own infancy. Reads as drafted against a different birth-year assumption, not as a deliberate joke; it breaks the book's otherwise careful date anchoring.
- Otherwise CLEAN — checked register across all five chapters for off-period vocabulary, therapy-speak, and corporate idiom; strongest counter-candidate: "the charcoal had gone back, on its own recognizance" (ch05, line 59) — arch legalism, but contemporary, June-dry, and singular.

## 5. Repetitive metaphors

- Filing/ledger/paperwork as figurative domain — 8 figurative occurrences across both POVs: "the tone of a woman filing a document" (ch01, 65); "every one filed under honesty" (ch01, 111); "filed in his favor" (ch01, 131); "Odile's filing system" (ch02, 5); "the lie reduced to objects he could file" (ch02, 161); "as if that were accounting and she would check it against receipts" (ch02, 103); "the file she was assembling… built the same file" (ch04, 131); plus the sample's own "file under reasonable" (ch05, 83). The domain is natively Theo's (paperwork is his job); June running it too collapses the optical/domestic differentiation the guide makes binding.
- "Arithmetic" as feeling-displacement, exact word, three chapters: ch01 line 29, ch02 line 9, ch04 line 117 (plus "run the count," ch04 line 3). One owner, one use, would be a motif; this is a tic.
- Door-holding as figure, 3 occurrences: "like someone who had been asked to hold a door" (ch03, 55); "stood like a held-open door" (ch03, 67); "like a man holding a door shut" (ch05, 93) — the image belongs to Sam's pose in ch03; reusing it for Theo two chapters later spends it.
- "the time it takes to lose an argument" coined twice inside one chapter (ch05, lines 77 and 107). If intended as a callback it is too close together to read as one; it reads as the phrase-bank repeating.
- Occupational/person-doing-something simile scaffold ("the way a __ / like a __") — 16 instances across the span, peaking ch03–05 (waiter presenting, proofreader reading a menu, passport photo, court stenographer, conservator's patch, woman filing a document, a good hang lying…). June's card licenses visual analogies "used sparingly"; this is no longer sparing, and Theo narration uses the identical mechanism, again blurring blind-POV. Checked the hands/body counts as a possible sixth domain (10/1/4/11/6 by chapter): predominantly literal service and drawing mechanics, audited clean in the tracker; ch04's 11 stays inside the cap only because none are foregrounded tenderness — watch it.

## 6. Sentence length problems

- Trailing participles trending up, not down: 9 / 3 / 7 / 7 / **11** by chapter (gate counts). Ch05 examples: "She did it without hurry, squaring each card under its bulldog clip…" (line 27); "sharpening one over the trash can with a blade, unbothered, ordinary, a woman preparing a tool" (line 35). The sample closes its observations with finite verbs and full stops: "The charcoal recorded the lean."
- Paragraph-final stamp monotony: a high share of paragraphs in all five chapters end on a 2–8 word declarative coin regardless of scene pressure — "The towel held." (ch01, 37); "The sentence stayed where it was." (ch01, 85); "Tonight it had a motor in it." (ch04, 53); "She had checked twice anyway." (ch05, 9); "She knew duration." (ch05, 77). Each is fine alone; metronomic in aggregate. The sample shows the alternative: its longest sentence (the drift-and-return shoulder sentence, ch05 line 85) runs past fifty words at peak pressure, and its stamp ("She kept her eyes up. The card said.") is earned by an instruction, not a reflex.
- Compression/expansion against scene pressure: ch04 lines 117–131 — two consecutive 130–160-word analytical paragraphs suspend a diner's tempo (fries landing, side conversations) for essays of inference. Theo is licensed longer, not licensed to stop the room.

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**VOICE SCORE: 7/10** — Line-level voice is largely intact: zero banned-regex hits (§2), the blind-POV test passes on most pages on diction alone, dialogue holds the plain-speech floor, Odile stays economical, and the smallness test passes everywhere (homasote rail, 4B pencil, fifty-seven-center). The deductions are systemic, not local: two zero-tolerance dialogue-diagnosis captions (ask 2); a shared sentence template (", which"-evaluation / refusal-to-conclude) and a shared figurative bank (filing, arithmetic, occupational similes) running through *both* POVs, which is exactly how the June/Theo differentiation will quietly die (asks 3, 5); epigram density in Theo's chapters above his card and the established ceiling (ask 3); rising trailing-participle counts and a metronomic stamp cadence (ask 6); one chronology misfire (ask 4). None of this is dead prose yet; all of it is the same drift measured five ways.

**POLISHED-BUT-DEAD ZONES:**
- "Twelve easels stood in pairs tonight, each pair turned to face each other, close, with a stool in front of every easel." (ch05, line 23) — inventory staging that could open any workshop scene in any edited novel; it pales against the sample's pressured seeing ("The clamp lamp over his easel put one hard edge of light down his collar"). The paragraph recovers at line 25 ("You did not face chairs at each other unless…"); this sentence is the dead spot.
- "Hands crossed the paper placemats for salt and napkins, and the table broke into side conversations the way eight people do, Ben and Sam on neighborhoods…" (ch04, line 117) — "the way eight people do" gestures at specificity and contains none; generic ensemble connective tissue, against the sample's "the collar point on the right stuck up where it had escaped his sweater."

**REVISION ORDERS:**
1. ch01 line 7, "his voice got wider when contradicted" — dialogue diagnosis (delivery caption). Replace with action: what the green-scarf man *does* that makes June retreat (turns to include her, restates it to the room), or cut the clause and let her retreat stand unexplained.
2. ch04 line 119 — dialogue diagnosis (conversation caption). Cut from "She had lied the way a good hang lies" through "truer in six other memories"; keep the three-versions setup and let the receipt list (lines 165–169) carry the perception, per the guide's shown-by-doing rule.
3. ch05 line 77 — rhythm mismatch. Re-cut to the sample's stop pattern: one concrete duration fact, full stop; delete "She knew duration." and the pop-song/subway triad; this also clears the first "lose an argument" (order 10).
4. ch04 line 131 — rhythm + AI scaffold. Drop "Wrong. Wrong in every particular…" repetition and the shared-wall metaphor closer; end the paragraph on a Theo-card move (an inventory item or task he reaches for), not a coin.
5. ", which"-evaluation and refusal-to-conclude template (ch01 131; ch02 31, 47; ch03 29, 127; ch05 21, 103) — cap at two per chapter per POV. Differentiate the survivors: June's stay optical (judgment in paint vocabulary), Theo's convert to task displacement (he does something instead of concluding).
6. Theo epigram stamps (ch02 163; ch04 11, 53, 119, 151) — keep at most two per chapter; "There was no procedure for it being easy" may stay, replace "the two silences were now a matched set" and "All the signature did was agree" with object handling per his card.
7. Filing/ledger figure — reassign the domain to Theo exclusively. Rewrite June's figurative instances (ch01 65, 111, 131) into her card's vocabulary (edge, value, ground, wash); literal filing (ch02 165) stands.
8. "Arithmetic" — keep ch02 line 9 (its best, most Theo use); reword ch01 line 29 and ch04 line 117 to different concrete verbs.
9. ch05 line 93 "like a man holding a door shut" — replace; the door-pose image was spent on Sam in ch03 (lines 55, 67). Use a Theo-domain image (crate, frame, label).
10. ch05 "the time it takes to lose an argument" ×2 — keep line 107 (the bin decision, where it earns its weight); the line 77 instance is removed by order 3.
11. ch03 line 159 "since roughly 1998" — re-anchor to a year consistent with June being twenty-eight in 2026 (school-age would be ~2006–2010), or rewrite as a non-dated span.
12. ch05 trailing participles (11, series high) — convert at least half to finite-verb sentences on the sample's pattern ("The charcoal recorded the lean."), starting with lines 27 and 35.
13. ch05 line 23 dead sentence — route the easel arrangement through June's installer eye (sightlines, spacing in inches, what the pairing does to where attention can go) instead of inventory.
14. ch04 line 117 "the way eight people do" — name the actual mechanics of the table splitting (who turns to whom, over what object) or cut the clause.
15. ch03 line 105 — delete the "it turned out" hedge; state the measurement observation plainly or move it into the charcoal action.
16. ch01 line 111 — trim the parallel fragment catalog to one exhibit ("The early train out of the weekend." or the email, not both); keep the frame/walls/door conceit, which is June's trade.
17. Paragraph-final stamp cadence (all chapters) — in revision, vary at least a third of paragraph closers per chapter: end on action, dialogue, or a long sentence; reserve the coin-stamp for genuine pressure points as the sample does.

**OVERALL: VOICE-DRIFT (20 findings — 18 across asks 1–6, plus 2 polished-but-dead zones)**
