I've read the full manuscript in order and verified my findings against the source files (word counts, motif counts, banned-pattern greps, headcount contradictions, card renderings). Report follows.

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# FINDINGS

1. **Whole book / Form binding — inviolable-miss (locked length band)** — Total manuscript is **61,000 words** (verified: `wc -w` across all 24 chapters), against the guide's binding "**Length: ~80K; band 75–88K.**" — A cold reader doesn't count words, but *feels* the shortfall: the "three couples" cohort is dramatized as three couples and no more, the class the setup promises never materializes (see #2), and the middle third reads as a string of near-identical vignettes rather than developed scenes. The book is ~14K under its own floor, and the thinness is structural, not stylistic. — **Revision order:** Expand toward the 75K floor by *developing* the underwritten material — give Mara/Luis a real arc (they currently only demonstrate settled-coupledom), populate or explicitly retire the phantom other couples, and let the Tasker decision breathe across fewer, denser chapters — not by padding existing scenes.

2. **Ch 2 vs. Ch 3/4/5/7/16/19 — continuity (class size) — the room will not hold still.** Ch 2: "**Eight pairs** now that the list was closed. **Sixteen people**, fourteen of whom were what the list said they were." Ch 3: "**eight easels** in a shallow horseshoe" and "**Six people** June was starting to like." Ch 5: "Odile had paired **twelve easels** nose-to-nose… June counted **six sightlines**." Ch 7: "**eight pairs of easels** set spine to spine" *and* eight lines later "listening to **fourteen people**." Ch 16: "counted **fourteen chairs**" / "the wooden knock of **fourteen easels**." Ch 19: "four joint grounds on newsprint, **one for each pair**." — A first-time reader who tries to picture the class gets 8, 12, 14, or 16 people depending on the chapter, and Ch 7 contradicts *itself* inside a page (eight pairs of easels = sixteen stations, then "fourteen people"). The staged cohort is unambiguously **four pairs / eight people** (Ch 3 "six people" + June + Theo; Ch 4 "eight people"; Ch 19 "one for each pair"), which flatly contradicts the setup's "Sixteen people." This wounds the book's signature virtue — it counts toggle bolts and label heights precisely, then can't count its own students. — **Revision order:** Lock one class size. The staging supports 4 pairs/8 people; change Ch 2's "eight pairs / sixteen people," Ch 5's "twelve," Ch 7's "eight pairs of easels," and Ch 16's "fourteen" to match, and reconcile every easel/chair count. If you keep 8 pairs, you must stage or on-page acknowledge the missing four couples every class night.

3. **Assignment cards (binding flourish) — inviolable-miss / register — the "handwritten" artifact appears in two different hands, and Week 8 has none.** Ch 12 establishes the artifact: "Heavy stock, **her pencil capitals** slightly too large for it." Cards render in caps for weeks 1–3 and the week-5 handoff ("TUESDAY ONE / BRING NOTHING"; "WEEK FIVE IS MEMORY…"). But weeks 4–7 render in mixed-case sentence style: Ch 10 "> Your partner's hands doing something they love."; Ch 13 "> Paint the memory your partner gave you."; Ch 19 "> *Week Seven. One ground. Two reaches.*" And **no card opens Week 8** (Ch 23/24 open on prose). — The guide calls the cards load-bearing on reread ("should read as a woman conducting two specific people toward each other"); that payoff needs *one consistent hand*. A rereader instead sees Odile's "pencil capitals" become lowercase halfway through, and the guide's explicitly-offered coda vehicle ("the last assignment card, repurposed") goes unused. — **Revision order:** Render all eight cards in Odile's capitals (or commit deliberately to one hand and fix Ch 12's description); add a Week 8 card and, per the guide, consider repurposing it for the coda beat inside Ch 24.

4. **Ch 1 — register (dialogue diagnosis, zero-tolerance) — one instance survives an otherwise-clean sweep.** "'They were switched,' Odile said, **as if the sentence had clicked level under glass**, and June could not tell whether the labels or the evening had just been approved." — The rule forbids captioning an utterance ("no calling a sentence careful… no 'that had the rhythm of a partial answer'"), *including in narration about speech*. The simile characterizes Odile's sentence itself; "any instance is a defect." — **Revision order:** Cut "as if the sentence had clicked level under glass." The clause that follows ("June could not tell whether the labels or the evening had just been approved") already does the work through June's uncertainty — showing, not captioning. (Softer secondary candidate to watch: Ch 4 "It came out flat and then it came out as inventory.")

5. **Ch 6–11 & Ch 15/18/20 — pacing — the cohort's care-moves harden into a narrated checklist, and the job-decision over-serializes.** The owned moves are announced on delivery and repeated near-verbatim: Sam's "**Sit here. Not symbolically.** The chair's better for your back" (Ch 4) becomes "**Stand here. Not symbolically.** You can actually see all three" (Ch 6); Priya's "**Did you eat?** You'll be standing a while" (Ch 3) recurs at Ch 4, Ch 6 ("Did you eat? You came straight from work"), Ch 7, Ch 16; Luis's competence is captioned each time — "**Luis checked it from two places before anyone asked, so now we all benefit**" (Ch 6). Separately, June's Tasker deliberation stages the same "notebook columns, no decision" beat three times (Ch 15, Ch 18 "look at the columns again," Ch 20) with little new information, and the outcome is telegraphed from Ch 9. — Interest sags Ch 6–11; the care-moves stop being character and become a rota. — **Revision order:** Vary or retire the announced moves (let one land wordlessly, cut the narration that flags it — the guide bans "it was these little things that…" and this is its cousin); collapse the Tasker deliberation into two higher-information beats.

6. **Ch 20 (and back third generally) — drift (voice differentiation) — June's POV adopts Theo-coded logistics.** Ch 20, June's POV: "**TASKER. $49,500. Divided by twelve, $4,125.** Under that, her best guess at what a W-2 actually left you, $3,150, question mark." — Standing-up arithmetic in columns is explicitly Theo's tell ("He did the arithmetic standing up, because the arithmetic was the part he could do," Ch 2). On the blind-POV test, several back-third paragraphs of June's money-math could pass for Theo. The differentiation holds elsewhere (Theo notices *hardware* even while painting — Ch 21 "the reveal and the switch plate… where the strike plate threw its little vertical gleam"), which is why the convergence stands out. — **Revision order:** Keep June's arithmetic filtered through her painter's eye and self-jokes (she already reaches for "a lot of lentils and walking fast to stay warm" — lean on that register); the raw ledger-columns read as borrowed voice.

7. **Ch 6 → Ch 20 — subplot (partial drop) — Ruth's safety demand is absorbed, never delivered.** Ch 6, Ruth to Theo: "who can she tell who isn't you?" / "I'll find one." / "**It should be one she can use.**" — Theo never builds June an independent channel; the thread is overtaken when June discovers the truth herself. Ruth's Ch 20 line ("This fall I noticed things. I kept them to myself and called it manners… Some of it was easier for me") closes *her* emotional arc but leaves her specific, on-page demand structurally unpaid. A reader who tracked Ruth's insistence waits for a payoff that gets quietly dropped. — **Revision order:** Either pay it off (Theo actually hands June/Ruth a channel that routes around him) or have Ruth explicitly retire the ask so the thread closes rather than evaporates.

8. **Chapter shape — form (minor).** Ch 19 (1,883 w) and Ch 15 (1,995 w) fall under the 2,000 floor; Ch 23 (3,721 w) and especially Ch 24 (**4,508 w**) breach the 3,500 ceiling. The coda runs ~1,000 words over. — A reader feels Ch 24 turn from ending into epilogue-plus-ledger-reveal-plus-study-turn-plus-snow. — **Revision order:** Trim the Ch 24 coda (the ledger reveal and the study-turning both want room but the chapter is carrying four climaxes); fold Ch 15/19's thin material into neighbors or develop them to floor.

**— Checked and holding (with nearest failure candidate) —**
- **"load-bearing" ban:** 0 hits across all chapters (grep `\bload[ -]?bearing\b`). The 2026-06-10 retrofit landed; the known Ch 2 instance now reads "**That's a lot of rule for an evening class**" (rates the rule, not the language — compliant).
- **Tic catalog:** No "breath she didn't know she'd been holding," no flutter/flip/electricity, no "warmth pooling," no smirk/chuckle, no "a beat," no "something shifted between them"/"the air changed"/bare "tension," no "golden hour," no "beautiful"/"didn't know he was beautiful," no NYC-postcard clichés. Nearest candidates that *survive*: "pooled" (Ch 20) is literal cobalt glaze; the window-as-mirror (Ch 24) is deliberately subverted — she looks *through* her reflection to the snow, so it is not an epiphany-via-mirror.
- **Winter Kitchen (cap 5, each new meaning):** Four discrete invocations — Ch 1 viewing (origin/thesis), Ch 1 crate "W. KITCHEN, 1983" ("it read like a moving date"), Ch 14 catalog cover, Ch 24 Odile's account of why she chose June — each recontextualizing. Nearest pressure: Ch 1's dense in-scene naming, which is one sustained appearance, not five.
- **Underpainting / first snow:** "Underpainting"/"pentimento" stay literal throughout (free use), and the book actively refuses the metaphor ("pentimento… the sermon," Ch 24). Snow falls only in Ch 24; earlier weather is tracked, not fallen.
- **POV / plain-speech / discovery / earned-stay:** Alternation clean, June opens and closes, the 17–18 June doubling is the sanctioned rupture flex. Plain-speech floor holds ("So if you quit, I lose the class." / "Yes." — Ch 2). Discovery is accidental/undeniable/non-snooping (acknowledgments page, Ch 17). Earned-stay holds because the decision precedes the reconciliation and the book foregrounds the order: "I said no to Tasker Friday morning… Before your texts… That's the part you need in the right order" (Ch 22). Nearest failure candidate: June's self-interest is a precarious studio wall + cohort proximity, so the "for herself" reading leans hard on the pre-reconciliation timing to defeat "staying-for-a-boyfriend."

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# ENGAGEMENT BATTERY

**Where did you feel like skimming?**
Ch 6–11. The gallery-crawl + Sonia's-booth + hide-the-panel sequence runs low-propulsion: Ch 8 (Social Debt) essentially re-runs the "where does Theo's panel live" beat that Ch 12 and Ch 21 also run ("faced to the wall," "one anonymous rectangle in a row"). Also Ch 15/18/20's repeated "June and the notebook columns" staging. The care-move narration (finding #5) is the texture I skimmed — "Not symbolically," "Did you eat?", "Luis checked it before anyone asked" arrive on schedule.

**Any character you couldn't place?**
Ruth and Sam, on first meeting (Ch 3), arrive with the thinnest tags ("Sam," who moves easels; "Ruth," who snaps charcoal) and don't individuate until Ch 4. Compounding it: the trays give surnames (VALDEZ, VALDEZ, NAIR, ADLER, KIM, RIVERA) while dialogue uses first names, and the text never cleanly maps Priya→Nair or Ben→Adler — the reader elimination-solves it (Ch 11 confirms only Kim=Ruth, Rivera=Sam). And the setup's "Sixteen people" primes you to look for ~5 more couples who never appear, which is a placement *void* (see #2).

**Did the chapter ordering lose you?**
No. Candidates checked: the consecutive June chapters 17–18 (survives — it's the rupture, and the guide sanctions one such doubling), and the mid-week time-jumps in Ch 18/20 (survive — every beat is dated: Wednesday scarf, Thursday Thanksgiving, Friday noon deadline; the 2026 calendar even checks out, Nov 26 = Thanksgiving). Alternation and turn placement are legible throughout.

**Where did interest drop off?**
Mid-book (Ch 6–11), and again in the Tasker-deliberation stretch (Ch 15/18/20), because the outcome — she stays — is telegraphed from Ch 9 and the deliberation adds emotion without adding information. Interest re-spikes at the kiss (Ch 13) and the acknowledgments-page discovery (Ch 17).

**Did any plot beat confuse you?**
The class size, repeatedly (finding #2) — the single genuine "wait, how many people are in this room" stumble. Secondarily, a skeptic pauses at *why* the elaborate eight-week deception is necessary rather than a quiet non-return; the book answers it (nontransferable slot: "if you quit, I lose the class"; Theo's fear), but the stakes for the lie stay modest relative to its maintenance.

**Did any recurring exchange feel like a slog?**
Two. The scarf-return negotiation (Mara/June across Ch 4, 5, 6, 7 — "keep it through Tuesday/Monday/the cold snap") charms twice, then wears; it does pay off (Ch 18/24), so it's not pure slog, but the middle repetitions drag. And the "who fills in the emergency-contact line / who picks up for you" theme (Ruth/Sam's gallbladder story, Dom's form, the cubby slash) is hammered in Ch 11 and re-struck in Ch 20.

**Where were you surprised, and where did you see it coming?**
Saw it coming: Theo is more-than-staff (flagged bluntly in Ch 2 — "'On paper.' / 'It's true on the payroll,'"), June stays, the couple resolves — the nephew reveal lands as confirmation, not shock. Genuinely surprised (and it's the book's best engine): the discovery *mechanism* dodges the expected overheard-conversation cliché and uses a printed acknowledgments page; the Ch 21 turn that **Odile engineered the reveal** ("I put that page where you would find it. On purpose."); the Ch 24 ledger showing she paired them night one ("Park, J. — Brennan, T. Last slot"); and June turning the study around and then *turning it back* (Ch 24). The freshest surprise is emotional, not plot — June naming the asymmetry: "**Every Tuesday I stood in her room knowing she could throw me out, and you stood in it knowing she couldn't**" (Ch 17).

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# AFTERMATH BATTERY

Not declared in the reading guide — skipped.

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# BOOK VERDICT

**FINDINGS-OPEN.**

The prose is disciplined where the guide is strictest — the mechanical bans (`load-bearing`, the tic catalog) are clean, the motif caps hold, and the dialogue-diagnosis sweep the amendment ordered comes back with a single borderline line. But three high-leverage problems are open, and they're linked:

1. **Class-size continuity (Finding #2).** Highest-leverage because it is undeniable, cheap to fix, and it attacks the book's core credibility — a novel this precise about gesso and toggle bolts cannot let its own class be 8, 12, 14, and 16 people, and contradict itself inside Ch 7.

2. **Underwriting / 61K vs. the 75–88K band (Finding #1).** The root cause: the book is ~14K under floor, which is *why* the cohort is under-populated (and why the counts wander) and *why* the middle repeats care-moves instead of developing them. The fix is development, not padding.

3. **Middle-third repetition / care-moves-as-checklist + Tasker over-deliberation (Finding #5).** Where a reader actually disengages. The owned moves ("Not symbolically," "Did you eat?") have become a rota, and the job decision is staged three times to reach a foregone conclusion.

Next tier to fix once those are addressed: the assignment-card flourish (two hands + no Week 8 card, #3) and the lone dialogue-diagnosis simile in Ch 1 (#4).
