# Narrator-Publicist Audit — Chapter 18 ("Returned Scarf")

Target: `output/chapters/chapter_18.md` (final integrated text). Stance: skeptical editor; every admiring or self-certifying line about June (protagonist/focalizer) and Mara (favored character this chapter) collected, marker-tested 1–5, strip-tested, and attribution-tested. Calibration applied: Tasker decision passage (l.95–97), face-down studies passage (l.91–93), final nail-hole action (l.99) examined specifically for press-release moral framing; Mara examined for narrator certification of wisdom/sainthood.

## Reading-guide stance check (step 4)

`premise/READING_GUIDE.md` §2 declares close third, "feelings rendered through action, object, and dialogue first," no unreliable or designed-publicist narrator. No license exists for unattributed admiration; any finding would stand. §8's earned-stay test ("June's choice to remain... legible as *for herself first*") raises the stakes on exactly the passages calibration flagged.

## Per-line verdicts

- `EARNED — "she also knew it the other direction, knew it cold" (l.23) — the on-page action that backs it: "the doorframe out of square at the top corner, the light switch with paint sealed over one screw, the coat hooks, the hallway's rectangle going dark first while the room stayed lit"` — the competence claim is cashed in four verifiable specifics in the same sentence, then in a completed nine-by-twelve study. Strip the claim and the knowledge is still demonstrated.

- `EARNED — "The row was good: the truest drawing she'd done since Week 6." (l.91) — the on-page action that backs it: five studies rendered in craft material across l.23, l.41, l.89 ("She kept it dry and exact. The chair did nothing. It was wood at an angle, viewed from the door."), followed by "She turned them over one at a time... backs up, blank" (l.93)` — June is the perceiver, judging artwork (her one licensed authority per the voice card), and the chapter immediately treats the goodness as a liability she suppresses, not a crown: "Pinned up, they could leave the room the way the flyer had... saying something for her to people she had not chosen." The face-down action is the critical frame. This is the chapter's most admiring surviving line; see chapter verdict.

- `EARNED — "Theo had drawn it in Week 3... the knot doubled at her throat, exactly right." (l.49) — attributable perceiver: June, explicitly fallible — "At the time she had found that flattering. Now the exactness bothered her more than a mistake would have."` — admiration of Theo's accuracy is time-stamped, owned, and revised on the page.

- `EARNED — Mara, "her free hand already out, palm up" / "She touched June's sleeve, once, on her way past" (l.61, l.83) — the on-page action that backs the warmth: the foil brick, "There's pie under the turkey. Don't tilt it," and "It's a dish I want back. Bring it Tuesday."` — Mara's kindness-disguised-as-logistics is performed entirely in object and dialogue. The narrator never certifies her: when the scarf scheme surfaces, it is June who names it ("*You told me that so I'd take it*") and Mara who admits it ("*and it worked*"). Mara's own deflection of June's gratitude ("October... It's almost December. I'm glad you came. Luis is circling the block") prevents a saint-scene. No narrator line rates her wise. Calibration item 2: clean.

## Near-misses checked and passed (work shown per marker)

- **Marker 1 (mystique):** strongest candidate: "her own face turned mostly away" (l.9). Literal description of a photograph on a flyer; no claim anyone fails to understand her. No hits.
- **Marker 2 (effect-on-others):** searched for "the kind that," generalized-people reactions. Strongest candidate: "saying something for her to people she had not chosen" (l.91) — this grades the *flyer's* audience, a plot fact (forty copies, l.9), not June's presence; the reactions that do appear are specific and named (Ruth: "*it's crooked*"). No hits.
- **Marker 3 (cosmic flattery):** none found. Closest figuration is "the table a long flat fact" (l.89), which is anti-flattery.
- **Marker 4 (gesture inflation):** strongest candidate: "Then she looked at June for a second longer than the scarf required" (l.67) — a one-second duration read by June, in scene, whose content is immediately spoken aloud ("Are you eating?") rather than asserted by the narrator. The gesture conveys nothing the dialogue doesn't deliver. Second candidate: "Mara sent back a turkey and a heart and asked nothing else, and that was the part that cost" (l.13) — the "cost" is June's, paid on the page at l.43: "She'd told a lie to avoid a dinner so she could paint a room she was also avoiding." That sentence is the narrator indicting the protagonist mid-chapter; it is the opposite of publicity and it retroactively attributes l.13's weight to June's guilt, not Mara's potency. Both pass.
- **Marker 5 (adjective campaigning):** three candidates run hard.
  - "The plan fit in one line, and it required no one" (l.7) — strip test residue: catalogs boxed spine-up, address copied from the colophon, eight dollars media mail, post office at nine. Residue is the whole plan; the clause is June's self-sufficiency self-image, and the chapter frames that self-image critically four paragraphs later (the lie to Mara, the saved plate she replaces with canned soup at l.43). Attributable perceiver: June, fallible on exactly this trait. Pass.
  - "It was a true question and a competent one" (l.31) — the question is quoted in full so the reader can judge competence themselves, and the same sentence destroys the framing: "sending it tonight would have nothing to do with ceiling height." Self-assessment exposed as cover in-line. Pass.
  - Tasker passage (l.95, calibration item 1): "That was the arithmetic that mattered... He had chosen for her for six weeks without her knowing. She wasn't going to ratify it by fleeing on his schedule." Tested for press-release agency framing — the risk is paralysis dressed as principle. It passes on three grounds: the reasoning is free-indirect June, not narrator applause (no adjective is spent on her); the chapter has already taught the reader her stated reasons can be motivated (l.31, l.43), so the logic arrives discounted; and the action residue is real and costly — the yes unsent, the floor-plan question opened and re-closed (l.97), Asha's December 15 reshuffle window ticking (l.39). The narrator does not crown the deferral; the chapter ends undecided. Pass, with a caution for downstream: the earned-stay test will eventually require reasoning that is *for herself*, not anti-Theo; this chapter is allowed to be mid-arc, the ending chapter is not.
  - Nail-hole close (l.99, calibration item 3): "the holes were hers to leave or fix, and tonight she felt like fixing one." Strip test residue: dug the spackle knife out of the open box, filled the first hole. The agency claim is literal property fact (her wall, her nails), the act is one hole out of a line of them, and the sentence explicitly refuses to convert it into the Friday decision ("whatever she decided by Friday"). Modest, material, uncampaigned. Pass.

## Chapter verdict

`CRITICAL-DISTANCE-HELD` — no unattributed publicity. Most admiring surviving line: **"The row was good: the truest drawing she'd done since Week 6."** (l.91). Earned by: the five studies built in craft-specific material across the chapter (the out-of-square doorframe, l.23; the dragged-chair scuffs, l.41; "wood at an angle, viewed from the door," l.89), perceiver June exercising her one voice-card-licensed authority — and the chapter immediately taxes the praise rather than banking it: she turns the good work face down and weights it with the water jar so it cannot speak for her (l.93). The narrator's discipline elsewhere is demonstrable: "The chair did nothing" (l.89) and the self-indictment at l.43 are active anti-publicity, and Mara's warmth is carried entirely by a foil brick and a reclaimed pie dish, never by narrator certification.

`REVISION ORDERS:` none — zero PUBLICITY lines. One forward-watch for the editor ledger, not an order on this chapter: the Tasker reasoning at l.95 currently defines June's staying logic against Theo ("She wasn't going to ratify it by fleeing on his schedule"); per the reading guide's earned-stay test, the chapter that lands the decision must replace this anti-Theo arithmetic with for-herself material, or the book's thesis fails there even though chapter 18 holds.
