FOUND — tic 1 Arrangement-coded prose — "The table had become a bad little office of her future: Dana's address on one index card, Kessler's January start time on another, `FEB = coat` in marker, the Tasker receipt folded into the notebook like a pressed leaf from a road she had not taken." (opening scene, para 3) — ORDER: REWRITE: the colon launches a curated exhibit of plot tokens with a mounted-plaque simile on the last one. June should handle one object under pressure — the receipt, while she's deciding whether to answer the texts — and the rest of the table stays peripheral. Cut "pressed leaf from a road she had not taken" entirely; it's a road-not-taken metaphor stated as decor.

FOUND — tic 1 Arrangement-coded prose — "His coat was folded beside him instead of on the opposite bench. His hands were around the mug, not arranging the sugar packets. He looked as if he had rehearsed doing nothing and was finding it difficult." (booth entrance) — ORDER: REWRITE: two consecutive X-not-Y constructions display counterfactuals for the reader's benefit — June cannot see where the coat isn't. Then the third sentence glosses the display. Give her one detail her eye actually lands on and let the restraint go unexplained.

FOUND — tic 1 Arrangement-coded prose — "He had put them there after paying for nothing, maybe because he knew what she would see if they were loose: a man ready to carry, fix, open, catch. It was so bluntly Theo and so clearly effort that she stepped closer before she could turn it into a theory." (sidewalk scene) — ORDER: REPLACE-WITH-CLAUDE-BASE: colon-launched verb inventory of Theo's care-function, followed by narration explaining what the gesture means and then congratulating June for not theorizing — while theorizing. The Claude base should let the hands-in-pockets read as a single seen fact.

FOUND — tic 2 Taxonomies disguised as narration — "Friday morning. Before your texts. Before this. I called Nia and said no. I gave her Asha's name after asking Asha first. I took Dana's room. I sent Kessler the W-9. My landlord has notice." (June's Tasker speech) — ORDER: REWRITE: this is a thread-by-thread status report — Nia, Asha, Dana, Kessler, landlord, one sentence each — a plot ledger wearing dialogue clothing, and it hands June Theo's cataloging tic. Keep "I said no to Tasker" and the "it is a worse decision than Philadelphia on paper, and it is mine" landing; cut the accounting down to one concrete item at most.

FOUND — tic 2 Taxonomies disguised as narration — "You keep the room alive and leave your own ground clean so nobody can say you failed at it. I painted that because I recognized it. I do it too. I make everything adjacent workable and call that a life." (fear-canvas exchange) — ORDER: REWRITE: June delivers a two-person psychological system tour and caps it with a polished aphorism — "I make everything adjacent workable and call that a life" is exactly the therapy-speak speech her voice card bans. The insight must arrive through the painting itself; give her the sideways version and let Theo's face do the decoding.

FOUND — tic 3 Three-item catalogs — "Mara's dish. Luis's leftovers dish. Tuesday's excuse, if she decided Tuesday still existed." (opening scene) — ORDER: REWRITE: three role-labels stamped on one object, two-literal-plus-one-clever. Keep at most two; the Tuesday stake can survive without the triple.

FOUND — tic 3 Three-item catalogs — "radiator tick, upstairs pipe, the refrigerator's hardworking buzz. None of them helped." (opening scene) — ORDER: REPLACE-WITH-CLAUDE-BASE: rhythm-filler tricolon of ambient sounds with a wry tag rating its own list. One sound or none.

FOUND — tic 3 Three-item catalogs — "I liked the keys. I liked that you knew which sink had bad pressure and which brush Luis would steal if nobody stopped him. I liked all the stuff you thought was evidence against you." (booth scene) — ORDER: REWRITE: anaphoric "I liked" ×3 where the third item abandons specificity and summarizes the first two — the tricolon dissolving into its own thesis. The first two clauses are the good material; end on the brush and let Theo react.

FOUND — tic 3 Three-item catalogs — "you might leave the class, or stop trusting Odile, or stop looking at me like I was just a person who could help with a stretcher bar." (Theo's confession) — ORDER: REWRITE: three escalating hypotheticals with the ornamented capper in slot three, the default Codex tricolon shape. Two fears, plainly stated, fits Theo's strip-down-to-apology mode better.

FOUND — tic 3 Three-item catalogs — "Not clean jars. Not chairs. Not good apologies." (fear-canvas exchange) — ORDER: REWRITE: negative-anaphora triple used as a punch rhythm. "Only paint fixes that" already carries the beat; cut or reduce to one negation.

FOUND — tic 3 Three-item catalogs — "You don't angle it. You don't ask Odile where the light is better. You don't make a little shrine of your restraint." (June's terms) — ORDER: REWRITE: same shape again — two literal prohibitions, then the witty abstraction "shrine of your restraint" in slot three. The shrine line is doing fake-sharp work; the terms should stay concrete and stop at two.

FOUND — tic 3 Three-item catalogs — "I kissed you in front of Mara's camera. I let Odile assign us the final piece. I took catalogs from your hands." (booth scene) — ORDER: REWRITE: third anaphoric tricolon in one scene ("I made... I made...," "I liked ×3," "I kissed/I let/I took"). The density is the finding: at most one triple survives in the whole booth sequence; break the others into asymmetric shapes.

FOUND — tic 4 Thesis closers — "That helped more than it should have." (text-message scene, after "Nothing else.") — ORDER: REPLACE-WITH-CLAUDE-BASE: the beat is "I'll be there." with nothing appended; the tag states the beat's effect. Cut and go straight to the dish action.

FOUND — tic 4 Thesis closers — "That landed. Not prettily. It landed like a jar set down too hard." (after Theo's "protecting the version of me you didn't mind") — ORDER: REPLACE-WITH-CLAUDE-BASE: narration grading the impact of the line just spoken — a thesis tag on dialogue, and it brushes the no-dialogue-diagnosis rule. Show the landing in June's next physical action (the too-hot sip is already there and already does this job).

FOUND — tic 4 Thesis closers — "That was the answer she had not known she needed and resented needing." (after "Not the part I didn't see.") — ORDER: REPLACE-WITH-CLAUDE-BASE: states the meaning of the beat the instant the beat lands. Her next line, "Tell me nothing else," already carries all of it.

FOUND — tic 4 Thesis closers — "She liked him so much in that moment that it made her angry all over again." (booth section closer) — ORDER: REWRITE: names the section's emotional point flatly at section end, and it's the third occurrence of the same ambivalence formula ("hated how much good there still was to notice," "Another point in his favor, which was inconvenient"). One instance of that formula per chapter, maximum; this closer should be an action or an exit, not a verdict.

FOUND — tic 4 Thesis closers — "She pinned it above `FEB = coat`. Two decisions. Not the same category, not the same risk, but both hers." (final paragraph) — ORDER: REWRITE: narration literally sorting its own symbols into categories and stating ownership as theme. End on the pinning; the adjacency of the two cards says it.

FOUND — tic 4 Thesis closers — "The cards were there for later. The cards were for the version of herself who would want to pretend she had not already chosen." (final two sentences of chapter) — ORDER: REPLACE-WITH-CLAUDE-BASE: full thesis closer — the chapter explains what the chapter meant, in an anaphoric pair. The last image must be physical (the dish in the tote by the door is sitting right there as an ending), not an interpretation of the index cards.

CLEAR — tic 5 Em-dash interruptions — checked: full text scanned for em-dashes and dash-punctuated breaks in both narration and dialogue; the only suspension punctuation in the piece is one ellipsis — nearest miss: "I thought the blank square was... kinder than it was." — why it passes: it's an ellipsis, not an em-dash; the hesitation completes into actual content (Theo revising his own self-assessment mid-sentence), so the pause carries information rather than substituting for it. Interruptions elsewhere are handled by dialogue turns and full stops.

Two out-of-format notes for the synthesis step, since they convert directly into orders even though they fall outside the five tics: the exchange "'That's ominous.' / 'It has bullet points.' / 'Worse.'" and June's "Don't just yes me" and "Say less" all have the characters commenting on each other's speech and delivery, which the register rules ban outright ("no dialogue diagnosis in any form") — the bullet-points exchange is also fake-sharp banter about a speech instead of the speech. These need rewriting regardless of the tic audit.

CODEX-TICS-FOUND (18)
