# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 13 ("The Memory and the Kiss")

Auditor stance: skeptical cold read of `output/chapters/chapter_13.md` against the reading guide register rules (§2: plain-speech floor, no dialogue diagnosis, feelings through object/action first, smallness test §8) and the voice cards. Raw draft `chapter_13.round_01.md` consulted for provenance: the revision demonstrably stripped the raw draft's LLM-clean tissue ("Odile never arrived; she was simply adjacent, like rent"; "looked like logistics and operated like surgery"; "installed a countdown in everyone's chest"; "a tact so seamless it was indistinguishable from mercy"; the post-kiss "audited the kiss on craft grounds" essay paragraph). The question is what survived.

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## 1. Portable paragraphs

Checked: the kiss sequence (flagged focus area), the photo-preview paragraph, the showcase-clock paragraph ("Until tonight, the eighth Tuesday..."), the Nia-office projection, the deli door-hold, the shoulder-seam hand beat.

- COUNTER-CANDIDATE — "The kiss was supposed to be small. She had planned one public correction in the short distance between Mara's phone and Theo's face. She missed the center of his mouth, corrected before she could stop herself, and felt him steady into the correction. His right arm lifted away from her at an odd angle." — Suspected because "the kiss was supposed to be X / it became real" is the single most portable romance-midpoint shape in the genre, and the opening sentence could top the kiss scene of any competent fake-dating novel. — Passes because every sentence after the first is non-portable: "correction" is June's painter vocabulary doing the becoming-real work (she corrects the kiss the way she corrected the fern curl forty lines earlier), and the lifted arm is withheld mechanical information — the loaded brush, umber held clear of Mara's borrowed scarf — that no other novel owns. The duration-tell is windowpane cold and hooked fingers, not flutters. Transplanted, the paragraph would drag its whole studio with it.
- COUNTER-CANDIDATE — "At the corner deli, a man came out carrying flowers in a black plastic bucket, and Theo held the door with his shoulder before he seemed to know he had done it." — Suspected because "heroine observes love interest's unconscious kindness" is a stock beat, and the trailing clause interprets rather than observes — the closest thing in the chapter to captioning Theo's care move. — Passes, narrowly: "seemed to" keeps the inference inside June's POV; the shoulder and the black plastic bucket are lived LES texture (smallness test); and the clause plants the exact asymmetry the next paragraph pays off — Theo's care precedes his awareness while June's evasion ("Nia") is fully aware. Cut the clause and the rhyme with "true in the same limited way *boss* had once been true" goes dark. It earns its one inch of telling. If a later revision touches this paragraph for any reason, prefer the observable version (he is still mid-sentence when the door takes his shoulder), but it does not warrant an order now.
- Also checked and cleared: "June could see Nia's office with the rolled posters in the corner and the mug full of dead pens" — the mug of dead pens alone is portable office furniture, but the list resolves into "the spare keys Nia would press into her palm... the clean wall that would need screws by January," which is Nia's keys-and-paycheck idiom and June's installer eye; the paragraph is doing offer-as-physical-place, per the chapter card.

No findings.

## 2. Summarized pressure

Checked: the showcase announcement landing, the `After Class` subject agreement (flagged focus), the flyer-photo sequence (flagged focus), the post-kiss minutes, the stairwell exchange.

- COUNTER-CANDIDATE — "Until tonight, the eighth Tuesday had been a date at the far edge of a packet, easy to leave stapled there instead of in the room. Now it had a door, a room of other people's coats, a table with plastic cups, and a label that might put PARK / BRENNAN under a thing they had made together." — Suspected because this is the chapter's one passage that renders pressure as forward summary rather than in-scene event: the clock is narrated, not enacted. — Passes because the summary is built entirely from objects (staple, door, coats, plastic cups, the label format) and immediately converts to behavior: "She rinsed gray out of her brush until the water clouded. Then she remembered she was not supposed to waste time cleaning a brush she still needed" — the voice card's exact stress tell (cleans brushes she hasn't used), caught and self-rebuked in June's perception-judgment-rebuke rhythm. The pressure lands in her hands, not at managerial altitude. The dread is then re-grounded in scene at line 107 ("Odile's pen mark beside PARK / BRENNAN shone wet for another minute... June kept seeing the wet mark, the future label, the two feet of wall below it").
- COUNTER-CANDIDATE — "June watched Ruth and Sam go before them because watching one pair was all she could manage." — Suspected because "was all she could manage" names her capacity instead of dramatizing it, and because the revision cut the raw draft's three-couple montage down to one, risking under-built social proof for the kiss. — Passes because the one retained instance is the right one and is fully inhabited: "Sam said, 'Rail behind you,' and Ruth stepped left without looking back. The adjustment was tiny." The tiny married adjustment is the social proof; June and Theo's photo then fails against it in concrete terms ("enough air between them for either one to be cropped out"), and the forcing mechanism is dramatized to the second — preview still lit, "Mara did not offer to take another preview. Her thumb slid toward the next name on the list." The reader watches the window for repair closing; nothing is reported that could have been staged.
- The `After Class` agreement was checked specifically for compressed-deal syndrome and is enacted, not minuted: Theo's offer arrives in his logistics register ("I can prime one panel. Same ground, clean edge. That's the easy part."), stalls mid-sentence ("You can..." He rubbed primer from his thumb into his rag.), and June's "No title." refuses meaning on the page rather than having the narrator note that they kept it practical.

No findings.

## 3. Polished / therapeutic / aphoristic dialogue

Checked: every Odile line (flagged focus), Theo's joint-piece lines (flagged focus — note: the line "a subject that can hold both of us" does not exist in the revised chapter; the raw draft's nearest polished ancestor, "We need a subject we both actually see. Not one of us narrating to the other," was cut in revision and replaced with the fumbled "Chairs up, jars. You can..." — the correct disposition), Mara and Priya's post-kiss tact (flagged focus), the sleeve exchange, the sidewalk exchange, Nia's text.

- COUNTER-CANDIDATE — "Acceptable. Empty rooms flatter badly." — Suspected because it is an aphorism, delivered clean, at the exact moment the subject agreement could curdle into theme-statement. — Passes on license: Odile is the only character the reading guide permits high-density memorable lines, the line diagnoses the work rather than anyone's sentence (no dialogue-diagnosis breach), it is two sentences inside her one-to-two-sentence mass cap, and it is reread-consistent — forward it reads as a craft warning; backward, a woman approving the subject that will carry the coda. Same disposition for "Than when you liked it" and "Do not punish it for being ordinary."
- COUNTER-CANDIDATE — "I can hold the photo," she said. "Or send it tomorrow. Or crop it first. Priya wants the layout by Thursday, but I can tell her... I can say the windows went wrong." — Suspected because Mara offering a pre-built cover lie is conspicuously deft tact, the kind of composed kindness that reads workshop-clean. — Passes because the line is not composed: it runs three escalating options, breaks off ("I can tell her..."), and restarts — over-hosting under stress, which is Mara's card exactly ("fills silence," "thinks smoothing is always kindness"). June's one-word "Tomorrow" refusing the smoothing is the under-pressure withholding the audit looks for, and it is June who supplies it, not Mara. Priya's tact was checked separately and is enacted entirely through objects (the clean paper towel shifted between June and the rack, June's gray water carried to the sink) and a closed-mouth "Mm." — no line of it is quotable, which is the point.
- COUNTER-CANDIDATE — "That was true in the same limited way *boss* had once been true." — Suspected because narration captioning the truth-value of a one-word answer brushes the packet's ban on self-delivery captions. — Passes because it captions content, not delivery (no comment on how "Nia" sounded), and the *boss* referent is the chapter's hinge: June is now running the partial-truth play Theo ran on her, with his memory card and her job offer pressed together in the same bag. The sentence is the payoff of a planted line from Theo's own voice card, not freestanding wisdom.

The plain-speech floor was verified: June ("Don't. It looks like a room."), Theo ("I'll send two."), Odile ("Subject."), Mara ("I can hold the photo."), Priya ("Top rack.") each land at least one direct, followable line. No findings.

## 4. Figurative where literal would win

Checked: every figuration in the chapter (flagged focus on studio detail), specifically: "secondhand daylight at the bottom of four stories," "the brick start to buzz," "the pleased cleverness of a restored sign," "the dinner price entering a drawing," "not bright enough to defend itself," "as if the person using it had stepped out for more paint," "as if the paper had taken a position," "the strange part at the bottom of the night," and the single light image ("that late-night green that made everyone look as if they needed sleep").

- COUNTER-CANDIDATE — "She ragged most of it away and left the skipped places: the cheap paper nap, the dry pen, the dinner price entering a drawing." — Suspected because the third list item is a meaning-statement where the first two are literal surfaces — the chapter's nearest approach to explaining its own image (the raw draft's version, "commerce haunting the view," was cut for exactly this offense). — Passes because the list's literal anchors arrive first and the abstraction is June's working criterion for what to leave on the panel, not the narrator's gloss on what it means; the literal substitute (the reversed numerals going pale at the rag's edge) is already on the page two sentences earlier ("thin ochre dragged almost dry, reversed and faint... Eighty-nine cents a pound"), so the phrase adds the only thing the literal hasn't said: why she stops ragging.
- COUNTER-CANDIDATE — "The numerals had the pleased cleverness of a restored sign." — Suspected as personification installed where a flat description of overworked paint would serve. — Passes because it is a craft-precise comparison from June's trade: a restored sign is the exact, technical failure mode of her first pass (too legible, falsely aged), and it motivates the next literal action ("She ragged most of it away"). A literal substitute would have to re-explain what "restored sign" carries in four words.
- Verified the inverse throughout the Theo-canvas viewing: the passage the chapter most needed to keep literal stays literal — outlet plate, two screws, one head catching white, the tray lip, the roller handle stopped halfway into frame, "DECORATOR'S WHITE. FLAT." on the tape. The one reading June performs ("left the job to continue without her") is her recognizing her own memory, which is the scene's psychology, not decoration.

No findings.

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**Out-of-scope notes for the tracker (not prose findings):** (1) The chicken-thigh price is "Eighty-nine cents a pound" in the revised chapter but "99 cents a pound" in the raw draft; neither the packet nor Ch12 canon fixes the figure, but whichever Chapter 12 printed should govern — worth a continuity check. (2) The Codex tic audit's claim of "no `hand/hands` word hits" is inaccurate ("His hand found the shoulder seam," "His left hand stayed at her shoulder," "June's hand had already gone toward the panels"); the usage is kiss/logistics mechanics and within the motif cap, but the tic audit's reconciliation line shouldn't be relied on as written.

Chapter verdict: `INHABITED`
