# Narrator-Publicist Audit — Chapter 13: The Memory and the Kiss

audit: narrator_publicist | owner: claude | tier: risk | trigger: sample:every-4th-chapter + flag:protagonist-heavy
chapter: `output/chapters/chapter_13.md` (current revised text)
calibration: not provided
written to: `output/critiques/claude/chapter_13.narrator_publicist.md`

## Narrator-attitude check (template step 4)

Reading guide §2 declares close third, warm/precise/lightly comic, interiority discipline (feelings through action, object, dialogue first). No unreliable publicist-narrator is declared anywhere in `premise/`; therefore every admiring line must survive the strip test or attribute to a named fallible perceiver. June is the focal perceiver throughout. The chapter does frame her judgment critically on its own page: "hated that she knew the pause was orange" (L17), "which was the most obvious thing she had done all night" (L79), the misread lifted arm (L127), and the closing self-conviction "That was true in the same limited way *boss* had once been true" (L191). Her admiration of Theo is therefore auditable as focalized perception, not narrator fact — line by line below.

Process note (non-finding): the mechanical gate report and the Ch13 tics rows quote strings absent from the current text ("from the label to the two bodies," "The laugh stayed where it was," "the room had been looking back all evening," the "make it larger" rhyme). The chapter was revised after that report; regenerate the gate before the next cycle. The "borrowed-frame caution" kiss beat named in this audit's request is likewise not in the current revision; the held-brush, dropped-brush, and sleeve/solvent beats are.

## Per-line verdicts

### June (campaign risk: insight, restraint, artistic honesty, desire)

- `EARNED` — "She could hear the small give of a palette knife against paint and hated that she knew the pause was orange." (L17) — the on-page action that backs it: "Theo uncapped tubes in his usual order and paused over one." (L17). The knowledge is habit-knowledge of his tube order, not uncanny hearing, and the clause is self-rebuke, not credit. Markers 1/4 checked; strip residue is a full action.
- `EARNED` — "Her painter's eye wanted to move it. She kept the brush away from the pin until the urge passed." (L45) — the on-page action that backs it: the kept-away brush IS the restraint; the urge is confessed as a flaw against the assignment. "Painter's eye" is the §2-licensed June lens, not an asserted gift.
- `EARNED` — "It did not look sentimental. She was glad, and the gladness made her set the brush down too hard." (L59) — the on-page action that backs it: failure shown first, three times — "June's first version made the curl pretty. She scraped it back" (L33); "Her first pass made the circular too legible... She ragged most of it away" (L57); "She wiped the brush and left the gap empty" (L43). The external check is Odile's hedged dialogue, and June cannot even rate it ("She moved on before June could decide whether that was useful," L41). The gladness is undercut in the same sentence.
- `EARNED` — "She had meant one count, two. ... and she was still there, her fingers hooked in his lapel." (L129) — the on-page action that backs it: desire as duration and grip against her stated plan ("The kiss was supposed to be small," L127). No heat-language, no narrator endorsement of the wanting.
- `EARNED` — "On the way back, she did not look again, which was the most obvious thing she had done all night." (L79) — anti-publicity: narration convicts her of transparency rather than crediting composure.

### Theo (favored-character risk, especially the kiss)

- `EARNED` — "He had not painted the superintendent, or the wall label from later, or any version of *you'd never know*." (L67) — the on-page action that backs it: a checkable canvas inventory June runs against the memory she handed over — "the outlet plate... two screws beside it" / "the roller handle stopped halfway into the frame" (L65). Tact stays implicit in paintable facts; marker 5 checked, no adjective asserted.
- `EARNED` — "He had put the formula tape on the can, exactly where a store clerk would have put it: DECORATOR'S WHITE. FLAT." (L67) — the on-page action that backs it: the tape and wording are on the canvas. Marker 3 checked: the comparator's content is fidelity to her memory, not his specialness.
- `EARNED` — "Theo came to her side. He did not stand too close." (L87) — the on-page action that backs it: spatial fact at June's threshold, and the chapter supplies her own unflattering counter-read of his body language ("the posture he used with difficult clients," L115). Perceiver: June.
- `EARNED` — "His hand found the shoulder seam of her jacket and stopped there, not weight enough to wrinkle the wool." (L119) — the on-page action that backs it: observable through fabric; June's material attention is the §3 heat mechanism (desire via specificity of attention), and the photo context makes the light touch read as tentative posing, not gallantry.
- `EARNED` — "His left hand stayed at her shoulder without tightening. His other arm stayed lifted, elbow locked, brush tip up, burnt umber clear of Mara's scarf." (L131) — the on-page action that backs it: planted two paragraphs earlier as unread evidence ("His right arm lifted away from her at an odd angle," L127) and paid off by "Theo's brush was on the floor, bristles down" (L133). June misreads first; the scene corrects her. His goodness is reconstructed from action, not asserted.
- `EARNED` — "He was crouched before she had finished lowering her hand, the rag already out of his pocket, blotting the umber mark from the boards." (L133) — the speed credit deflates him: he exits the kiss to clean a floor. Comic cost, not press release.
- `EARNED` — "'I have solvent downstairs.' / 'Old jacket, Theo.' / 'Right.'" (L141–149) — the care move is dialogue-action, refused twice, with no narrator caption rating it sweet.
- `EARNED` — "He put his keys in his coat pocket and did not take them out again." (L175) — the on-page action that backs it: keys are his established stress object (voice card); self-control shown as object fact.
- `EARNED` (strongest counter-candidate; see verdict) — "Theo held the door with his shoulder before he seemed to know he had done it." (L181) — strip test: what action remains: "Theo held the door with his shoulder" for a named third party ("a man came out carrying flowers in a black plastic bucket"). The campaigning clause is "before he seemed to know he had done it" — an unselfconscious-virtue claim one hedge from the §6-banned didn't-know frame. It survives because "seemed" marks it as inference, the perceiver is on page in the next sentence ("June looked at him and at the signal changing across the avenue"), and the chapter frames her reads of Theo as pressured and fallible (L127 misread; L79, L191 self-convictions). Attributable perceiver: June.

### Odile / Mara (tact over-praise check)

- `EARNED` — "Ben raised one finger with a practical objection already assembled. Odile looked at him until he lowered it." (L13) — marker 2 handled correctly: authority graded by one named character's specific reaction, not generalized awe.
- `EARNED` — "Odile stopped beside her. June had not heard her arrive." (L35) — marker 1 checked: strip residue is a full action; the not-hearing characterizes June's absorption in the pass she was scraping back, and narration never glosses Odile as uncanny.
- `EARNED` — "At the roster table, Odile wrote something beside a name and did not look up." (L139) — the consistent-with-knowing beat stays unglossed: "something," "a name," no claim that she saw, approved, or arranged. Forward-innocent, reread-pointed, per §8. Her praise ("Better." / "Than when you liked it," L37–41) is in-voice diagnosis of June's taste, not romance management.
- `EARNED` — "Mara did not offer to take another preview. Her thumb slid toward the next name on the list." (L125); "Mara looked at the phone once, pressed it flat against her sweater" (L135) — tact as physical fact. The chapter then charges her for the smoothing instinct instead of selling it as wisdom: her stairwell offer is an offer to lie ("I can say the windows went wrong," L165), delivered in her over-hosting stutter ("but I can tell her... I can say") — the flaw her voice card names.
- `EARNED` — "Ruth stepped left without looking back. The adjustment was tiny." (L113) — marker 4 checked: the small gesture is not credited with paragraphs of meaning; it is two named people's specific coordination, and the unfavorable conclusion about June and Theo is drawn by the camera, not narration ("enough air between them for either one to be cropped out," L115).

Minor, no finding: "Mara said something pleased and low" (L83) — tone-naming for a non-POV character, audible in scene, below threshold.

## Chapter verdict

Most admiring surviving line: "Theo held the door with his shoulder before he seemed to know he had done it." (L181). Perceiver: June, marked by "seemed" and placed on the page looking at him in the next sentence; the stripped action is complete (door held, shoulder, for the flower-bucket man), and her judgment is framed as fallible within this same chapter (L127, L191).

`REVISION ORDERS:` none — no PUBLICITY lines.

Non-blocking watches for Ch14 (tics-tracker material, not orders):
1. Theo-restraint-by-negation syntax is clustering: "did not stand too close" (L87), "without tightening" (L131), "did not turn from the sink" (L167), "did not take them out again" (L175). Each earns its place; four in one chapter makes the shape a tic candidate. The next Theo-restraint beat should be positive action, not negated excess.
2. L181 spends the book's one safe unselfconscious-virtue framing for Theo. A second instance in a nearby chapter converts this family into the §6 beauty-unawareness ban by accumulation.
3. Stale dependency: regenerate the mechanical gate report against the current revision; several quoted strings and line anchors no longer match the text.

`CRITICAL-DISTANCE-HELD`
