# Chapter 21 Narrator-Publicist Audit — Round 2 (verification)

Scope per `checks/audits/narrator_publicist.md`. Round 2: verify the five Round 1 revision orders against the current text, then re-run the full publicist strip test on the chapter as it now stands. Protagonist: Theo (POV). Favored characters stressed: Odile, June (present via painted objects and texts). Inputs: `output/chapters/chapter_21.md`; Round 1 audit `output/critiques/claude/chapter_21.narrator_publicist_round1.md`; snapshots `chapter_21.0016...before_narrator_publicist_round1_repairs.md` / `chapter_21.0018...after_narrator_publicist_round1_repairs.md`; READING_GUIDE §§2, 5, 6, 8; voice cards (Theo Brennan, Odile Marchetti, June Park); CHAPTER CARD - 21; positive_prose_round2 (INHABITED).

## Repair-boundary integrity

The `0016...before` → `0018...after` diff touches exactly four lines — 59, 79, 87, 93 — and contains the five ordered cuts and nothing else. Every cut is a pure deletion; no substitute clause was coined at any site, which each order explicitly required ("Do not replace with another interpretive tag" / "deleted, not softened: no substitute clause"). The current chapter is byte-identical to the `0018...after` snapshot (diff empty): no drift entered between repair and verification. The Round 1 pass-condition on the ending — that line 117 stay uncaptioned — is confirmed by the same diff: line 117 was not touched.

## Narrator-attitude check (step 4, re-confirmed)

READING_GUIDE §2 declares close third, feelings "rendered through action, object, and dialogue first"; §5 bans captioning care moves ("never announce"). No publicist-by-design narrator license exists for Theo's chapters, and Theo's voice card bans polished aphorisms about care even as free indirect. Findings, had any survived, would stand as narrator failures. None survived — see below.

## Order-by-order verification

1. **EXECUTED** — Order: cut "the lender owning the loan." Current line 59: "she wrote her own initials, *O.M.*, small and square. She hung the clipboard back on its nail one degree straighter than he'd left it and went upstairs." The appositive is gone; the sentence ends at "small and square" as ordered, and the clipboard beat closes the exchange in action. Residue sweep: zero hits for "lender" and "owning" chapter-wide. Cross-audit check: positive_prose_round2 (order 8 verification) had pointed to this appositive as where Odile's ownership "lives" after her "That is mine." was cut. The cut does not orphan that repair: the ownership still lives at line 59, in the action itself — her initials written beside his entry, under the loan she originated, on the sheet she then re-hangs. Round 1 order 1 anticipated exactly this ("The placement of the initials beside his entry... is the confession; no gloss"). No caption is needed and none remains.
2. **EXECUTED** — Order: cut "The looking was the part he'd skipped in Week 3." Current line 79 is the single sentence: "He looked at it a long time before he touched anything." The growth scorecard is gone; the contrast survives where it always lived — line 77 ("He had painted it fast, from memory, in a state he had refused at the time to name") against the long look. No replacement beat was added, which the order permitted but did not require; the one-sentence paragraph holds the pause by itself. Cross-audit check: positive_prose_round2 had quoted the two-sentence version as its question-1 counter-candidate (ruled portable-but-passing). Cutting the second sentence removes that counter-candidate; a pass is not a retention order, and no positive-prose constraint required the sentence. No conflict.
3. **EXECUTED** — Order: cut everything after "dragged the ochre-white into the ground." Current line 87: "So he painted the light doing that. He worked the edge wet and dragged the ochre-white into the ground." The certification ("became a described one... the ending itself made accurate") is gone. Residue sweep: zero hits for "made accurate," "described one," "boundary" chapter-wide. The optical fact stands earlier in the same paragraph ("the edge of the hair going from paint to glow to gone") and the technique now ends on technique.
4. **EXECUTED** — Order: end the scarf-knot sentence at "He kept it because he had it." Current line 87 ends the beat exactly there. The guilt arithmetic ("not a crime, only everything he had built on top of the remembering") is deleted whole, with no substitute apportioning clause. The origin of the study (line 77) and the hiding (line 77: "wrapped it and hidden it behind the boards") remain the reader's ledger materials, unadjudicated.
5. **EXECUTED** — Order: cut both "If she ever... / If she never..." conditionals. Current line 93 runs: "...the labeled bar outward where anyone walking through the stockroom could read exactly what was there and no one could see it. He did not put it in a crate." — precisely the sequence the order specified. The consent design is now entirely enacted: label quoted verbatim, orientation stated, legibility stated, non-delivery stated. The museum placard is gone. Residue sweep: zero hits for "findable," "hers to not look at," "turn it around."

All five orders genuinely executed; none satisfied by paraphrase or partial trim.

## Re-run: strip test on the current text

Every narrator description of Theo, and of Odile and June where the prose could favor them, re-collected and re-tested against markers 1–5. The five sites named in the round order stressed hardest.

- Counter-candidate, ruled pass — the fear-canvas thesis: "She had painted a man maintaining the perimeter of a room so that he would never be required to stand in the middle of it." (line 71). Tested as marker 4 (a painting credited with paragraph-length communicative power) and as over-clean decoding of June. Attributable perceiver: Theo, mid-epiphany, on the page with the canvas flat in front of him. The decoding is backed object-by-object at line 67 (keys fanned "so you could nearly count them," the steadied table "that did not appear to need steadying," the filled nail hole given four square inches, the bright twelve-by-sixteen "that the hands in the foreground were too busy to walk toward") — the strip test leaves the whole ekphrasis standing. The self-image it demolishes ("a fond portrait of a man who did things") is framed critically in the same paragraph, and the sentence indicts the protagonist rather than campaigns for him. The adjacent sentence — "She had seen that in Week 6, before the catalog, before any of it" — was tested separately as marker 1 for June (perceptiveness-mystique): it passes because the claim is time-stamped by a dated object hanging in the scene (the Week 6 canvas) and lands on self-indictment ("walked under it forty times"), not on June's specialness. Condition carried forward from positive_prose_round2 and from Round 1's watch: this stays the chapter's single thesis sentence, and Ch 22 must not restate the decoding (the Ch 22 card's own rule — "Week 6 fear canvas returns as object memory, not lecture" — already binds this).
- Counter-candidate, ruled pass — the top-fold refusal: "The glassine lay open beside the easel. His hands went toward the top fold before he stopped them." (line 91). Tested as marker 5 (restraint asserted). It is not asserted; it is staged — an object, a started motion, a stop, and then displacement into task ("He cleaned his palette knife instead."). No clause names what the stop means. Clean.
- Counter-candidate, ruled pass — the labeled-bar paragraph (line 93). Tested for residual placard language after the cut. "could read exactly what was there" is a legibility fact about a quoted pencil label, not a verdict about the discloser; "He did not put it in a crate" is a negative action in freight vocabulary. Nothing in the paragraph tells the reader the disposition is honorable. Clean.
- Counter-candidate, ruled pass — the phone wait: "The wait was terrible in an ordinary way. He wanted to move something and had nothing in reach worth moving." (line 105) and "Sunday was two days away and he was not going to spend them building anything." (line 111). Line 105 deflates rather than inflates — "ordinary" is the anti-mystique adjective — and the reaching-for-preparation is rendered as repeated behavior with an object callback ("Each time he set it down like the drill"), the drill being a named prop from line 73. Line 111 is a volition-report and was tested as marker 5 ("honest now" in prospective form): it passes on the same logic Round 1 applied to the cheekbone line — the reader needs the reason the reply is one word — and the volition lands in immediate on-page action: "*Okay,* he typed, and sent it, and that was all." (line 113), preceded by the unflattering "He read it four times." No narrator grading follows the send. Clean.
- Counter-candidate, ruled pass — "When he stepped back the panel stood as a finished thing." (line 89). Tested as marker 5 (achievement certification). "Finished" is a catalog fact corroborated by the pencil label he writes four lines later ("*finished 12/4*"), and the paragraph immediately spends its remaining words on the two withholdings ("The door stayed half open. The unpainted cheek stayed unpainted."), which are the opposite of campaign material. Clean.
- Counter-candidate, ruled pass — "the loan sheet on its nail with every column full for the first time in two weeks, *O.M.* square and small beside his own writing." (line 115). Tested because Round 1's pass-condition banned a "for the first time" caption on the ending. This one attaches to a ledger column, not a moral state: the two-week blank is established at line 11 as bookkeeping fact, and the sentence is a shutdown-routine inventory item between the humidity log and the thermostat. The reprise of *O.M.* is an observed object in Theo's last look, perceiver on the page. Clean — but it is the closest thing to a curtain-call the chapter retains; nothing may be added to this litany.
- Borderline re-checked, holds — "It was accurate on purpose, from her end, and he made himself write it accurately from his." (line 11). Round 1 passed this on residue (the quoted entry, the sting of "Not via J. Park") with the condition that no second volition-gloss enter the passage during revision. None did: the diff shows lines 9–13 untouched by these repairs, and the surrounding text (the counting refusal at line 9, the reflex-text left in the coat at line 13) is behavior throughout. Condition satisfied.

## EARNED (standing from Round 1, re-confirmed in current text)

- `EARNED — "That was the order his hands did things in: count first, feel later." (line 3) — the on-page action that backs it: "He had the utility knife out of his pocket before he had his coat off... Eight catalogs, each one wrapped in tissue"`.
- `EARNED — "she looked back at him with no more preparation than she gave a wall." (line 21) — the on-page action that backs it: "'I opened the door. There was nothing to sign.'"` — perceiver Theo, proven fallible in the same scene ("It was partly your fault.").
- `EARNED — "she had actually found the filled nail hole and given it four square inches." (line 67) — the on-page action that backs it: "a filled nail hole a shade off from the wall around it"` — perceiver Theo, countable fact of the described canvas.
- `EARNED — "It made the picture harder to look at. He kept it." (line 85) — the on-page action that backs it: the specified geometry change, "a generous welcoming angle" narrowed to "a door that could complete its swing in either direction."`
- `EARNED — "walked home through the cold with his keys in his pocket and both hands empty." (line 117) — the on-page actions that back it: "'I'm keeping the keys. The freight, the condition reports, the loan sheet.'" (line 53) and "He did not put it in a crate." (line 93).` Still uncaptioned; the diff confirms no interpretation was appended during repairs. Round 1's condition of pass remains in force for all future touches.

## Chapter verdict

`CRITICAL-DISTANCE-HELD`

Most admiring surviving line: "walked home through the cold with his keys in his pocket and both hands empty." (line 117). It is earned because it is inventory, not verdict — both halves are literal consequences of on-page decisions (he kept the job at line 53; he delivered nothing at line 93), and the narration reports the contents of pockets and hands without ruling on what they mean. The five Round 1 findings were all moral campaigning — honesty certified, guilt apportioned, consent captioned — and all five certifying clauses are now gone, with the objects that made them redundant (the loan sheet, the long look, the wet-dragged edge, the scarf knot, the labeled bar) doing the work alone.

Standing conditions for any future touch (not orders; the text as-is is clean): line 71 remains the chapter's only thesis sentence and must not be reprised in Ch 22 except as object memory; line 117 stays uncaptioned; the shutdown litany at line 115 takes no additions; no volition-gloss enters the loan-sheet passage (lines 9–13).

`REVISION ORDERS:` none.
