Newbie Trouble with Print ePub Page Numbers

Hi. Very much an InDesign newbie and I'm standing in a painful medical boot or a maybe stress fracture, so be kind. I've skimmed many posts here, watched relevant YouTube videos, and spent a few hours with Google's AI which appears to know InDesign well.  So pardon me if I repeat others' posts.

I signed on for a year of InD in order to selfPub two novels based on my first selfPub that was formatted by pros at Booknook. Despite minor stumbling blocks (I failed to get my indb book's add-chapter plus sign to let me navigate to my indd chapters in Creative Cloud so I had to resave them to my computer where they don't have autosave; and styles looked like too much to learn [I've never used them in Word] so I did a lot manually), I've set up my book Double Time as an indb book with all 43 chapters formatted manually. I've gotten rid of excess pages by manually adding or subtracting blanks to get all chapters to begin on the right. It looks great, exactly like Swimming, the paperback that Booknook formatted for me, BUT I've been hung up for nearly a week now on page numbering.

In Chapter 1, I've set up page numbering in A-Parent. Correct page numbers appear on Chapter 1's ten pages but don't continue to the remaining 42 chapters. Only in Chapter one do I have more than one layer: the top layer is Page numbers overlay and the bottom layer is Layer 1. The remaining pages all have only one layer and each page (1-392) in all forty-three chapters says A-Parent applied when I hover in the Pages panel. I have no formal section breaks (my linedrops are textual, not otherwise coded). I've checked many times that there are no missing or extra pages resulting from choosing to begin all chapters on the right; together with that process I've found and fixed all instances of a page ending with that 'text hidden' thing. Each chapter's file in my indb book shows the correct page numbers; there are no gaps or repeated page numbers. Each chapter, when I go to Layout/Numbering & Sections Options, has Automatic Page Numbering checked and the unchecked field Start Page Numbering at shows the correct number for that chapter's first page. When I've changed anything on A-Parent (experimentally deleting and adding back the page number box), I get 'busy' popup while it applies the change to all 392 pages. Yet STILL I can't get page numbers beyond Page 10, the last page in Chapter 1. 

Can anyone see what I'm missing?

Thanks!

fg