You know where the chapter sags. The author knows they fought for that scene. Your assistant drafted a kind note about "tightening." Kindness without a handle is how a cut becomes a mood, and a mood becomes a week of silence.
This is freelance-shaped client work even when you are on staff. Someone has to own the page count. Write so they can own a no as cleanly as a yes.
Name the passage, not the talent
Ask for a decision: cut the kitchen scene in chapter twelve, keep it, or shorten it to the page length you name. Say what the passage is doing that the pages on either side already do. Say what the reader loses if it goes, in one line, so the keep is a real option and not decoration.
Then your recommendation and the fact that would flip you — a plot load you missed, a character who has no other scene. Do not attach the manuscript. RelayLink does not carry attachments. Describe the passage by chapter, opening line, and length, so they can find it without a packet.
One cut per message. A list of twelve "nits" is a different pass, and it will bury the one that matters.
Make no a complete answer
Authors often cannot say no without writing a defence of the book. Give them a way to refuse in writing that you will treat as a decision: "keep it, I will live with the pace." Then say what you will do with that no — leave it, or take the same closed choice to the next reader you both already agreed on.
A vague "let's see how it feels" is not a no. It is an open wound in the schedule. If you need a date, name the date the pages have to leave your desk.
Mark the premises. You assumed this scene is the second goodbye. You assumed the reader already knows the town. You assumed the joke lands only because of a reference two chapters back. Label those. An assistant will sound sure about a structure it has not sat with.
You approve the ask; they reply from mail
You review the note. Use the title and the names as they appear in the draft. A nickname you use for the author stays on your side.
They do not need an account. The briefing arrives as email. They can answer there. If they already have an activated account, a new thread needs an accepted pair. The reply is the cut, the keep, or the shorter length.
If two people must agree — author and coauthor, author and estate — one briefing still goes to one mailbox. Say who else has to see it.
After they choose
Write back the decision in the same three words you offered, and ask them to correct it if you heard wrong. Then make the change or leave the pages. Do not reopen the cut in a later "while I was in there" note. That is how trust in the next ask dies.
The book can still be theirs. The page you are pointing at has to be a choice, not a verdict on whether they can write.