# Plain-Translation Audit — Chapter 17, "The Acknowledgment Page"

id: plain_translation | tier: risk | stage: drafter | inputs: `output/chapters/chapter_17.md` (revised), `output/drafts/claude/chapter_17.round_01.md` (raw provenance), `output/model_prompts/claude/chapter_draft/chapter_17.md` (packet), `output/style_and_voice.md`, `premise/READING_GUIDE.md`, `premise/premise.md`, `premise/patterns/reading_guide_bans.tsv`, `output/critiques/codex/mechanical/chapter_17_quality_gate.md`

Form identification: the entire chapter is close-third June (compare against the June voice card, not generic clarity), with one documentary insert (the catalog acknowledgment — locked) and one conversation form (the stair confrontation — June lines against June's card, Theo lines against Theo's card). No narrator-form or essayistic passages claimed; every interiority paragraph was checked as close-third June. Mechanical gate reports open=0 for this chapter; all WATCH hits reviewed below where they touch register (the `iron` texture hits at lines 39/119 are the literal stairs, referential, not drift; the 14-em-dash dialogue cluster at line 51 is Theo's over-explaining tell and is interrupted on the page, so it is doing character work, not punctuation decoration).

## Per-paragraph verdicts

- `HOLDS — "June read it once as back matter. She read it again as English..." (line 21) — sample compared: June voice card ("The third time she read it the way she checked a measurement she didn't like" against "The left edge is good. Don't fix it." and the card's "interiority rhythm: perception first, judgment second") — binding-register rewrite is worse because: my rewrite ("She read it three times. The names didn't change.") preserves the fact but loses the measurement-verification procedure, which is the card's stated stress behavior (gets visually exact, checks variables) and the packet's explicit instruction that she rereads "because facts refuse to change." The original's anaphora is the procedure, not decoration. Density and fidelity both drop in the rewrite. Original stands.`

- `HOLDS — "Once, at a museum, she'd watched two technicians swap out a wall label..." (line 27) — sample compared: June voice card (visual/craft nouns; "operation snapshot: notices edges before faces") plus the packet's metaphor clause ("Primary comparison, if any, should clarify reclassification: a label changing") — binding-register rewrite is worse because: the plain version ("The facts about Theo hadn't changed; only their meaning had.") states the reclassification abstractly, which violates the reading guide's interiority discipline (feelings through object/action first) and deletes the one sanctioned metaphor the packet ordered. "Same paint. Not one thing on the canvas had moved." is fragment-compressed June under pressure (card: "shorter syntax... more visual specificity"). Checked "Same paint." against the Aphorism Gate below — cleared there. Original stands.`

- `HOLDS — "Nothing about Theo had moved either. He had keys because his aunt had given him keys..." (line 29) — sample compared: June voice card ("uses... exact, decent, alleged"; compresses when exposed) — binding-register rewrite is worse because: the candidate rewrite of the riskiest clause ("*She's my boss* was true on paper and a lie in practice") loses both the coinage "payroll-true" (June's admin-craft compounding, consistent with her installer vocabulary) and "false about the rooms behind it," which binds the judgment to the gallery's literal name, Marchetti Rooms, and to the locked acknowledgment's "These rooms." Note this clause was repaired from the raw draft's murkier "the way the front room of a house is the house"; the revision is tighter and stays. Also checked: this sentence assesses the truth value of Theo's "She's my boss," not its phrasing or delivery — content judgment, not dialogue diagnosis. "In the careful hand of staff" was checked against the same rule: it describes penmanship on a logbook line (object detail doing the staff-disguise reclassification), not speech; cleared, but it is the closest non-dialogue approach to the line.`

- `HOLDS — "And every Tuesday she had walked into Odile Marchetti's room as a stranger..." (line 31) — sample compared: June voice card plus the packet's grievance requirement ("The wound is asymmetry... June alone risked humiliation... while Theo had family authority, room keys, and a way out") — binding-register rewrite is worse because: the plain version ("She had risked everything every week; he had risked nothing") is the generic betrayal monologue the packet bans. The original carries four concrete asymmetry facts (one slipped detail, the easel on the street, the key ring, Sunday dinner) in one periodic sentence. "Sunday dinner waiting on the far side of any disaster" was the drift suspect; the rewrite ("and family dinner no matter what") deletes the safety-net specificity that is the chapter's engine. Original stands.`

- `DRIFTED — original: "Theo was quiet for a second. Then the facts came, his hands finding his pockets and the keys in them." (line 77) — binding-register version: "Theo was quiet for a second. Then his hands found his pockets and the keys in them." — what the rewrite preserves and what drift it removes: it keeps the full physical tell (pockets, keys — Theo's card-specified stress behavior) and the beat timing; it removes "Then the facts came," which is narration captioning the mode of his upcoming speech. That is dialogue diagnosis under the reading guide's zero-tolerance rule (§2: perceptiveness is shown by what a character does with what they heard, "never by captioning the conversation"), and it is also inaccurate — what follows at line 79 is a list of offers and plans ("I can fix the part that's fixable... I'll move the pair into storage tonight"), not facts. The raw draft's longer version ("Then the facts came, the way she'd known they would") was partially repaired in revision; the repair did not go far enough. The rewrite is not worse on density, drama, or fidelity. ORDER: REPLACE.`

- `HOLDS — ""Okay," he said. "I was scared you'd stop coming. That's the actual reason..."" (line 89) — sample compared: Theo voice-card samples "I should have told you. I know that." / "I said boss because it was true. It just wasn't the whole truth." and the card's allowed plainness ("I was scared" is explicitly licensed) — binding-register rewrite is worse because: there is nothing to translate; this is the card's register verbatim in shape ("performs usefulness, over-explains, then goes very plain"). Note the revision correctly cut the raw draft's lead-in "And then, with everything practical stripped off it:" — narration rating his own delivery, a zero-tolerance hit. It must stay cut. "I ran it the first night... you'd do the math" is his risk-calculation interiority surfacing as speech, per card.`

- `HOLDS — ""Tuesday looks like a room with one less chair in use," she said. "Don't set one for me."" (line 105) — sample compared: June voice card ("I'm not leaving because I hate it here. I think that's the problem." — the compressed declarative plus the turn) — binding-register rewrite is worse because: the plain version ("I'm not coming back. Don't expect me.") answers Theo's literal question ("Tell me what Tuesday looks like") less precisely and deletes the inventory-exact phrasing ("in use") that is June counting a room the way an installer counts a room. Checked against the packet's spent-family rule (Ch16 chair-count comedy spent): this is not count-shaped comedy; it is a refusal stated as a fixture report. Checked against the Aphorism Gate below — cleared there. Plain-speech floor: the exchange is followable as text (he asked what Tuesday looks like; she refused attendance and refused a placeholder).`

- `LOCKED — skipped, listed under calibration's inviolable text: the acknowledgment quotation (line 19, "These rooms had one winter... He still knows. O.M.") and the factual reveal it carries (Eileen Brennan is Odile's sister; Theo Brennan is Eileen's son; Odile is Theo's aunt — restated on-page at line 51, "Eileen Brennan is my mother. Odile's my aunt," which is the locked fact in Theo's card-true plain register and is not touched). Clarity/mechanical check on the locked text, as permitted: the revision dropped the raw draft's attribution dash, so the signature now reads "He still knows. O.M." — on first read "O.M." parses momentarily as a sentence rather than a signature. This is a mechanical formatting defect, not a rewrite. ORDER: restore the signature dash from the raw draft: "He still knows. —O.M." The revision's demotion of "**ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**" to plain caps was checked and is acceptable catalog back matter; no order.`

## Aphorism Gate (zero tolerance)

- `APHORISM-GATE — "That's the whole grievance. It fits in one sentence. I've checked." — raw draft line 79 only; already cut in revision (line 75 ends at "knowing she couldn't."). Judged: this was a Gate failure — a portable triplet, epigraph-shaped, and self-captioning (June rating her own sentence's economy, brushing the dialogue-diagnosis rule). ORDER: the cut stands; do not reinstate in any later pass.`
- `APHORISM-GATE — "Strangers know the way out." — raw draft line 123 only; already cut in revision (line 117 ends at "the whole time."). Judged: a Gate failure — a generalization about a class of people, tattoo-able, detachable from the scene. The surviving "I've been a stranger here the whole time" is indexical (here, the whole time) and stays. ORDER: the cut stands; do not reinstate.`
- `APHORISM-GATE — "Saying *I know* isn't giving it back." (line 95) — strongest surviving candidate, cleared as character-pressure speech: it is a second-person rebuttal bound to Theo's "I know" one line above, and "it" binds to "You did my math for me and kept the answer" (line 91) — out of context both referents collapse, so the line cannot travel. Shape-matched against June's card sample "That part works. Sorry. I realize that makes things worse." — same compressed-correction form. Watched condition: if any later revision detaches it from the "I know" / "kept the answer" frame, it becomes portable and must be cut.`
- `APHORISM-GATE — "You did my math for me and kept the answer." (line 91) — cleared: transformative pickup of Theo's own "you'd do the math" (line 89), accusation not maxim; referent-bound.`
- `APHORISM-GATE — "They'd be grammar the room already spoke." (line 7) — cleared with a note: narration, not dialogue; bound to the wall-text/house-style argument of its own paragraph and to a specific room. It is the most polished sentence in the chapter's first scene; it survives because it adds information ("the titles will read as native precedent, not invention") that the rewrite ("It would look like house style") flattens. Borderline — do not let later passes add a second polish-grade line to this scene.`
- `APHORISM-GATE — "Same paint. Not one thing on the canvas had moved." (line 27) — cleared: cannot travel without the wall-label anecdote; the compression is June's stress syntax per card.`
- Raw draft line 125's "because pairs that don't hang together lie" (narration paraphrasing Odile's Ch16 line into a maxim) was already replaced in revision with "as Odile had ordered them kept" — correct under the Gate and under the packet's "Ch16 Odile quotability at ceiling" rule. The cut stands.

## Verbatim-Echo Gate

- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "checked/check": "she checked a measurement" (21), "She checked the cover" / "checked the colophon and the acknowledgment again" (25), "I didn't check the back pages" (Theo, 59) — cleared: the line-25 anaphora is the verification procedure itself (the packet orders rereading "because facts refuse to change"), and the revision already compressed the raw draft's three "She checked" sentences into two; Theo's instance is a different speaker, different object, functional. June's "I've checked" (raw 79) is gone, which removes the only cross-speaker non-transformative instance. No order.`
- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "fact(s)": "The facts stood where they'd stood" (25), "the fact that Odile had named the shelf" (33), "a confession instead of a fact" (Theo, 69), "Then the facts came" (77) — the line-77 instance is removed by the DRIFTED order above; the remaining three are each a different register (procedural, deferred-pile, Theo's card vocabulary) and the chapter card names "June wants facts to stay stable" as the desire line, making this the calibration's load-bearing motif. Cleared conditional on the line-77 order.`
- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "catalog(s)" (12 instances) and "keys" (8 incl. locked text) — cleared: the catalog is the physical prop and care-object-turned-evidence (chapter engine); references are varied ("the slipped catalog," "the one catalog," "One of nine"). Keys are Theo's card-specified tell; the pocket sequence (77 → "the keys still in his pocket" 85 → "The keys stayed" 87) is escalating choreography with a payoff, transformative, not echo. "He had keys because his aunt had given him keys" (29) is a deliberate within-sentence tautology doing the reclassification work. No order.`
- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "room(s)" (14 incl. the gallery's name and locked text): the live cluster is dialogue, lines 71–89 — June "that room" (71), "her room" (75), Theo "in that room" (89) — cleared: each names the same literal classroom, and Theo's pickup converts her grievance-room into his confessed want ("because I wanted you in that room"), which is transformative cross-speaker use, the opposite of dead echo. Line 105's "a room with one less chair in use" is a fourth, also transformed (future-conditional). Watched, not ordered.`
- `VERBATIM-ECHO — "truth": one instance (85). Trivially clear.`
- `VERBATIM-ECHO — strongest candidate considered and cleared: "stop/stopped" (12). "Stop." / "He stopped." (53–55) is command-and-compliance, dramatic and minimal; "Stop offering me things" (81) escalates the same imperative deliberately; "stop coming / stopped coming" (89–91) is June confirming Theo's stated fear in past conditional — transformative cross-speaker pickup; "she stopped, and he stopped" (111) is physical mirroring, not verbal echo, and was checked against the packet's "no paired echo confirmations as beat-closers" — it is mid-scene choreography, not a beat-closer confirmation. No order. Also checked: "the way" simile frame x4 (15, 21, 85, 107) — June's card tic ("visual analogies, used sparingly"); four is at ceiling; contents transform each time; the revision already converted a fifth (raw 125 "the way she'd come up" → "as she'd come up"). Watched, not ordered.`

## Chapter verdict

`DRIFT-FOUND` — 2 orders:

1. **REPLACE, line 77:** "Theo was quiet for a second. Then the facts came, his hands finding his pockets and the keys in them." → "Theo was quiet for a second. Then his hands found his pockets and the keys in them." (Zero-tolerance dialogue-diagnosis caption; also mislabels the offers that follow.)
2. **MECHANICAL FORMAT, locked text, line 19:** restore the signature dash to the acknowledgment: "He still knows. —O.M." (Present in raw provenance, dropped in revision; without it the initials misparse. No other character of the locked quotation may change.)

Standing keep-out orders (already-cut raw-draft drift; reinstatement in any later pass is a defect): "That's the whole grievance. It fits in one sentence. I've checked."; "Strangers know the way out."; "because pairs that don't hang together lie"; "in the voice of an employee explaining shift work"; "with everything practical stripped off it"; "the first honest thing his face had done"; "She heard her own voice come out level and was distantly grateful to it"; "she filed it where true useless things went."
