The audit is written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_24.purple_prose.md`. Returning the completed document as instructed:

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# Purple Prose & Show-Don't-Tell Audit — Chapter 24: "First Snow"

Focalizer: June (chapter card 24; "June closes it," guide §1). Audited against the current shipped text (`output/chapters/chapter_24.md`, 175 lines); every line number below indexes that file.

**Input reconciliation.** The Codex Claude-tic audit is stale against this text: its anchors run ~8 lines behind, and two of its quoted "nearest miss" lines return zero matches in the current file ("Everything in between belonged to the two of them to keep"; "The painting didn't fix that. It wasn't trying to"). The close was also revised since those artifacts were written — no "her own water / her own work" anaphora survives in the current text (grep-confirmed absent). I therefore re-read the current text directly and did not trust any prior line anchor. Mechanical gate (current report): PASS, open=0, allowlisted=0, WATCH=104 — non-blocking leads, dispositioned below.

**Watch-lead disposition** (leads verified in context; false positives discarded by name):
- `wp-aivocab-cluster` / `writing-jargon-defaults` / `aiisms-2.33-overused-verbs` "showcase" (7): literal event name ("EIGHT TUESDAYS - FINAL SHOWCASE"), not vocab ornament. Discard.
- `aiisms-2.6-gaze-look` "guarded" (123): "the one thing Odile guarded harder than her own advantage" — literal guarding of a secret, not a gaze descriptor. Discard.
- `tells-2.1-throat-breath` "swallowed" (161): "the glare swallowed it" — a light/value fact (glare erasing falling snow), not a breath-tell. Discard.
- `aiisms-2.10-temperature` "cold" x3 (163, 175): literal winter, POV-tactile on the underdressed walk, the sanctioned season clock (guide §4). Discard (dispositioned under Criterion 4).
- `aiisms-2.25-transition-verbs` "tightened" (101): "Her hand tightened on the stretcher bar" — a POV-true physical action (showing), not a purple transition. Discard.
- `qscan-06-carefully` (103): anchored to "carefully, at value" — a painting-craft observation, not a vague adverb. Discard.
- `qscan-07-finally` x4 (5, 163…): temporal/calendar ("finally stopped performing the climb," "the cold had finally shown up"), not emotional softeners. Discard.
- `ruleset-three-part-cadence` (85): "piece, name, out, back" are literal clipboard columns, not a lyric triad. Discard.
- `reddit1-repeated-descriptor` "against" x3, `tells-2.1-hands/eyes/shoulders`, `watch-qs-trailing-participle`, `watch-qs-and-but-start`: literal spatial/body vocabulary and rhythmic emphasis; each verified literal or pressure-matched (the And-starts and trailing participles are dispositioned under Criterion 5). Discard for purple/telling.

No mechanical lead survives as a purple/telling hit.

## Criterion 1 — Purple spans

**CLEAN**

Banned sub-patterns verified absent across the full text. No ripple/stillness simile ("like a stone," "rippled through," "sent ripples," "stillness shattered," "cracked the silence" — grep-confirmed, none present). No misapplied epic tone ("changed everything," "broke forever," "world held its breath," "nothing would ever be the same" — grep-confirmed, none present). The chapter is anti-epic by construction: the public admission is deflated to "two words at an urn" (57); the Odile reveal lands on "I'm retiring, not dead" (127); the close refuses a summit with "eight hundred dollars due Thursday, and she went" (175). No stacked-adjective piles; the prose runs on concrete nouns and verbs (urn, cups, umber, stretcher bar, cobalt).

The chapter also refuses ornament at a spot the genre installs it: line 155, "the studio lights turning it into a mirror," is immediately undone — June "crossed to kill the strip lights… When the strips went off the window stopped being a mirror, and she saw it." The banned epiphany-via-mirror (guide §6) is inverted (she kills the mirror to look outward). No violation; positive evidence for the verdict.

Strongest counter-candidates considered:
- Line 49, "a person in front of a picture, a different and more dangerous thing." The most abstract tag in the chapter and the primary purple suspect. It is an abstract evaluative appositive, not a metaphor, so criterion 5's "metaphor reveals the perceiver" license fits it only loosely. It survives — but at the narrowest margin, and its failure mode, if any, is labeling-ahead rather than ornamental pile; routed to Criterion 2 and carried there.
- Line 157, "the fat slow kind that can't yet decide if it means it." Snow lightly personified — the weather-as-emotion suspect the prompt named. Survives, and is **excused explicitly**: guide §4 makes first snow "the clock made visible," and §6 names "the first-snow ending [as] the one sanctioned convergence" of weather and feeling. The figure names a real physical property of tentative wet snow and is cashed to fact one beat later — "It won't stick," "Ground's too warm. It'll be wet by morning" (159). The personification stays subordinate to literal weather.
- Line 153, "she watched it cost him and watched him pay it." A parallel metaphor (swallowed words as a paid cost). Survives under criterion 5's allowance — it reveals the perceiver (June reads restraint the way she reads a picture) and is deflated by the dry tag that follows ("she liked him so much in that second it was faintly annoying").
- Line 125, "the wreckage of how well it had worked." A figure at the Odile reveal. Survives: it carries real content (the class succeeded so completely it overturned June's life), reveals June's dry self-view, and is cashed to literal fact in the same sentence ("a wall in Ridgewood and a man up front putting away someone else's drawings").

## Criterion 2 — Telling that restates implied meaning

**TELLING (1 instance)**

- Line 175, "his hands staying where they were **because the kiss was hers to give and hers to end**." The subordinate clause tells the agency the surrounding choreography already dramatizes in full. The action shows both halves: "She got up on her toes… and kissed him" shows the kiss is hers to give; "his hands staying where they were," then "she stepped down off the curb and went to catch her train," shows it is hers to end. The balanced "hers to give and hers to end" is a lyric gloss on movements the reader has just watched, and it restates a claim the chapter has already grounded three times over (Theo's hand that "started toward the portfolio strap… let it drop," 169; "his hands empty," 137; the portrait's withheld hands, 99). This is the over-balanced lyric explanation the prompt flagged to watch at the close. It does not replace action — the action is present — but it seconds it. See Revision Order 1.

Strongest counter-candidates considered (each survives):
- Line 103, "That was the ache… while he was deciding for her what she could stand to know." The chapter's most direct emotion-label and the obvious telling suspect; it also echoes "all she could stand" from 101. Survives under §2's naming-as-event license: for June, who "treats desire as evidence against herself" and "exits before anyone can watch her want" (voice card), naming the ache *is* the vulnerability-event, not a restatement. It is not a gloss on 101 — 101 reads the painting's content (she is small, turned away); 103 names the paternalism (he decided for her) as the *source* of the ache, new content that reframes rather than repeats. The "could stand" echo is the recurring wound, not lazy doubling. Closest call in this criterion.
- Line 107, "the seeing was what was hers to do with it." Same "hers to…" construction as the flagged 175. Survives — it does not restate a dramatized gesture; it answers a live question the scene has just raised ("She wasn't hiding it"): whether turning the panel back to the brick equals hiding. That distinction is the beat, not a gloss.
- Line 3, "She left it a tower and counted that, privately, as growth." Labels "growth" over the just-dramatized refusal to fan the cups into an arc. Survives: the label is the self-aimed joke (guide §2, "jokes aimed at herself"), not a redundant gloss — the comedy is June scoring a micro-victory. De-ironized it would be the telling this criterion catches; the irony makes the naming the beat.
- Line 91, "turning it was the single move he'd built the whole week to leave to her." Interpretive narration. Survives: it delivers new information (Theo's design and restraint), not a restatement of anything dramatized; the portrait scene needs June to read his withholding for the agency turn to land.

## Criterion 3 — Allowable telling

**TELLING — no instances. CLEAN**

Every compression stretch re-tested against the duplication/replacement bar. Summary appears only where the reader did not need to live through the material; every scene that carries weight is dramatized (reception, portrait turn, Odile reveal).

Strongest counter-candidates considered:
- Line 83, "June heard him tell two people with pleasant certainty that the room opened to them at eight and there was a decent bar on Orchard that would hold them for twenty minutes." Reported speech instead of dramatized dialogue. Survives — this is criterion 3 working: the Halloran hand-off is a minor logistical beat; rendering it as summary preserves momentum toward the dramatized June/Odile core (115–133). Duplicates nothing.
- Lines 79–85 (the room emptying; logging the work). A summary stretch. Survives: it compresses departures and clipboard mechanics the reader need not live through, while the beats that matter inside it are shown, not told — June signing both names ("*Park* and *Brennan*"), the panel going "into the dark to finish drying, hers and his, checked out to no one, waiting on a wall."

## Criterion 4 — POV-bound sensory detail

**CLEAN**

Every sensory notation routes through June's painter's eye or her body under the evening's pressure; there is no free-floating five-senses decoration and no detail the focal consciousness would not select.

Strongest counter-candidates considered:
- Line 99, "the dark of her sweater against the dark of the wall, almost the same note, a half-step apart, the hardest edge there is to hold." A dense value/edge passage — the "more detail" suspect. Survives: June reading a painting at value is the one consciousness in the room that sees it this way; licensed by the prompt ("June's painter-eye can be lyrical only when it names a visible value/edge/light fact") and guide §2. Immersion through the focalizer's craft, not addition.
- Line 163, "Snow found every place the sweater wasn't and melted there." Tactile cold. Survives: exactly the cue June — underdressed in "the good sweater," not "the warm coat," under money pressure — would select; POV-bound, not a checklist.
- Line 175, "kissed him, quick, sugar and cold." Compressed taste/temperature at the kiss. Survives: desire rendered through specificity of attention rather than anatomy (guide §3); the two sensations June would register, not padding.
- Line 161, "the glare swallowed it. She had to look where the street went black." Survives as the model of the licensed lyricism: a POV-bound optical/value fact (falling snow visible only against dark ground), not room-dressing.

## Criterion 5 — Pressure-matched language

**CLEAN**

Syntax tracks pressure section by section: clipped at impact ("'No,' June said. 'We didn't.'" 55; "And he'd held it." 99; "She turned it anyway." 95; "'Okay,' he said." 143) and layered only at sanctioned reflective beats (the portrait read at 99, the Odile parallel at 129). Concrete nouns hold at every impact point. The And-/But-starts and trailing participles the gate flagged are rhythmic emphasis and simultaneous-action texture at reflective beats; none sits where the scene wants speed.

Strongest counter-candidates considered:
- Line 163, "a February problem, a Kessler-in-March problem, an eight-hundred-dollars-by-Thursday problem." A triad at a reflective beat — the over-balance suspect. Survives: pressure-matched; it escalates to the literal dollar figure that *is* the scene's pressure (June's precarity), landing on a concrete number rather than smoothing the romance into comfort.
- Line 129, "the same withholding June had finally made Theo answer for over coffee, except Odile had done it longer and colder and would be answering for less…" A long, balanced comparative sentence. Survives: this is reflection (June taking a made thing apart for the order it got made in), where guide-earned layered syntax is correct; it is analysis, not ornament, and it grounds out in "the proof on a page instead of in a sentence."
- Line 175's flagged clause is also an over-balance candidate here; routed to Criterion 2, where restating-implied-meaning is its primary failure. The low-pressure close means the balance is not contradicting urgency — the defect is redundancy, not pressure-mismatch.

## REVISION ORDERS

1. **Line 175 — telling that restates implied meaning (over-balanced lyric explanation).** Quoted: "his hands staying where they were **because the kiss was hers to give and hers to end**." Fix: **cut the clause** "because the kiss was hers to give and hers to end." The choreography already carries it — "his hands staying where they were" shows Theo's ceded control (and rhymes with 169, 137, 99), and "she stepped down off the curb and went to catch her train" shows she ends it. The clean-win result: "…and kissed him, quick, sugar and cold, his hands staying where they were. Then she stepped down off the curb and went to catch her train." No interiority is lost; only the aphoristic gloss is. If the beat of Theo's consent must be marked at all, keep only the shown fact ("his hands staying where they were") and let the two verbs of her leaving do the rest — do not restore a balanced pairing.

Closest calls — carried as cautions for the next touch, not orders on this text:
- Line 49, "a different and more dangerous thing." The narrowest margin in the audit: an abstract evaluative tag that pre-labels the exposure stakes Ruth's next line dramatizes ("You didn't start this together," 51). It survives because it is four words, anchored to a dramatized action ("the length of time that means a person is reading and not being polite"), and names June's central wound (fear of being caught needing to be seen) at the moment of maximum exposure risk — cutting it cools the POV rather than clearly tightening it. Do not let a second abstract-stakes label of this shape accrete nearby.
- Line 157, "can't yet decide if it means it." The one sanctioned weather-figure (guide §4/§6). Spend no further personification on the snow; the rest of the close must stay literal value/light, as 161 already is.
- Line 103, "That was the ache." The one licensed direct emotion-label in the chapter, and it already carries a "could stand" echo of 101. Do not add a second direct label, and do not re-sound "what she could stand" a third time.

OVERALL: TELLING
