All checks verified — "Winter Kitchen," "load-bearing," and "underpainting" have zero hits in the final chapter, and the "only map" image has a literal referent (Theo's route card and map habit, chapter_06.md:113,151). The full audit follows.

---

# Figurative Language Audit — Chapter 07 ("From Memory")

id: figuration_audit | owner: claude | tier: risk | trigger: `flag:figuration-heavy` (chapter card 07)
Audited text: `output/chapters/chapter_07.md` | Raw draft: `output/drafts/claude/chapter_07.round_01.md` | Upstream: codex tic audit (TICS-FOUND ×10), mechanical gate (0 open, 61 WATCH)

Stance: every image treated as guilty until it proves work. Chapter card grants heightened-imagery license ("felt experience: exposed wonder," "prose dials: June painterly detail; density medium-high"), which raises the volume ceiling, not the quality floor.

## Pre-screen: literal craft language ruled out of battery

These were checked and ruled literal painter speech, not figuration — the chapter's strongest asset is that its art vocabulary is technically true: "kill the white" (standard toning of a ground), "the cheek went to mud" (real crit-speak for overmixed neutrals), "gouache lifts when you scrub" (true of the medium), "the sweater had dried two values too dark, so the head floated" (real value-relationship failure), "raw gesso," "the blank held," "Gouache dries lighter" (Luis — true, and his voice card licenses exactly this line type), "Paint has weight" (Luis's own card example line, literal). Also below threshold as dead idiom or plain statement: "buy nothing," "past retrieval," "a guess and a long one," "ran past plausible by a knuckle's worth," "some average of her actual coats," "the problem arrived whole," "his reach was longer," "had become a system," "felt like a statement," "the way a head does when the lean has worn itself in over years" (anatomy observation, not vehicle/tenor).

## Per-image battery

**1. "June saw the trap from the doorway"**
1. Clarifies the literal fact that the easel arrangement is engineered against looking — and the social danger that the assignment will extract what June is hiding.
2. Yes — June reads rooms for threat before faces; "exits before asks" (voice card); a rearranged studio is exactly what she'd case from a doorway.
3. Yes — eight easels, kraft screens, the empty model stand: the trap is built from this scene's furniture, and on reread it is literally Odile's trap.
4. Sharpens — it sets the chapter's engine (absence as test) in one word before the card is even quoted.
5. The word is portable; the construction (counted easels, clipped kraft, the card propped where a person should be) is not — swap the nouns and the sentence dies.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "saw the trap from the doorway" — anchor: the engineered no-looking rig; focalizer basis: June's threat-first room-reading, plus reread truth (Odile is trapping them).`

**2. "eight pairs of easels set spine to spine"**
1. Clarifies orientation: back-to-back pairs, partners blinded to each other.
2. Yes — compact visual noun, June's idiom.
3. Yes — easel masts in this studio; the body echo (people standing back to back) is the assignment's actual geometry.
4. Sharpens — one phrase does the blocking work of a paragraph.
5. Marginally portable, but only to another studio scene; it is doing this scene's blocking.
6. Accept invisibly. (Gate WATCH hit on "spine" is a false positive on blocking vocabulary.)
`EARNED — "set spine to spine" — anchor: back-to-back paired easels; focalizer basis: June's exact visual nouns.`

**3. "dealt them out like a woman who had done this for forty years and lost patience in year six"**
1. Clarifies the speed and economy of Odile's distribution, and her teaching history.
2. Yes — June's dry observational comedy aimed at a person she reveres ("reverence disguised as irritation").
3. Yes — "dealt" comes from the literal postcard-sized panels going out like cards; the forty years is Odile's actual final-class tenure.
4. Sharpens — characterizes Odile through motion, not narration about her nature.
5. The "did X for N years" template is portable; the deal-of-panels and the true forty anchor it here. Keep.
6. Admire mildly; no pause.
`EARNED — "dealt them out like a woman who had done this for forty years..." — anchor: panel distribution speed; focalizer basis: June's wry precision about Odile.`

**4. "It dries while you argue with it, so argue early." (Odile, dialogue)**
1. Clarifies a literal property of acrylic gouache — fast, unforgiving drying — and instructs pacing.
2. Yes — Odile's license: best lines, fewest words; insult/instruction compression.
3. Yes — medium-specific; painters genuinely personify paint this way in studio speech.
4. Sharpens — it is the chapter's craft clock (June later violates it by scrubbing).
5. Not portable outside a paint scene.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "It dries while you argue with it" — anchor: acrylic gouache drying behavior; focalizer basis: Odile's economical studio idiom, paid off by June's scrubbed cheek.`

**5. "A funeral of a palette, and honest for it."**
1. Clarifies the literal chromatic sobriety of the five-tube limit: white, black, ochre, sienna, ultramarine — blacks and earths, no seduction colors.
2. Yes — June names pigments and makes the dry joke at the materials, not at her feelings; "honest" is the class's value word.
3. Yes — the tube list is quoted in the sentence before; the image is generated by this palette.
4. Sharpens — "honest for it" forecasts the chapter's problem: a limited palette can't flatter, so neither can she.
5. "A funeral of X" is a portable template — see closest calls below; retained because the anchor is on the page two clauses earlier.
6. Admire; a painter-reader nods.
`EARNED — "A funeral of a palette, and honest for it" — anchor: the quoted five-tube earth palette; focalizer basis: June's pigment-naming wit. (Closest call #2, defended below.)`

**6. "the kind of likeness you could show a jury without perjuring yourself"**
1. Clarifies June's plan: a deliberately defensible, deniable likeness — accuracy without testimony.
2. Yes — her voice card states she "treat[s] desire as evidence against herself"; the legal frame is her documented psychology, not decoration.
3. Yes — it opens the chapter's sustained legal register (evidence, "legally consult," "stood beside the evidence," countersigning), which is this book's rendering of June's self-prosecution.
4. Sharpens — names the exact bad-faith contract she's making with the assignment.
5. Not safely portable: in another novel it's a gag; here it's load-carrying system. Keep.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "show a jury without perjuring yourself" — anchor: a deniable generic likeness; focalizer basis: June's desire-as-evidence wound (voice card, verbatim).`

**7. "Worse than nobody: the face that comes free with the frame."**
1. Clarifies the literal failure: she has painted the placeholder stock face that ships inside a new picture frame.
2. Yes — June works art-adjacent install/retail labor; frames are her material world.
3. Yes — a painting class, a panel, a frame-world image; also comic in her register.
4. Sharpens — diagnoses *generic* with an object instead of an adjective.
5. The vehicle exists elsewhere, but only an art-labor focalizer earns it; swapped into another book it would read as borrowed cleverness. Here it's native.
6. Admire — the chapter's best comic image.
`EARNED — "the face that comes free with the frame" — anchor: stock-photo frame insert as the painted result; focalizer basis: June's frame-handling work life.`

**8. "A man generated by the word *man*. He looked recently assembled."**
1. Clarifies the real pedagogical failure of symbol-drawing: painting the concept instead of the remembered person.
2. Yes — this is how a trained painter names that failure; June's compression under exposure.
3. Yes — it diagnoses this panel at this easel; "assembled" extends the free-with-the-frame retail register.
4. Sharpens — explains *why* the safe man is worse than nobody.
5. "Generated by the word" is the most portable phrase in the chapter and carries an unintended machine-text shimmer in 2026 — but the symbol-drawing fact it names is real craft truth, and cutting it would cost the diagnosis. Retained on the literal-anchor strength.
6. A sharp reader accepts; a suspicious one hovers a half-second on "generated."
`EARNED — "A man generated by the word man" — anchor: symbol-drawing failure (drawing the word, not the memory); focalizer basis: trained-painter diagnosis under pressure. (Closest-call runner-up; survives on Q1.)`

**9. "He had never stood in a gallery handing a stranger his only map."**
1. Clarifies what the generic man lacks: Theo's specific history of vulnerable care.
2. Yes — June indicts her own painting by citing what she remembers, which is the chapter's danger.
3. Yes — verified literal referent: Theo's route card and map-giving habit are on the page in chapter 06 (Ruth: "you drew Sam a map to a bar that was four blocks away"; Theo handing Ben the route card). "Only" is the single heightened word.
4. Sharpens — converts "I painted nobody" into the relationship-history stakes.
5. Not portable; it's a callback, not a vehicle.
6. Accept invisibly; rereaders are paid.
`EARNED — "handing a stranger his only map" — anchor: Theo's literal route-card care move (ch. 06); focalizer basis: June's involuntary recall, the chapter's engine.`

**10. "the whole figure sat on the panel like a coat on a peg"**
1. Clarifies a literal construction failure: no weight, no gesture, a hung object instead of a standing body.
2. Yes — exactly how a figure painter describes a dead pose.
3. Yes — and the vehicle is sourced from the scene's own opening action: "She hung her coat on the rail" four paragraphs earlier.
4. Sharpens — motivates the two-degree glasses correction that breaks her plan.
5. Portable in isolation; not after the on-page coat. Keep.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "like a coat on a peg" — anchor: gestureless figure construction; focalizer basis: painter's pose diagnosis, vehicle planted by June's own coat on the rail.`

**11. "He was arriving, the way a figure comes up out of a wash before you've given it permission."**
1. Clarifies the literal process — opaque strokes resolving a figure out of the thin ochre wash she laid at the top of the scene — and the emotional fact that the likeness is escaping her control.
2. Yes — process-language is where June hides feeling; "before you've given it permission" is her control wound speaking in craft terms.
3. Yes — the wash is on this panel, on this page (line 20 of the chapter).
4. Sharpens — this is Turn 1's mechanism: the painting outrunning the painter.
5. Not portable — it requires a wet wash in the scene.
6. Admire.
Smuggling check (motif cap): this is **wash**, not underpainting, and the figuration's target is the literal panel, not Theo's arc or the relationship — the reading guide's underpainting-metaphor cap is not touched. The personification ("permission") is the earned payload, not décor.
`EARNED — "comes up out of a wash before you've given it permission" — anchor: the on-page ochre wash resolving into likeness; focalizer basis: June's control expressed as process; cleared of underpainting smuggling.`

**12. "It was simply in the account, filed under week two, available on demand" / "the file had no entry"**
1. Clarifies the two memory facts the chapter turns on: involuntary perfect recall (collar point) versus a true gap (eye color).
2. Yes — June makes her memory sound clerical precisely to deny it is tender; the bureaucratic frame *is* the deniability she wants.
3. Yes — it interlocks with the legal register (evidence/jury/countersign) and pays chapter 05's blind contour ("set June's visual memory for Ch 07," per card).
4. Sharpens — "the file had no entry" makes the eye-blank a finding, not a mood.
5. Account/file vocabulary is generic, but the paired use (entry present at week two, entry absent for eyes) is structural to this chapter. Keep.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "filed under week two" / "the file had no entry" — anchor: involuntary recall vs. true gap; focalizer basis: clerical framing as June's plausible deniability.`

**13. "like a man listening to instructions he intended to follow"**
1. Clarifies the literal set of the painted mouth — left corner low, a fraction tight — and Theo's compliant usefulness, his book-level wound.
2. Yes — June reads character from mark-making; three strokes producing a temperament is her optical gift.
3. Yes — it is Theo specifically (the man whose adult life is following Odile's instructions); the image would be false of any other sitter.
4. Sharpens — the mouth is the moment the portrait becomes evidence.
5. Not portable — tenor and vehicle both belong to Theo.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "listening to instructions he intended to follow" — anchor: the painted mouth's actual set; focalizer basis: June reading Theo's usefulness wound off three strokes.`

**14. "wiped it on a paper towel as if the rubber band had paint on it"**
1. Clarifies the cover gesture: she manufactures an innocent reason for having touched the tote.
2. Yes — June's stress behavior is physical busywork (voice card: cleans brushes she hasn't used).
3. Yes — paint, rags, paper towels: all scene materials.
4. Sharpens — the "as if" makes the self-deception visible as action, replacing the raw draft's banned "declining to think about it" gloss.
5. Not portable without the tote/rubber-band apparatus.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "as if the rubber band had paint on it" — anchor: performed alibi for an aborted reach; focalizer basis: June's documented displacement busywork.`

**15. "The room kept its brushes busy."**
1. Clarifies the cohort's tactful non-reaction to Ben's bust: audible brushwork as collective looking-away.
2. Yes — June registers the room acoustically (she's behind a screen; sound is her only data).
3. Yes — brushes-in-jars loudness was established at line 20.
4. Sharpens — replaces the raw draft's shimmer line ("Nobody laughed, which was its own kind of laughing") with an observable behavior; the repair executed codex's order correctly.
5. Mild metonymy, scene-bound. Keep.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "The room kept its brushes busy" — anchor: audible tact behind screens; focalizer basis: June's sound-only access to the room; verified repair of a codex-ordered cut.`

**16. "The shoulders were wrong in the right way... a man who would ease himself back by degrees rather than snap square, because snapping square would make it everyone's business"**
1. Clarifies the off-plumb torso as assignment-failure but likeness-success, then cashes the paradox immediately in Theo's actual conflict-avoidance.
2. Yes — paradox-then-concrete-unpacking is June's perception-judgment-rebuke rhythm.
3. Yes — posture read from paint; the "everyone's business" instinct is Theo's documented self-effacement.
4. Sharpens — the unpacking clause does real characterization; the paradox alone would not.
5. "Wrong in the right way" solo is a portable reversal; chained to the snap-square read it is not. Keep as a unit.
6. Accept, with a flicker at the reversal — see closest calls.
`EARNED — "wrong in the right way... rather than snap square" — anchor: off-plumb painted torso; focalizer basis: June's posture-to-character reading of Theo. (Closest call #3, defended below.)`

**17. "every failed repair had made him more himself"**
1. Clarifies the literal accumulation: each correction (cheek, sweater, shoulders) added observed specifics instead of removing them.
2. Yes — flat declarative, no ornament; June at her most cornered is at her most plain.
3. Yes — it summarizes three on-page paint events, all itemized in the same paragraph.
4. Sharpens — it is the Turn 1 sentence, and it earns its abstraction because the evidence precedes it (contrast the raw draft's cut "It was not a good painting. It was a true one," which asserted before showing).
5. Not portable with its evidence; portable without — and it doesn't travel without.
6. Accept; lands as conclusion, not aphorism.
`EARNED — "every failed repair had made him more himself" — anchor: three itemized failed corrections; focalizer basis: June's plain-statement-after-evidence rhythm.`

**18. "The figure ended like a half-excavated fresco."**
1. Clarifies the literal sight: painted figure above, raw white gesso from sternum down — a hard horizontal edge into ground.
2. Yes — art-historical comparison from a lapsed art-school painter; gesso is itself a plaster ground, so the vehicle is materially kin to the tenor.
3. Yes — the raw gesso is on the page in the same sentence ("Raw gesso from the sternum down").
4. Sharpens — dignifies the refusal to invent his hands as a known form of incompleteness, not laziness.
5. Portable to any unfinished figure — but the gesso/plaster material rhyme localizes it. Keep.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "like a half-excavated fresco" — anchor: paint stopping at raw gesso mid-torso; focalizer basis: June's art-historical eye plus the gesso-plaster material kinship.`

**19. "three tries at an edge that wanted to be one stroke"**
1. Clarifies a literal paint event on Theo's panel: visible reworking where a single confident stroke was needed (the scarf tuck).
2. Yes — "edge" is on June's voice-card word list; edges-before-faces is her stated operation.
3. Yes — painter's idiom (edges "want" things in real studio talk), describing actual visible pentimenti of effort.
4. Sharpens — the labor visible in the paint is the evidence that Theo *worked* to remember her, which is the scene's emotional payload, delivered without one feeling-word.
5. Not portable — requires wet paint and a knot.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "an edge that wanted to be one stroke" — anchor: visible triple-reworked edge at the painted tuck; focalizer basis: "edge" is June's literal first-order vocabulary.`

**20. "She was leaning in and leaving in the same body"**
1. Clarifies the two literal facts of Theo's painted stance: torso tipped toward the easel, feet angled to the door.
2. Yes — compressed paradox at peak exposure is June's documented stress register.
3. Yes — both halves are painted facts quoted in the previous sentence; it also names the book's whole June problem (wants it / leaves first) in body terms.
4. Sharpens — the abstraction is a reading of evidence already shown, not a substitute for it.
5. Not portable: without those painted feet it's a therapy sentence; with them it's observation.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "leaning in and leaving in the same body" — anchor: painted torso-tip plus door-angled feet; focalizer basis: June's compression under exposure; thesis carried by stance, not naming.`

**21. "she recognized the posture the way you recognize your own voice played back: wrong, and more yours than the one in your head"**
1. Clarifies the specific shock of seeing oneself observed accurately: external truth versus internal self-image, via the universal bone-conduction fact that recordings sound wrong.
2. Yes — generic-you distancing is how June handles a feeling too large to own in first person.
3. Partially — the vehicle is general modern experience, not studio material; the tenor (the painted stance) is maximally this-scene.
4. Sharpens — it names the chapter's felt experience ("exposed wonder") through a sensation every reader has had, at the exact beat the card calls Turn 1.
5. The vehicle would survive transplant to another novel — this is the chapter's most portable load-bearing image. See closest calls.
6. Admire, after a beat.
`EARNED — "the way you recognize your own voice played back" — anchor: external-vs-internal self-image, tenor locked to the painted stance; focalizer basis: June's generic-you deflection at peak feeling. (Closest call #1, defended below.)`

**22. "blank, an honest hole"**
1. Clarifies the raw gesso where the scarf always covered her: an omission that is accurate.
2. Yes — "honest" is the class's currency, Odile's word; June appraising Theo's panel in the room's shared value language.
3. Yes — the blank exists because of the scarf's literal coverage history across five Tuesdays.
4. Sharpens — distinguishes Theo's blank (honest) from June's planned blanks (evasive), the chapter's quiet moral ledger.
5. Not portable without the scarf history.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "an honest hole" — anchor: gesso blank where the scarf always was; focalizer basis: class value-vocabulary applied as appraisal.`

**23. "moved on without a word, which from Odile was a medal"**
1. Clarifies the cohort's learned decoding of Odile: silence is her highest grade.
2. Yes — June's dry institutional-knowledge humor.
3. Yes — five weeks of Odile's economy make the inversion legible; consistent with her voice card ("withholds praise until it can change a person").
4. Sharpens — grades Ruth's panel and characterizes Odile in nine words.
5. Mildly portable; the Odile-specific silence economy anchors it. Keep.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "which from Odile was a medal" — anchor: silence as Odile's known maximum praise; focalizer basis: June's earned read of the teacher.`

**24. "a small, exact Sam, every proportion audited"**
1. Clarifies Ruth's painting's character: checked, verified, exact.
2. Yes — June tags each cohort panel with one precise noun; "audited" matches Ruth the copyeditor.
3. Yes — Ruth's professional texture imported accurately onto her work.
4. Sharpens — one word does Ruth's whole characterization.
5. Portable word, person-locked use. Keep.
6. Accept invisibly.
`EARNED — "every proportion audited" — anchor: Ruth's verified exactness; focalizer basis: June matching work to maker.`

**25. "The mouth is observed. The cheek is an apology. Scrape it." (Odile) → "she scraped the apology off the cheek"**
1. Clarifies the literal paint fact: the muddied cheek is overpaint applied to take something back, not to state something — a retraction in pigment.
2. Yes — insult-as-diagnosis is Odile's chartered mode; June's later single reuse is a student adopting the teacher's term while executing the order with a palette knife.
3. Yes — generated by this panel's actual mud, scrubbed edge, and putty patch, all established forty lines earlier.
4. Sharpens — "observed"/"apology" is the chapter's entire verdict on June delivered in six words, and the narration's reuse converts metaphor into action (scraping reveals "the first pass... sienna and plain. Better. Still him.").
5. Not portable — it requires a cheek painted in bad faith.
6. Admire — the chapter's best line, correctly in Odile's mouth.
Pressure-point note: the raw draft's narration owned this as "a putty-colored apology" (raw line 62); integration correctly demoted narration to the literal "putty-colored patch" and let Odile coin the metaphor. That is the right ownership — diagnosis is hers, execution is June's.
`EARNED — "The cheek is an apology. Scrape it." — anchor: bad-faith overpaint as literal retraction; focalizer basis: Odile's insult-as-diagnosis license; narration reuse is a single earned adoption.`

**26. "The rack is communal and so is blame." (Odile)**
1. Clarifies the literal logistics (shared drying rack, name your work) with her standing threat attached.
2. Yes — Odile's zeugma economy; logistics carrying judgment is her documented kindness-disguise.
3. Yes — rack, tape, marker, class list: all scene materials, and the line arms the chapter's final beat (a name on a communal rack is a public claim).
4. Sharpens — without it, June's decision to rack the panel face-out has no stakes.
5. Not portable in function.
6. Admire.
`EARNED — "The rack is communal and so is blame" — anchor: shared-rack attribution rules; focalizer basis: Odile's logistics-as-judgment register, arming the closing beat.`

**27. "verifying Priya's surname like it might have changed since the wedding"**
1. Clarifies Ben's literal behavior (checking a spelling he cannot not know) and his over-verification anxiety.
2. Yes — June's comic register, affectionate not contemptuous (warmth floor holds).
3. Yes — Ben's voice card is built on double-checking ("I checked the train. Twice"); the wedding is established cohort fact.
4. Sharpens — one clause of cohort comedy that also contrasts Ben's performative checking with June's coming unhesitating two-N certainty.
5. Person-locked; not portable.
6. Accept with a smile.
`EARNED — "like it might have changed since the wedding" — anchor: Ben re-verifying a known spelling; focalizer basis: June's observational comedy keyed to Ben's documented tic.`

**28. "he carried it level through the cleanup traffic the way you carry soup"**
1. Clarifies the literal handling: a wet gouache panel flat on forearms under newsprint must be carried level, two-handed, attention down.
2. Yes — June reaching for a domestic vehicle to describe Theo is the point: she is reading him accurately in *his* idiom (logistical-domestic care), which is what the chapter proves she can do.
3. Yes — wet panel, newsprint, cleanup traffic all on the page; soup belongs to the book's diner-and-feeding texture.
4. Sharpens — "the way you carry soup" tells us the panel is precious to him without one interiority word, and June watching tells us she knows it.
5. Mildly portable vehicle, but the wet-gouache logistics make it near-inevitable here.
6. Accept invisibly — the best kind.
`EARNED — "the way you carry soup" — anchor: level two-armed wet-panel carry; focalizer basis: June describing Theo in his own domestic-care register, the chapter's seeing-him proof; also seeds Theo's hidden-study thread for Ch 23 without comment.`

**29. "heard the marker squeak through the second N like it was countersigning"**
1. Clarifies the literal sound (a half-dead chisel tip squeaking) and the act's meaning: writing THEO BRENNAN unhesitatingly is June attesting, in public, to her own memory of him.
2. Yes — the legal register is hers from line one of the plan ("jury," "perjuring," "evidence she could legally consult," "stood beside the evidence"); a countersignature is the system's closing entry.
3. Yes — marker, tape, communal rack, class list: scene materials; the document frame is the chapter's own built register, not imported.
4. Sharpens — converts a logistics beat (label your work) into the decision the chapter has been building: she stops denying the file exists and signs it.
5. Not portable — without the five prior legal touches, the personification would be cute; with them it's the ledger closing.
6. Admire, after a checked instinct to object — see closest calls.
`EARNED — "like it was countersigning" — anchor: the squeak under the second N of a public, unhesitating attestation; focalizer basis: capstone of June's chapter-long evidence/legal register. (Closest-call runner-up.)`

## Motif caps and special pressure points — reconciliation

- **Hands**: not the tenderness channel. Final-text hand instances are blocking-literal (fingers on the rubber band, jars in Luis's hands, Odile's arms behind her back, the panel on Theo's *forearms* — the raw draft's "both palms" was correctly de-escalated). Tenderness routes through the scarf knot, the filled water jars, the soup-carry, and the marker. Week-4 sanctuary preserved. PASS.
- **Light**: one deliberate light image — "The clamp lamp over her easel put a shine on the wet black paint of the rims, two panes of glare" — which is also the solution to a paint problem (rendering unknown eyes). The earlier "Glare, glasses, never that close" is a memory *fact* explaining the gap, not a second image; the rhyme between them is structure, not multiplication. No "golden hour" (grep-verified). PASS.
- **`Winter Kitchen`**: zero occurrences (grep-verified). PASS.
- **Underpainting**: the word does not appear (grep-verified). "Wash" and "first pass" uses are literal process; the one wash-simile (image 11) targets the physical panel, not Theo's arc — no smuggling. PASS.
- **"load-bearing"**: zero occurrences (grep-verified). The raw draft's interrupted "it's load—" (Mara, raw line 106) was excised entirely; the final clementine interception ("before she could extend the ruling") carries the beat with no banned residue. PASS.
- **"scarf radar"** (raw line 106): CUT in integration — final text reads "Mara arrived in Odile's wake and went straight to Theo's panel," which is the literal behavior the radar gag was decorating. Correct repair; nothing to order.
- **Dialogue diagnosis (zero tolerance)**: clean. "The mouth is observed" diagnoses the *work*; "They're gray. For the record" is fact, not phrasing-caption. PASS.
- **Codex tic-audit orders**: all ten figuration-relevant cuts verified executed in the final text ("No model was the model," "its own kind of laughing," "true one, which was worse," "paint and the man agreed," "specific exposure," "caught in the truth," "Both true. Both at once," future-narrator shading at Odile's pause, "hidden or just resting," "the question she actually had" — none survive).

## Chapter verdict

`FIGURATION-EARNED`

Three closest calls, each defended against the question it nearly failed:

1. **"she recognized the posture the way you recognize your own voice played back: wrong, and more yours than the one in your head"** — nearly failed **Q5 (portability)**. The voice-recording vehicle would survive transplant into any contemporary novel, and a skeptical reader should notice that. It stands because the tenor cannot travel: the recognition is of a *painted stance* — torso tipped to the easel, feet aimed at the door — quoted in the immediately preceding sentences, and the image is doing the chapter card's named work ("exposed wonder," Turn 1: "the lie has produced real seeing"). Replace it with literal observation and you lose the only sentence that says what being accurately seen *feels like* from inside, which is the assignment the chapter exists to perform. A portable vehicle bolted to a non-portable tenor at the book's designated emotional peak is acceptable risk; the same sentence anywhere else in the chapter would be ordered cut.

2. **"A funeral of a palette, and honest for it."** — nearly failed **Q5/Q6 (template wit)**. "A funeral of X" is a transplantable witticism, and the appended "and honest for it" flirts with aphorism. It stands because the literal anchor is quoted in the prior sentence — White, black, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, ultramarine — and the joke is *chromatically accurate*: that five-tube list genuinely produces a mourner's range of blacks, grays, and earths. "Honest" is doing forecast work, not decoration: the limited palette that can't flatter is the chapter's whole problem in miniature (she will fail to paint a flattering lie with it). A painter focalizer assessing her squeezed-out palette in one dry clause is June's register operating exactly to spec.

3. **"The shoulders were wrong in the right way"** — nearly failed **Q6 (reversal-tic adjacency)**. The codex tic audit cut this construction's siblings ("not a good painting... a true one," "Both true. Both at once," "not caught in a lie, caught in the truth"), so the surviving reversal must justify why it isn't the same disease. It is the only one of the four whose paradox is *immediately cashed in paint*: the sentence does not rest on its balance but opens directly into the off-plumb torso, the drift right, and the snap-square read of Theo's conflict-avoidance — concrete, person-locked, non-rhetorical. The cut siblings asserted truth abstractly after the fact; this one is a craft observation (wrong per the assignment's safe man, right per the actual man) whose evidence occupies the rest of its own sentence. It stays, but it is the last reversal this chapter's budget can carry — integration should add no more.

No orders. The chapter's figuration discipline is the inverse of the raw draft's: the literal craft language (mud, lifting, value drift, floating head, scraping to the first pass) carries the emotional load, and the surviving images are either built from on-page scene materials (coat/peg, wash, gesso/fresco, soup-carry) or from June's chartered legal-evidence register (jury, file, countersign). Literal specificity is winning over cleverness, as ordered.
