# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 20 (*No Advice / Keys Here*) — Round 6 (verification pass)

Cold read of the current text against the reading guide register (interiority through object and action; plain-speech floor; June compresses and gets visually exact when exposed) and the June/Ruth/Sam/Asha/Nia voice cards. Verification scope honored first: all three round-5 orders are confirmed executed in the current text. (1) The orphaned "You do" is gone; June's first reply to Nia is now `"It wasn't," June said. "I ran it four times."` — which answers the line Nia actually says ("It wasn't close.") and concedes her math in the same verb. (2) The FEB gloss is now `Below the figures: FEB = . There was nothing to put there.` — the essayish "in the space where a plan should be" caption is cut and exactly one plain fact remains, per the order's ceiling. (3) *Okay. No chair.* appears once (`Scrolling for Dana's thread she hit the one that still ended *Okay. No chair.* She did not open it.`) and the comparison follows directly (`She put the right page beside it: $490, JAN 2--KEYS, ten feet of wall, FEB blank.`) with no restatement frame. No repair introduced a new seam: the "ran the math"/"ran it four times" echo at the call's top is a concession mechanism, not a scar, and the collapsed Dana beat gains a literal follow-on fact (`The $340 room barely held heat.`) that cashes Asha's coat warning instead of glossing the juxtaposition. Each section below records what was checked and the strongest surviving candidate.

## 1. Paragraphs portable to another novel

No findings. Checked every paragraph for slot-into-any-book smoothness, hardest at the scene transitions and the before-noon montage, where connective tissue usually goes generic. Strongest counter-candidates:

- "She squared the receipt against the notebook's edge. She'd done it four times and it came out the same every time: the left page won. The left page won on every line." — Still the chapter's most cadence-polished moment and still the first thing a portability check catches. It passes for the same reason rounds 3–5 kept it: both clauses are welded to a two-page spread the reader has just read line by line (TASKER/GOOD against NEW YORK/FEB = .), and the repetition renders June's documented stress behavior — re-verifying, squaring paper — not narrator rhythm.
- "Sam got the door open with a hip, and Ruth held it, and the box of catalogs left June's apartment a quarter before eleven on Thursday. The rectangle by the door was bare except for a strip of dust where the box had been." — The timestamped exit sentence has a faint ceremonial shape that could travel. It passes because the timestamp mode is this chapter's spine (9:52, 10:40, 10:52, 11:14, 11:20 — the chapter resolves in receipts and clock readings by design), and the strip of dust is the non-portable residue of a premise-specific errand (Odile's catalogs, returned through intermediaries, with the Theo-avoidance routing spelled out in dialogue).
- "She washed the blue dish again. She dried it and set it on the shelf." — Checked as a generic quiet-close. Passes on "again": the dish was already clean in the rack since Tuesday; the second wash is June's physical processing of having just changed the errand's terms ("Tell Mara I'm bringing the dish myself Tuesday"), and the dish itself is nailed to the book by the pooled-cobalt flaw Mara won't replace.

## 2. Pressure summarized rather than inhabited

No findings. Checked the three prior failure sites (the FEB blank, the Dana thread, the post-Nia-call gap) plus every paragraph opening for managerial altitude. The repaired sites now run object-notation-timestamp with no narration grown back between them. Strongest counter-candidates:

- The FEB notation's recurrence — `FEB = .` (line 11), `FEB = .` recopied after the Asha call (line 91), "FEB blank" (line 99), "February is a blank line in my notebook" (line 125), `FEB = coat` (line 155) — five appearances is the closest thing to insistence left in the chapter. It passes because each appearance is a different event, not a restatement: the blank is created, survives a logistics call that answered everything else (the recopy at line 91 is the point — Asha solved December and January, not February), is weighed against the left page, is spoken aloud to Nia as the worst fact of June's own case, and is finally paid with one word. The tics tracker already logs the payoff as paid-and-retired.
- "The notebook, open to the spread she'd been avoiding." — The one told avoidance in the chapter. Passes as one-clause scene-setting immediately substantiated by physical evidence: the pencil gone shiny at the folded-and-unfolded corner and the twenty-six-hour count.
- "The five studies stayed face down under the water jar. She could see the staple lines through the back of the top one. Not yet." — "Not yet" checked again as a suspense fragment; still passes because it defers a specific physical act the chapter visibly performs at lines 157–159, where the study comes up and gets the nail.

## 3. Polished, therapeutic, or aphoristic dialogue

No findings. Walked all three conversations under the standing suspicion (composed fluency, pre-resolved lines, quotable refusal rhetoric). The refusal call fumbles where it must ("Or the sink would--" She stopped.), Ruth stays within her one-sharp-line cap and pays for it with the bag-strap fumble and unquotable help ("We have a car."), and June's asking-not-asking declaration repeats itself under pressure rather than landing clean ("I'm not asking for an opinion. I want to be clear that I'm not asking."). Strongest counter-candidates:

- "February is a blank line in my notebook." — The most shaped line in the call; out of context it could be a curated admission. It passes because it is a literal read-off: June is reciting the counter from the right page, the blank is a real notation the reader has watched persist through two scenes, and the line concedes the weakest point of her own case to the person she's refusing — plain-speech-floor material stated at cost, which Nia immediately punishes ("That's a worse offer.") rather than admires.
- "One thing, though. Send my name because I'm qualified. If you're trying to feel less bad, don't." — Asha's two-beat warning has polish-risk shape. Passes as her card's exact register (blunt leads, no pity, no dressing), delivered mid-freight-noise, and it extracts a real cost: June's incomplete admission "I did want to feel less bad," which Asha declines to absolve ("Okay. Second thing?") — the round-4 repair holding.
- "It is," June said (answering "That's a worse offer."). — Checked the uncontracted form (also a mechanical WATCH hit). Passes under June's contractions policy: full forms when trying not to fall apart; she is agreeing with the case against her own decision, and the stiffness is the cost showing.

## 4. Figurative language where literal precision would win

No findings; the chapter's register is literal to the point that its few compressions are load-carrying. Strongest counter-candidates:

- "paint-scabbed floor" — The one metaphorical compound in the chapter's final stretch. Passes: it is the precise painter's word for dried drips built up on a workroom floor, inside a photo June is reading for information, and the sentence ends on the literal observation doing the real work ("the north window putting flat gray light across ten feet of empty wall. June looked at the light longest.").
- "the email she'd been not-sending to Nia for nine days" — The chapter's one coinage, carried over from round 5. Still passes: the progressive holds nine separate daily decisions not to send, which "hadn't sent" loses, and compression-by-coinage is inside June's card.
- "the specific boom of a gate coming down," the printer "feeding a page and catching for half a second," "the glaze had that thumb-sized flaw near the foot, a spot where the cobalt had pooled and gone almost black" — all checked as candidate atmosphere; all are literal, exact, and this book's.

## Chapter verdict

`INHABITED`

All three round-5 orders are executed in the current text with no new seams, and a full cold read under all four questions produces no finding that survives its own counter-argument. The chapter's decision material resolves entirely in the book's own currency — receipts, notations, timestamps, and one nail — and the remaining polish candidates (the left-page echo, the FEB recurrence, the blank-line admission) are each welded to specific objects and documented character behavior. Nothing here is worth an order before commit. For Chapter 21: rest `against` (mechanical WATCH, 3 uses), do not reuse `FEB = coat` or a third "Noted," and let the pinned index card and the hung study carry forward as objects without re-explanation.
