Written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_24.narrator_publicist.md` (132 lines), replacing a stale prior audit that had scored an earlier revision. The completed audit document:

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# Narrator-Publicist Audit — Chapter 24: First Snow

id: narrator_publicist | owner: claude | tier: risk
chapter: output/chapters/chapter_24.md (close third, past; June focalizer per Ch 24 card)
inputs: output/style_and_voice.md; premise/READING_GUIDE.md; output/outline/chapter_cards.md (CHAPTER CARD - 24: First Snow); output/critiques/codex/chapter_24.claude_tic_audit.md; output/critiques/codex/mechanical/chapter_24_post_clarity_current_round3_repair_quality_gate_report.md
calibration: none present

Stance: skeptical editor, not encouraging coach. Publicity lines are engineered to read as stylish; the admiration they provoke is the symptom under audit. Every admiring line below was pulled to fail. Lines marked EARNED survived adversarial strip-testing, not approval.

## Input reconciliation (read before trusting the prompt anchors)

This file SUPERSEDES a stale prior audit at the same path that scored a different revision (its line numbers are offset ~8–14 lines and it quotes at least four phrases the current text no longer contains — "So June did the thing Odile couldn't", "Her own water, her own work, her own cold walk to her own train", "the kiss was hers to give and hers to end", "watched him pay it"; grep-verified absent). It also carried a stray "Written to…" preamble inside the file body. All line numbers and quotes below are the CURRENT output/chapters/chapter_24.md.

Two prompt anchors are likewise gone from the live text (grep-verified) — they name already-remediated risks:
- `room can hold it` — ABSENT. The public/private-disclosure beat now sits at line 25 ("The picture needed the two or three who would stand there long enough to feel the bare strip refuse to close") and line 57 ("That was the only confession the room was going to get: two words at an urn").
- `Everything in between belonged` — ABSENT. Current line 69 reads "'Nobody needs the rest,' he said. He didn't reach for the rest."
The co-filed codex tic audit cites the same pre-repair line numbers (its "line 101 The painting didn't fix that" is gone) and describes a prior revision.

Live focus locations audited in place: portrait non-exoneration = lines 99–107; Odile's "No" = lines 131–133; first snow = lines 155–161; final walk = lines 163–175.

## Narrator-stance check (step 4)

READING_GUIDE §1–2 declares close third, past, dual-POV, and interiority-through-action-first ("named directly only when the naming *is* the event"); §Voice-Card June, "narration transparency: June sees scene logistics clearly; do not hide what she sees for coyness." No unreliable or publicist-by-design narrator is declared. Therefore every admiring line must either survive the strip test (concrete action remains) or attribute to a fallible on-page perceiver; and because this is a June-focalized chapter, any close-third voicing of June's own self-image is a finding UNLESS the chapter frames that self-image critically at a citable point (audit spec §28).

The sole perceiver is June, and the chapter treats June's judgment as fallible on the page — enacted, not merely claimed, at four citable points:
- line 7: her forecast of the evening is proven flatly wrong — "She'd built an apartment's worth of dread over the weekend... She'd pictured herself at the door with her coat already on. Instead she was at the urn... and she was laughing with the cup still only half full."
- line 95: she interrogates her own motive and names how she could be fooling herself — "Not-looking, if she did it to prove a point, was its own composed arc of cups, another performance."
- lines 99→101→103: her generous read of the portrait is reversed inside two paragraphs — "denying himself the easy move" → "because he had still hidden it from her" → "while he was deciding for her what she could stand to know."
- lines 117–127: the ledger overturns June's entire model of the class — she believed the pairing was her own doing / an accident; Odile wrote "Park, J. - Brennan, T." on night one. Her governing interpretation was wrong.

And she converts admiration into accountability IN dialogue rather than only narrating it: "How's it feel to get caught" / "You didn't explain the corner to Sam" (lines 67, 71) to Theo; "It wasn't yours to run... it still wasn't yours to run" (line 131) to Odile; "Don't hand me the thing you hid and call it mine" (line 145) to Theo. Findings below were judged against that fallibility frame, not excused by fiat.

## Corpus (step 1)

Pulled every narrator description of appearance/movement/gesture/presence/reputation for June (focalizer), Theo (love interest), Odile (mentor/legacy figure — §2 "gets the best lines," the chapter's most-favored non-POV character), and the cohort (Ruth, Sam, Mara, Luis, Priya, Ben). The cohort produced no campaigning: their care-moves are rendered as completed physical actions (Luis re-sites the dish, lines 41–43; Mara routes the empanadas and leaves the dish, lines 39/79; Priya's unasked coffee, lines 45–47), and the boldest praise in the chapter is Ruth's dialogue, not narration ("It's the best thing on the wall," line 57 — attributable to a named, fallible character, not narratorially seconded). The live risk is concentrated exactly where the prompt pointed: June's self-image, Theo's restraint, Odile's complexity. Every clause that triggered a marker test follows.

## Marker sweep — Campaign target A: June's choices / self-image

- EARNED — "She left it a tower and counted that, privately, as growth." (line 3) — on-page action that backs it: "The cups she stacked in a plain tower. Fanned into an arc they'd have looked composed... A tower said nothing about her." (line 3) — tested marker 5 (protagonist self-approval). Strip residue: "She left it a tower" — a concrete choice (plain stack, not a fanned arc) survives. Critical frame: the self-image is deflationary at source (crediting "growth" to not-fanning-cups is the joke) and is re-opened as suspect performance at line 95 ("another performance"). Excused. Not a finding.

- EARNED — "and June made herself stay at the urn and take it in sideways, out of the eye that did her real looking." (line 17) — on-page action that backs it: "she was running the urn... running the urn gave her a wall to stand against" (line 3). Tested marker 1/5 (asserting June's superior painter-perception, "her real looking"). Strip residue: "made herself stay at the urn and take it in sideways" — a concrete avoidance behavior. The clause valorizes her eye but renders it as a compulsion she must manage ("made herself"), not glory. Perceiver: June. Watch-listed below.

- EARNED — "She was good at taking a made thing apart for the order it got made in, and this one came apart plain." (line 119) — on-page action that backs it: the deduction performed on the page in the next sentences — "The pairing was in Odile's hand, and it predated the pairing. Odile had written them down together on the first night, before there was a together to write down." (line 119). Tested marker 5 (protagonist competence asserted in close-third — a finding unless framed critically). Strip residue: the actual analysis (order reconstructed from the ink). Critical frame: the skill delivers her into shame, not triumph — "The shame came up fast enough that she could have torn the page for that alone." (line 129) — and §Voice-Card June frames exactly this analytic remove as her defense ("moves through the world like a painter pretending she is only a technician"). Excused. Not a finding.

- EARNED — "The picture needed the two or three who would stand there long enough to feel the bare strip refuse to close." (line 25) — on-page action that backs it: the seam is a described property, not a claim — "down the center a hard sixteenth of bare priming where the tape had come up: not blended, not bridged, a join you could find from clear across the floor" (line 19). Tested marker 1 (work-mystique — appreciated only by a worthy few, the field-guide "a face few people bothered to understand" pattern turned on her own painting). Strip residue: "June let them go"; the picture's difficulty is a stated visual fact. Distinguisher from the failure pattern: the many are NOT held in contempt — "A couple of the others clocked the seam, decided it was a technique, and moved on. Fine." June concedes the technique-read is fair. Perceiver: June. Closest marker-1 call in the chapter; watch-listed.

## Marker sweep — Campaign target B: Theo's restraint

- EARNED — "He'd have built Sam an explanation a month ago: pentimento, the record of getting a thing wrong on purpose, the sermon. Now he went to top off a water jar that didn't need it." (line 29) — on-page action that backs it: "'It's meant to lean,' Theo said, and left it there." (line 29). Tested marker 5 (valorizing new restraint). Strip residue: the displacement act ("top off a water jar that didn't need it") plus the four-word refusal survive intact; "the sermon" deflates the old Theo rather than flattering the new one. Perceiver: June. Not a finding.

- EARNED — "He had not turned it, because turning it was the single move he'd built the whole week to leave to her." (line 91) — on-page action that backs it: "He'd carried the second easel past it twice today, and the card stock once, and his own two empty hands more times than that. He had not turned it." (line 91), later cashed by his own plain line "It's yours, if you want it." (line 143). Tested marker 5/1 (restraint recast as a designed, week-long noble gift). Strip residue: the itemized carrying-past-without-turning is a shown, checkable behavior — restraint enacted before it is named. The generous inference is June's, and the chapter refuses to let it stand: 18 lines later she throws it back — "Don't hand me the thing you hid and call it mine." (line 145). Strongest Theo near-miss; watch-listed.

- EARNED — "He'd found the exact half-step where a shoulder comes forward out of a shadow with no line to help it... He'd painted her not knowing she was seen." (line 99) — on-page action that backs it: every laudatory verb is fastened to a specific, checkable compositional choice named in the same sentence-run — "He'd caught the value first... the dark of her sweater against the dark of the wall, almost the same note, a half-step apart... He'd painted the quarter of it that was turned and let the dark keep the rest, denying himself the easy move: swing her a few degrees more and make her look back at the man painting her." (line 99). Tested markers 3/5 (figuration/adjective praising Theo's mastery and restraint). Strip residue: everything — this is the source's fix executed, not violated (describe what the character actually painted; let the reader rate it). Perceiver: June, painter-eye (her declared expertise). Cited as counter-evidence of held distance; the most admiring surviving line (see verdict).

- EARNED — "He had looked at her like this, carefully, at value, with no need for her to turn around, while he was deciding for her what she could stand to know." (line 103) — on-page action that backs it: the itemized restraint in the paint at line 99. Tested marker 5 (portrait-as-proof-of-Theo's-tenderness — the prompt's non-exoneration location). This runs the OPPOSITE of publicity: the same careful gaze the sentence admires is welded to the indictment — "while he was deciding for her what she could stand to know" — and line 101 states it outright: "the word stayed in the room because he had still hidden it from her." June then refuses to publicize the object: "She would not describe the shoulder out of the dark or the quarter of her face he had left alone." (line 107). The narrator declines to let the art redeem the man. Not a finding; counter-evidence.

- EARNED — "He did not ask what she thought of it, whether she was all right, or for the answer she could watch him not reaching for." (line 143) — on-page action that backs it: "'Okay,' he said." (line 143). Tested marker 5 (restraint itemized as three noble abstentions). Strip residue: the abstentions pay off immediately as a plain one-word line; restraint enacted, not merely narrated. Perceiver: June. Not a finding.

- EARNED — "He nearly said something and drank the idea instead, and she watched it cost him, and she liked him so much in that second it was faintly annoying." (line 153) — on-page action that backs it: "He nearly said something and drank the idea instead" (the swallowed reply is the shown action). Tested marker 4/5 (crediting his self-suppression; June's swoon). Critical frame: "faintly annoying" mocks June's own affection in the same clause (§Voice-Card June self-mockery); the narrator is not asserting Theo is lovable — June is ruefully catching herself. Not a finding.

- EARNED (recurring shape) — "he read a person reading a picture the same as she did." (line 65) / "reading the room the same as he read everything: June, and Odile, and the ledger with a page gone out of it. He waited." (line 137) — on-page action that backs it: at 137 the claim is cashed in the same sentence by the itemized objects of his reading (June/Odile/the missing page) plus the action "He waited"; 65's hypothetical is cashed by 137 and by his showcase behavior (29). Tested marker 5 (perceptiveness asserted as the love interest's mystique). Strip residue: at 137, "Theo came back... stopped a few feet off... He waited." The two instances are the recurrence-risk shape (watch note) but each pays out in-scene. Not a finding.

## Marker sweep — Campaign target C: Odile's complexity

- EARNED — "It was the only thing, June had learned this fall, that Odile ever really watched." (line 13) — on-page action that backs it: the preceding two sentences — "she wasn't looking at the work. She was looking at the people looking at the work." (line 13); the plant is redeemed at the reveal, "I wanted to know what you'd make if I made you." (line 127). Tested marker 1 (mentor-mystique: Odile alone watches the true thing). Strip residue: "She was looking at the people looking at the work" — the singular claim is cashed by the described gaze in the same breath; the third sentence is redundant gloss. Perceiver: June, time-stamped as an acquired read ("June had learned this fall") and overturned by the night-one ledger. Cleanest cut-candidate in the chapter; watch-listed.

- EARNED — "she declined to say it, because the one thing Odile guarded harder than her own advantage was that." (line 123) — on-page action that backs it: "'He's my--' She stopped. Even here, even with the door shut and no boots on the stairs, she declined to say it... 'He was handy,' she said again." (line 123). Tested marker 1 (asserting Odile's guarded depth). Strip residue: the mid-sentence stop and the repeated deflection "He was handy" are concrete, dramatized speech behavior — the guarding is shown before it is glossed. Perceiver: June. Not a finding; gloss rides on shown action.

- EARNED — "That was the closest she came, two words with nothing after them, and June understood it was more than Odile gave most people and less than the thing was worth." (line 133) — on-page action that backs it: "Odile looked at her a second, direct for once. 'No,' she agreed. 'It wasn't.'" (line 133). Tested marker 2 (effect-on-others: "more than Odile gave most people" grades the concession by a generalized comparison). Strip residue: "'No,' she agreed. 'It wasn't.' ... two words with nothing after them" — the concrete concession survives. The marker-2 clause is defused by its own second half: "and less than the thing was worth" withholds validation in the same breath, so Odile is measured, not certified; no hypothetical crowd reacts — the only reactor is June, in-scene, and her verdict is a grievance, not endorsement. This is the prompt's Odile's-"No" location and it is a model of held distance. Not a finding.

- EARNED — "laid one finger on the drawer that held *After Class*, not opening it, only marking it, the nearest she'd come all night to touching the thing the two of them had made in her room out of her assignment." (line 139) — on-page action that backs it: the gesture itself — "laid one finger on the drawer... not opening it, only marking it." Tested marker 4 (gesture inflation — a fingertip credited with Odile's suppressed feeling) and Odile-complexity campaigning. Strip residue: the one-finger touch that does not open the drawer. The interpretive clause is deflationary, not inflationary: "the nearest she'd come all night to touching" explicitly reports she did NOT engage the work, and the narration declines to say what Odile feels. The chapter's single closest call (a favored non-POV character's minimal motion carrying an evening of unstated feeling); survives because it strips to concrete action and refuses the sentiment it gestures at. Perceiver: June. Watch-listed.

## Marker 2 (effect-on-others) — dedicated pass

No description grades June, Theo, or Odile by hypothetical or generalized onlooker reactions. Nearest candidates, all cleared:
- line 133, "more than Odile gave most people" — handled above; the generalized comparison is neutralized by the withholding second half and stays June's in-scene verdict.
- line 49, "she stood at it the length of time that means a person is reading and not being polite" — formula phrasing, but the perceiver is June reading one specific person (Ruth) in-scene; strips to "she stood at it [a long time]"; Ruth is not certified as cool — June is tracking the danger that Ruth will see the truth.
- line 49, "felt her stop being a person in a room and turn into a person in front of a picture, a different and more dangerous thing" — attaches to Ruth-as-viewer, names a specific shift, and is localized to Ruth's actual on-page read ("It's the best thing on the wall," line 57); it grades the threat to June, not a favored character's presence.
- line 5, "the loose clot of people who'd been climbing these stairs for eight Tuesdays and had finally stopped performing the climb" — generalizes the cohort and flatters no protagonist. No hit.

## Marker 3 (cosmic-flattery) — dedicated pass

No imagery anywhere asserts a character's specialness as its only content. All figuration is craft-anchored (value, edge, the seam, the half-step of a shoulder out of shadow, line 99) or literal weather. The snow close (lines 157–161) is deflated on the page — "'It won't stick,' Theo said... 'It'll be wet by morning.'" — and resolved as a painter's visibility problem, "the glare swallowed it. She had to look where the street went black." (line 161). No hit.

## Marker 4 (gesture inflation) — dedicated pass

Candidates: line 139 (Odile's finger — handled; survives on deflationary residue) and line 47, "For Ben, practically skywriting" — overt comic hyperbole in June's register, attached to a real minimal action ("re-taped a corner of his own flyer... left it a half-degree off level on purpose"); the inflation IS the joke, June-attributed and self-aware, not sincere narrator certification. No sincere hit.

## Structural check — is June validated as correct every time? (prompt directive)

Her in-scene reads of others do mostly confirm (the room reads the picture as she predicts; Ruth is the deep viewer; Theo behaves as expected). Left unchecked, that pattern is where publicity would enter next. It does not here, because the chapter supplies counterweights that make June wrong or self-suspicious on the page:
- her over-built dread is falsified (line 7);
- her motive is self-audited as "another performance" (line 95);
- her whole model of the class is overturned by the ledger (lines 117–127) — the deepest correction: she was wrong about the origin of everything;
- her generous read of Theo's portrait reverses to indictment (lines 99→101→103) and she retracts it aloud (line 145);
- the page-tear at 133 is left as an ambiguous, unendorsed act ("if anyone was going to decide what that first night meant, it was going to be the one whose name got written down without her"), not narratorially ratified as wisdom.
The prose does not validate June as correct every time. Constraint satisfied; flagged as the chapter's live risk, not a current defect.

## Anchor-beat spot checks (current lines)

- line 57, "That was the only confession the room was going to get: two words at an urn." — a narrator statement about the scene's disclosure economy, not a character description; strips to the fact that the public admission is only "No. We didn't." (line 55). No campaigning.
- line 69, "'Nobody needs the rest,' he said. He didn't reach for the rest." — Theo dialogue plus a concrete non-action; no narrator gloss claiming nobility. Clean (this is the current stand-in for the deleted "Everything in between belonged").
- Portrait non-exoneration (lines 99–107) — the chapter's anti-publicist centerpiece; audited under Target B above.
- Odile's "No" (lines 131–133) — audited under Target C above.
- First snow (lines 155–161) — no character description; note the window-as-mirror at 155 is DEFEATED, not used for epiphany ("When the strips went off the window stopped being a mirror, and she saw it"), which forecloses the §6 mirror-epiphany tic rather than indulging it.
- Final walk (lines 163–175) — restraint shown as concrete withheld motion ("His hand had already started toward her portfolio strap... let it drop open at his side," line 169; "his hands staying where they were," line 175); the chapter closes on June's un-rescued material stakes ("eight hundred dollars due Thursday, and she went," line 175), the opposite of a glow-up.

## Chapter verdict

`CRITICAL-DISTANCE-HELD` — no unattributed publicity; 0 PUBLICITY lines. Markers 2 and 3 are absent; no mysterious/dangerous/effortless/cool adjective is asserted of a favored character by the narrator; every admiring line survives the strip test with concrete residue; all admiration is June's free-indirect perception, and June is framed fallible in-chapter (lines 7, 95, 117–127, 99–103) and holds Theo and Odile to account on the page (lines 67, 71, 131, 145).

Most admiring surviving line: "He'd found the exact half-step where a shoulder comes forward out of a shadow with no line to help it... He'd painted her not knowing she was seen." (line 99). Perceiver: June, painter-eye. What earns it: a specific object whose every praised quality is an itemized, checkable painting decision ("He'd caught the value first... the dark of her sweater against the dark of the wall, almost the same note, a half-step apart... He'd painted the quarter of it that was turned and let the dark keep the rest"). And the admiration is denied exoneration status in the same beat — "because he had still hidden it from her" (line 101), "while he was deciding for her what she could stand to know" (line 103). Admiration asserted, then audited by the scene itself.

Runner-up earned lines: "the single move he'd built the whole week to leave to her" (line 91), backed by Theo's repeated carrying-past without turning and cashed by his plain "It's yours, if you want it." (line 143), then complicated by June at line 145; and "more than Odile gave most people and less than the thing was worth" (line 133), backed by Odile's two-word concession and debited in its own second clause.

## REVISION ORDERS

None. Zero PUBLICITY lines; there is no campaign clause to convert to action or cut.

## Advisory watch-items (not revision orders; no line currently fails)

Each held on residue and/or June's fallibility frame, but each is the exact shape that decays into marker-1/4/5 publicity if a later edit removes the check currently carrying it. Logged so a future revision touch does not lose the ballast:
1. line 13, "the only thing... that Odile ever really watched" — pure-gloss sentence; the concrete action is in the prior sentence. If "looking at the people looking at the work" were ever cut, this becomes standalone mentor-mystique with residue NONE.
2. line 25, "the two or three who would stand there long enough" — holds only because the many are not held in contempt ("Fine. June let them go"). If any disdain for the technique-readers is added, it converts to the field-guide's "few people bothered to understand" failure.
3. line 17, "out of the eye that did her real looking" — holds because framed as compulsion ("made herself"). Drop the compulsion framing and it is a bare superiority claim about June's perception.
4. lines 65/137, the Theo-perceptiveness credential clause — holds because each is itemized or behavior-cashed in-line. Reused without on-page cash-out, it is love-interest mystique.
5. line 91, "the single move he'd built the whole week to leave to her" — holds because Theo's own dialogue (line 143) cashes the inferred intent and June (line 145) complicates it. Remove either and it is narrator-asserted noble restraint.
6. line 139, "the nearest she'd come all night to touching the thing the two of them had made" — holds only on "only marking it," which caps the gesture. Remove that cap and the fingertip carries inflated feeling (marker 4).

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**Verdict: `CRITICAL-DISTANCE-HELD`.** The chapter carries no unattributed publicity for June's choices, Theo's restraint, or Odile's complexity. It avoids the three most damning markers outright (no effect-on-others framing, no cosmic flattery, no narrator-asserted "mysterious/dangerous/effortless" adjectives); every admiring line survives the strip test with concrete residue; and the free-indirect admiration is licensed by a focalizer the chapter frames as fallible (lines 7, 95, 117–127, 99–103) and who converts admiration into accountability in dialogue (lines 67, 71, 131, 145). The two publicity-adjacent phrases the prompt flagged (`room can hold it`, `Everything in between belonged`) are already gone from the current text. Six near-misses are logged as advisory watch-items — not revision orders — each with the exact condition that would tip it into publicity if a later edit removes the check now carrying it.

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One flag worth your attention beyond the audit itself: the prior file at this path, the prompt's anchor list, and the co-filed codex tic audit were all written against an **earlier revision** of `chapter_24.md` (offset line numbers; four quoted phrases now absent). I audited the live text and noted the reconciliation in-file. If other Ch24 critiques are being consumed downstream, they may need the same re-run against current lines.
