# Chapter 15 Initial Draft Assessment

Target: `output/drafts/claude/chapter_15.round_01.md`

Verdict: ACCEPT AS BASE WITH LOCAL SYNTHESIS REPAIRS.

## What Works

- The chapter fulfills the card's main engine: the Philadelphia offer is genuinely good, respectful, material, and not a strawman.
- June's POV is audible: she makes a call station, writes notes, studies object edges, and locates the trap through what she would actually do in a room.
- Nia is not villainized. She talks in keys, paychecks, board timing, equipment, and deadlines, and gives June a real professional choice.
- The catalog loan remains protected. The stack is physically present and uneasy, but June does not read the acknowledgment page or learn Theo's nephew identity.
- The close lands on the deadline as object: `FRI DEC 4 / NOON` pinned under the unopened mineral spirits jar.

## Raw Draft Problems

- Mechanical gate failed on the raw draft with four open findings:
  - one-sentence paragraph density in the opening setup.
  - banned `after a moment`.
  - banned echo-line construction: `she was never at the wall. She was...`.
  - banned `for a long moment`.
- Several prose-risk areas should be watched by audits:
  - the opening dog/firewood comparison may be too broad for June's register.
  - "It was developing a presence" made the mineral spirits jar too personified and was repaired in integration.
  - the apartment-small/action line drifted toward environment-as-agent and was repaired in integration.
  - Nia's job-details paragraph is dense by design but needs Clarity/Thought Development pressure because Ch15 is `dense-or-system-heavy` and reflective.

## Integration Performed

- Copied the raw Claude draft to `output/chapters/chapter_15.md` as the base.
- Merged opening one-line paragraphs into adjacent action paragraphs.
- Replaced `after a moment` with the concrete note placement `under the first four`.
- Replaced the wall/press echo-line construction with a single returning-image sentence.
- Replaced the apartment-as-agent line with `she needed a task with a beginning and an end`.
- Replaced `for a long moment` with a radiator-click duration.

## Current State

- Final accepted chapter word count after audit repairs: 1,995.
- Final per-chapter mechanical gate: PASS open=0 allowlisted=0 WATCH=41.
- Subsequent audit rounds supersede this initial assessment; final disposition is recorded in `output/critiques/codex/synthesis/chapter_15.md`.
