# Voice Check — Chapters 16–20 (`voice_check_20`)

**Stance:** skeptical professional editor per `voice_check_protocol.md`. Calibration note: no liked-sample was pinned in this invocation, so per the protocol's comparative mandate I calibrated against the book's own best committed passages outside the span — the Ch13 flyer-photo/kiss sequence (June POV) and the Ch14 opening (Theo POV), both survivors of prior audit cycles.

**Calibration paragraph (step 1).** The Ch13 sample's rhythm signature: hard, frequent stops; perception-first clauses that land on a concrete object ("Theo's brush was on the floor, bristles down."); comedy from blocking precision, not phrasing (elbow locked, brush tip up, umber clear of Mara's scarf); dialogue functional to the point of rudeness ("Old jacket, Theo." / "Right."). The Ch14 Theo signature: medium, steady sentences whose interiority arrives as task-residue (the torn index card, the crossed-out date), relieved by one dry self-audit per paragraph ("He stopped interpreting it after midnight."). Diction temperature in both: cool, contract-heavy, craft-nouned; zero hedged abstraction. That is the standard; competence is not.

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## 1. Rhythm mismatches

- "The partners split. That was the mechanics of it: you couldn't paint what someone feared while reading their face, so easels angled away from easels..." (Ch16, ¶ after Odile's rules) — didactic second-person explainer captioning blocking the reader can see. The Ch14 sample never explains mechanics; it performs them ("The panels came down first. He brought June's over to the trestle table and checked the corner by the clothespins with a dry knuckle.").
- "Around him the other stations had found their rhythm." (Ch19, mid-session) — generic transition scaffolding of the kind the sample replaces with object motion. The specifics that follow (Ruth on edges, Sam on mass) survive; the topic sentence is filler.
- Ch19's three He-chain paragraphs (opening: "He carried one stool back... He filled wash jars... He read the card..."; mid: "He painted. He committed the stool... He painted the hook... he painted the peg's shadow... He painted both wash jars..."; close: "He put the stools up... He emptied his wash jars... He carried it to the rack...") — the grief-procedural monotone is partly the point, but three separate paragraphs built on the identical subject-verb chassis flattens against the Ch14 sample, where every third sentence breaks the chain with a self-audit aside.

**Focused check — blind-POV, Theo 16/19 vs June 17/18/20: CLEAN.** Names removed, Ch16/19 declare Theo through count-distrust ("counted fourteen chairs, distrusted the number, and counted again"), jar/stool/label logistics, and shame-as-tasks; Ch17/18/20 declare June through measurement procedure ("The third time she read it the way she checked a measurement she didn't like: each word separately, in order, looking for the error") and optical nouns (the blue dish's "milky cobalt that went gray-green at the rim if the light came from the left"). Strongest counter-candidate: Ch16's ekphrasis of June's canvas is the span's most optical Theo passage — but it reads hands, jobs, and "everything fed and watered and aligned," domestic inventory, not June's edge/value vocabulary. It survives.

**Focused check — Ch20 June vs Theo-logistics merge: PASSES, narrowly.** The 11:14/11:20 task-execution run and the notebook math are rhythm-adjacent to Theo's clipboard, but the chapter keeps June's painter-accounting hybrid alive where it counts: "She looked at them the way she'd look at a ground: holes, thin patches, places where wanting had been scumbled over need"; the study verdict "The left edge was good. The value structure held all the way into the corner" (her voice-card praise move turned on her own work); the photo read that ends on light, not terms ("June looked at the light longest"). The Vandercook confession to Nia is June's exact register of want-as-suspect-evidence. No order needed.

**Focused check — 17/18/20 generic-rupture merge: CLEAN.** Ch17 runs the discovery as measurement verification, Ch18 runs grief as wool-soap/gouache labor, Ch20 runs decision as arithmetic. Strongest counter-candidate: Ch18's "She sat with the two columns for a long time" — hedged duration, generic posture — but the paragraph is rescued by the deleted-ventilation-question beat, which no other book owns.

## 2. Banned phrases

Checked verbatim against the reading-guide tic catalog and tics.md watch list:

- "load-bearing"/"loadbearing"/"load bearing": **0 hits**, all five chapters.
- breath-catching family, flips/flutters/warmth pooling/electricity: **0 hits** ("the cobalt had pooled and gone almost black," Ch20, is literal glaze — cleared).
- "something shifted between them"/"the air changed"/unspecified tension: **0 hits** (all `shifted` instances are literal strap/tray/table actions, consistent with tics.md rows).
- smirk/chuckle/"a beat"/one-word reaction paragraphs/standalone "Oh.": **0 hits**.
- weather-as-emotion, mirror epiphany, NYC postcard: **0 hits**. No snow.
- **Dialogue diagnosis (zero tolerance): OBEYED, 0 hits.** I checked the three hardest counter-candidates: (a) Ch17 "*She's my boss* was payroll-true: accurate on a form, false about the rooms behind it" — rates the statement's truth conditions, which is the plot, not its phrasing or delivery; (b) Ch17 "How long has *boss* been the word?" — interrogates the deception, not the diction; (c) Ch16 "You told it that way. I just heard it late" — refers to whose story the wall was, not to her delivery. All three survive the rule as written ("diagnoses target the person or the work, never the sentence").
- Spent-family orders: Ch17 added no chair-count joke; Ch18 added no ledger/debt narration; Ch20 added no stool-count joke or jar symbolism (both jars are literal carry-overs). One revival: **"a second longer than the scarf required" (Ch18, Sonia's corner)** — the measured-duration scaffold hard-capped at two in Ch05 ("length of time it deserved" family). This is that scaffold with a scarf in it.

## 3. AI-sounding constructions

- "He did not know how to paint the room any other way. He did not have another version of it. If she had one, he had never seen it." (Ch19, mid-painting) — three-beat parallel negation resolving on a poised turn; the span's most LLM-shaped passage. The voice card licenses Theo plainness ("I was scared"), not balanced triptychs.
- "It was not cruel. That was the worst part." (Ch16, after June's canvas) — two-beat evaluative stamp; the clementine peel stopping mid-tear two sentences later already carries this, better.
- "He recognized the plan making itself useful and kept it anyway." (Ch16, closing) — abstraction-as-agent plus self-captioned care move; spec: Theo "never says polished aphorisms about care," and narration shouldn't do it for him.
- "the room around it had been wrong in a way she had not yet known how to see." (Ch18, scarf de-pilling) — hedged profundity abstraction; the sample's diction temperature never hedges. Say the concrete wrongness or cut.
- "he was underpainting a room that was waiting" (Ch19) — revives the room-personification family explicitly killed in the Ch13 repairs ("Nothing in the room was waiting politely" was cut). The object list that follows (jars filled, stool turned out) already says it.
- Survivors I checked and pass: "He had painted leaving, not June's fear" (Ch16) — the not-X-but-Y shape, but it is a material correction of a specific canvas, not a false-profound contrast; "Same paint. Not one thing on the canvas had moved." → "Nothing about Theo had moved either" (Ch17) — paired echo, but it is the packet-sanctioned reclassification metaphor doing argument, not a beat-closer confirmation.

## 4. Anachronistic language

CLEAN — checked all five chapters against the contemporary-NYC register: Zelle, W-9, net-45, 80lb matte, media mail are all period-true and character-assigned. Strongest counter-candidate: "cadmium-adjacent" (Ch18) — "-adjacent" is internet-era idiom, but in a painter's color narration adjacency is literal pigment talk; it survives.

## 5. Repetitive metaphors and phrase families (with counts)

- **`the way` connective: 9 across the span — Ch16 ×4 ("the way you'd hand someone their own mail," "the way Odile had trained them to," "the way a painting can let hands do," "the way she came at everything"), Ch17 ×4 (logged at ceiling), Ch20 ×1.** The span cap since Ch11 is one per chapter. Ch16 alone is at 4×cap, and 8 instances sit in two adjacent chapters.
- **"at the angle(s) of someone/people..." recognitional figure: 3 in two chapters** — Ch18 "at the angles people left them," Ch18 "at the angle of someone who had just stood up," Ch19 "at the angle of someone coming right back." The 18/19 pair is a deliberate cross-POV rhyme (her leaving-angle vs his returning-angle) and earns its keep; the third instance is surplus.
- **squared/flush/aligned family: 14+ across all five chapters** — June squares the receipt (Ch20 ×2), the catalog "square to the edge" (Ch17), index cards squared (Ch17), stack squared by feel (Ch18); Ruth squares her easel (Ch16) and the sign-in sheet (Ch19); Theo squares newsprint-era spines and easels flush ×3 (Ch19); "all of it squared up" (Ch20). When every character squares things, the tell stops differentiating anyone.
- **good/better/worse-offer formula: ~7 across Ch18/Ch20** — Ch18 narration ×3 ("The Philadelphia column was better. It had been better on the seventeenth"; "The job was as good as it had been on the seventeenth"), Ch20 dialogue ("The job's good, Nia"; "That's a worse offer... on every line I have a column for"; notebook GOOD ×2). Nia's "worse offer" line is the formula's one earned peak; the narration restatements dilute it.
- **"ten feet of (clear/empty) wall": 5 in Ch20 alone**, plus "I want the wall anyway." Ch19's room/side/reach ceiling was obeyed — Ch20 pivoted texture as ordered — but built its own drumbeat on wall footage.
- **"is real" confirmation formula: ~5 in dialogue across three speakers** — Theo Ch17 ("the job is real... all of that is real"), Asha Ch20 ("Ninety days to benefits is real"; "Forty-nine five and written access is real"). Cross-character verbal convergence.
- **Terminal lock-up image duplicated across both Theo chapters** — Ch16 ends "turned off the lights, all but the one over the door, checked the front bolt twice, and put Odile's keys in his pocket"; Ch19 ends "Then he turned off the lights and locked the door."
- Checked and clean: keys cluster rested after Ch17 cap; "stop coming"/stranger clusters not extended past Ch17; crooked cluster contained to Ch18; no `Winter Kitchen`; no clementine after Ch16; receipt/label/object personification at zero new instances apart from the two agentive figures logged in ask 3.

**Focused check — Nia and Asha in Ch20: DISTINCT.** Nia: columns, payroll, calendar authority, professional grace ("Walk me through it. I ran the math with you three weeks ago. It wasn't close." / "I know her invoices. She itemizes."). Asha: freight-door physicality, blunt hustle math, anti-sentiment warning ("Send my name because I'm qualified. If you're trying to feel less bad, don't." / "the radiator is decorative. Wear the coat inside until February."). Neither uses June's optical vocabulary. Sole convergence is the shared "is real" tic above.

## 6. Sentence length problems

- Ch19's He-chain monotony (quoted in ask 1) is the one structural length problem: three paragraphs on the identical short-declarative chassis, against the Ch14 sample's relieved procedure.
- Ch16's ~90-word ekphrastic sentence ("She had painted his hands. Both of them, large in the frame, doing three jobs at once... everything fed and watered and aligned.") — expansion matches scene pressure and is the right call; the "fed and watered and aligned" polysyndeton triple inside it is the only polish to shave. Survives as a whole.
- All five chapters end on an object-action closer (keys pocketed / strap shifted / spackle / lock / cup washed). Each is packet-mandated individually; the sameness is now a house cadence. Watch, not yet a defect — except the Ch16/Ch19 duplication logged in ask 5.

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**VOICE SCORE: 7/10** — No banned-list hits, zero-tolerance dialogue rule holds, blind-POV differentiation holds in all five chapters, and Ch17/Ch18 contain the span's best writing (the three-readings discovery procedure; the scarf wash). The score loses three points to documented drift: a 4×cap `the way` breach in Ch16 adjacent to Ch17's ceiling, two revivals of previously killed families (room-that-waits personification, measured-duration scaffold), the span-wide squaring/offer-formula/wall-footage densities, and Ch19's monotone chassis plus one balanced-triptych stamp.

**POLISHED-BUT-DEAD ZONES:** two, both mild —
1. "The partners split. That was the mechanics of it: you couldn't paint what someone feared while reading their face..." (Ch16) — grammatical, professionally toned, could open any workshop scene in any novel; pales against the sample's "The panels came down first," which does the same work as action.
2. "Around him the other stations had found their rhythm." (Ch19) — coverage sentence; the sample never announces ensemble state, it shows one station's object and moves.

**REVISION ORDERS:**
1. Ch16 `the way` ×4 (mail-handoff, Odile-trained circling, painting-lets-hands, came-at-everything) — cap breach. Keep one (recommend "the way she came at everything" — most character-bearing); recast the other three as plain action ("holding it out to him like his own mail" → direct handoff; delete "the way Odile had trained them to," the slow hands-off circling already shows the training).
2. Ch16 "He recognized the plan making itself useful and kept it anyway." — abstraction-as-agent, self-captioned care move. Re-cut to object per voice spec: let the sentence before it (catalogs on the table, hands busy) end the paragraph, or give Theo a task-shaped plain thought without the caption.
3. Ch16 "It was not cruel. That was the worst part." — evaluative stamp. Cut both sentences; the clementine peel quitting mid-tear is the finding, already on the page.
4. Ch16 "The partners split. That was the mechanics of it: you couldn't paint what someone feared while reading their face" — delete the explainer clause; keep "easels angled away from easels, everyone's back to the person they knew best in the room," which carries it.
5. Ch18 "wrong in a way she had not yet known how to see" — replace the hedge with the concrete wrongness (the room in Theo's Week-3 drawing was a room he had keys to and she didn't) or end the sentence at "the room around it had been wrong."
6. Ch18 "looked at June for a second longer than the scarf required" — measured-duration scaffold, hard-capped since Ch05. Cut the phrase; Mara's "Are you eating?" is the look, land it directly.
7. Ch18 offer-formula narration — cut "It had been better on the seventeenth" (keep "The Philadelphia column was better," once) and recast Ch18's "The job was as good as it had been on the seventeenth" into object terms (the terms hadn't moved; the receipt had). Reserve the formula's peak for Nia's Ch20 "worse offer" line, which stays.
8. Ch18 `which` captions (add-zero standing order): split "The apartment had been half packed since September, which she had stopped noticing until now" into two sentences; recast "Thursday was Thanksgiving, which she had forgotten until the street told her" to remove both the caption and the street-as-teller ("Thursday was Thanksgiving. The street said so first: closed grates, a man balancing a foil pan...").
9. Ch19 "He did not know how to paint the room any other way. He did not have another version of it. If she had one, he had never seen it." — compress to one plain Theo sentence per the card's allowed plainness (direction: "He didn't have another version of the room.").
10. Ch19 "underpainting a room that was waiting" — cut "that was waiting"; the jar/stool inventory that follows already performs the waiting. This family was ordered dead in the Ch13 repairs; keep it dead.
11. Ch19 He-chain relief — in the opening setup paragraph and the closing lockup, break one chain each with a Ch14-sample-style interiority aside or clause inversion; and vary the terminal image so both Theo chapters don't end on the same lights-and-lock beat (recommend ending Ch19 on the upside-down jar under the stain, with the lock demoted to a subordinate clause).
12. Ch20 "ten feet of wall" ×5 — keep two (Asha's first offer of it; the photo's "flat gray light across ten feet of empty wall"); vary the rest ("the north wall," "the wall share," footage dropped once known).
13. Span squaring family — cut the two lowest-value instances ("He squared its spine with one finger and stopped there," Ch19 — the "stopped there" restraint beat survives without the squaring; "the receipt, the notebook, the phone, all of it squared up," Ch20 — Ruth's eye stopping on the date carries it) so the family stays owned by June's receipt/card tells and Ruth's paper tells.
14. "is real" formula — give Asha one different confirmation idiom (her register offers rate/invoice vocabulary: e.g. "Forty-nine five and written access — that's a number that pays invoices"); leave Theo's Ch17 spiral untouched, it's audited pressure-speech.

**OVERALL: VOICE-DRIFT (14 findings)** — no banned phrases and the POV/character contracts all hold, but the cap breach, two family revivals, two dead zones, and span-density findings above disqualify VOICE-HOLDS. All orders are executable at next revision touch without re-deriving reasoning.
