# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 13

Source audited: `output/chapters/chapter_13.md` against raw draft `output/drafts/claude/chapter_13.round_01.md`, chapter packet, voice cards, `premise/READING_GUIDE.md`. Stance: cold read, skeptical professional editor. Mechanical gate input: open=0, 64 WATCH hits (non-blocking). Codex local audits report TIC-CLEAN / CLEAN; this pass does not inherit those verdicts.

## 1. Paragraphs portable to another novel

PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "'Closer?' Mara said. 'You're not strangers.'" — This is the stock photographer-pressure beat of the fake-dating genre; it could appear unchanged at the midpoint of any Christina Lauren or Emily Henry novel with a couples-photo scene, and it is the line that licenses the kiss, so the chapter's hinge is hanging on its most generic words. — ORDER: Rebuild Mara's nudge from this scene's own apparatus — the flyer layout, the crop Priya would have to make, the Ruth-and-Sam photo already on her screen for comparison — so the pressure is about this flyer and this preview, not the couple-category in the abstract.

Strongest counter-candidates checked and passed:
- The kiss paragraph itself ("She missed the center of his mouth, corrected before she could stop herself, and felt him steady into the correction... holding burnt umber clear of Mara's scarf") is not portable: the loaded brush, the borrowed scarf custody, and "correction" as painter's diction pin it to this book. The diction is June's, not the genre's.
- The offer close was hunted hard per the focused check. Nia's text ("Call tomorrow before you talk yourself out of it") is the nearest thing to a portable knowing-friend line, but it passes — narrowly — because "PHL board said yes... make the offer formal" carries book-specific facts in Nia's brisk register, and the interiority that follows ("the mug full of dead pens... the clean wall that would need screws by January") is June's install-world idiom, untransplantable.

## 2. Pressure summarized rather than inhabited

SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "She knew exactly where they were: windowpane against her shoulder, Theo's damp brush near Mara's scarf, the roster table four steps to her left..." / "His right arm held the brush away from her body, elbow locked, brush tip up, burnt umber drying at the tip." — The middle of the kiss is spent re-reporting the brush position three times across three consecutive paragraphs (lines 127, 129, 131) from inventory altitude, while the one pressure the midpoint exists to stage — the planned brief correction running past its plan and becoming real — is never rendered; "corrected before she could stop herself" happens in the first second, and the raw draft's overrun beat ("somewhere after the third count the kiss stopped being instructional and she did not stop it") was cut in revision with nothing put in its place. The cover failing is now an inference from hooked fingers, not a lived moment. — ORDER: Consolidate the brush choreography into one statement and spend the recovered middle on the duration breach inside the kiss: the count June set and the concrete point at which she passes it (Mara's shutter going while the kiss continues; the second press of the windowpane). The reader must live the cover failing, not be handed the room's coordinates while it does.

SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "The panel stayed in the irritating middle: a fourth-floor shaft, some laundry pins, a grocery price, a pipe in need of paint. Narrow and airless." — This re-inventories a panel the reader just spent two pages watching her paint, and repeats "narrow and airless" verbatim from the previous paragraph ("the airshaft looked narrow and airless"); assessment replaces pressure two paragraphs running, and the verbatim echo reads as revision residue, not incantation. — ORDER: Cut the echo and the recap list. Replace with one new perception under pressure — what Theo's audible brush behind her does to her wish never to touch the panel again, or how far Odile is standing from it.

Focused checks that passed, with evidence: The `After Class` subject agreement is inhabited, not summarized — Theo's "Same room... I can do the after part. Chairs up, jars. You can..." trails off into rubbing primer from his thumb into the rag, which is the fumble doing the work, and Odile's one-word "Subject." keeps the clock material. The flyer-photo pressure peak is carried by objects ("Mara did not offer to take another preview. Her thumb slid toward the next name on the list."). Strongest counter-candidate considered: "Until tonight, the eighth Tuesday had been a date at the far edge of a packet" opens at managerial altitude but passes because it immediately converts to the lived version — "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."

## 3. Polished, therapeutic, or aphoristic dialogue

POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "I can hold the photo... Or send it tomorrow. Or crop it first. Priya wants the layout by Thursday, but I can lie to Priya. Badly." — Mara is too articulate about her own tact: four graduated options resolved with a two-word self-deprecating capper, a constructed punchline landing in the kiss's aftermath where the chapter card explicitly forbids a zinger; the overexplaining is in her voice, but "Badly." rates her own performance and closes a beat that should stay open. The under-pressure version would not get the joke assembled. — ORDER: Keep the offer of control (hold/send/crop — that is the tact the scene needs) but break the capper: let the third option fail to arrive, or let Mara start the lie-to-Priya logistics and abandon them mid-sentence, so June's "Tomorrow" answers an offer still hanging rather than a landed joke.

Focused checks that passed, with evidence:
- Odile's teacher lines: "Do not improve it. Do not punish it for being ordinary." and "Acceptable. Empty rooms flatter badly." are the chapter's most aphoristic dialogue, and they pass under the reading guide's explicit license — Odile is the only character permitted high-density memorable lines, both are insult-as-diagnosis aimed at the work rather than at anyone's sentence, and "Than when you liked it" shows the same density doing scene work in four words.
- Theo's "subject that can hold both of us": this line does not exist in the revised chapter. The raw draft's thesis-shaped version ("We need a subject we both actually see. Not one of us narrating to the other.") was correctly cut. His most composed surviving line, "I'll send options. You can say no to all of them," passes because pre-licensing June's refusal is his accommodation-as-care failure mode rendered in logistics idiom, and June's "Limit the list" refuses the smoothness on the page.
- Mara mid-scene: "I'm not asking the next question if you don't want it." is tact made explicit, but passes — it is meddling acknowledged as meddling, followable as text, and June's "I don't" closes it without decoding.
- Priya post-kiss passes outright and is the model the Mara finding should be revised toward: "Wet work stays" / "Top rack," repeated, the clean paper towel physically shifted between June and the rack, "Mm." answering "Thank you" — tact carried entirely by objects and repetition, zero composure on display.

## 4. Figurative where literal would do more

FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "Theo put an arm around June's shoulders. It arrived with the exact caution of a borrowed frame." — A gallery-coded simile installed at the exact beat the chapter exists to make awkward; the custody meaning (handling something not his) is already established by the difficult-clients posture one sentence earlier, and the smoothness of the figure works against the stiffness it describes. The chapter's own best moves here are literal placement (elbow locked, brush tip up). — ORDER: Replace with the literal contact observation — where the hand lands on the shoulder seam, what weight it withholds, what June feels of it through the jacket — and let the already-named client posture carry the custody work alone.

FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "The numerals had the pleased cleverness of a restored sign, and Theo's memory had not been pleased with itself." — The second clause extends the personification into a meaning statement that the very next sentence proves literally ("left the skipped places: the cheap paper nap, the dry pen, the dinner price entering a drawing"); attributing affect to a memory does the reader's interpreting for them. — ORDER: Cut "and Theo's memory had not been pleased with itself." The restored-sign comparison plus the literal skipped-ink repair carries the correction without the gloss.

Strongest counter-candidates checked and passed: "secondhand daylight at the bottom of four stories" passes because it is a painter naming a value for the actual subject — the figure serves the mixing decision stated in the same sentence (ultramarine, umber, too much water). "Watched the brick start to buzz" passes as literal-technical: buzz is what doubled lines do optically, not decoration. The narrowest pass is "That was the strange part at the bottom of the night" — a poetic time-stamp that survives only because the sentence cashes out immediately in literal inventory ("no wet board on the train... only the umber on June's cuff and the card in the roll"); if the rewrite touches this paragraph for any other reason, prefer the literal hour and the sidewalk.

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## Chapter verdict: `LLM-CLEAN-FOUND`

Orders, in priority:

1. PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — rebuild Mara's "You're not strangers" nudge from the flyer/crop/preview apparatus of this scene.
2. SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — consolidate the triple-reported brush choreography in the kiss block and stage the duration overrun inside the kiss; the cover must fail on the page, not by inference.
3. SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — cut the verbatim "narrow and airless" echo and the panel recap inventory; substitute one new perception under pressure.
4. POLISHED-DIALOGUE — break the "I can lie to Priya. Badly." capper so Mara's post-kiss tact stays unresolved when June answers "Tomorrow."
5. FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — replace the "borrowed frame" simile with the literal contact detail of Theo's arm.
6. FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — cut "and Theo's memory had not been pleased with itself"; the literal skipped-ink repair already carries it.
