# Thought-Development Audit — Chapter 15 (`output/chapters/chapter_15.md`)

audit: thought_development | owner: claude | tier: risk | trigger: flag:reflective-chapter
Stance: skeptical editor. Every verdict below is evidenced; borderline candidates are quoted and adjudicated, not waved through.

## Reflective-passage inventory and thought-path traces

- **P1 (paras 2–7, "Inside, she discovered…" through "…neither of which had taken until eight-forty"):** starts at a practical failure (no surface fits a 10.5-inch catalog), gathers through measurements, the slip-down stack rationalization ("She told herself that was about weight distribution"), the call-station assembly, the crossed-out *what happens if no*, and lands on the avoidance arithmetic of eight-forty. Path is accretive, not linear.
- **P2 (mid-call aside, "Her handwriting had gotten neat. It did that when the room would not line up."):** two-sentence aside inside an active dialogue scene; examined under criterion 3 below.
- **P3 ("June looked at what she'd written…" through "…standing at the wall would feel like a question."):** starts at her own notes, touches the wrong-object correction (*Not the wall. The press.*), interprets, then re-develops the interpretation through the visualized eight-fifteen room. Examined under criterion 1 and focused check 1.
- **P4 (post-call paragraph, "When the call ended…" through "The flaw wasn't in the offer."):** starts at the notebook reread, touches the quoted punch list, doubles back to the station and pen from P1, lands on the flaw displacement. Examined under focused check 2.
- **P5 (Asha passage, "…because the next thing in her head was Asha's voice…" through "…put the phone face down."):** starts from a live text, gathers a sourced memory (loading dock, hands full of strap), projects two concrete futures (gripper bar, wet canvas), lands on an object simile ("like a tool on the bench you weren't using and someone else needed") with the decision withheld.
- **P6 (flyer photo, "Her own face in it was doing the thing she'd been trying to caption…"):** caption-attempt with an inversion landing; examined under criterion 3.
- **P7 (close, "The receipt was in the jacket's left pocket…" through the last line):** object sequence ending in placement, not insight. Examined under focused check 3.

## Criterion verdicts

**1. Pre-solved reflection — DEVELOPED.**
Strongest counter-candidate: "Her pulse had gone straight past the part of the offer that was supposed to be for her and settled into the part that kept the room usable" (P3) — the interpretation arrives one sentence after the data point and could be read as instant captioning. It survives the straight-line test on two grounds. First, the data precedes it on the page in concrete form, including a compressed wrong-first-guess: "The line that interested her was *true up the Vandercook.* Not the wall. The press." The noticing is of her own handwriting, an object established at "June was writing. *Vandercook—gripper, return stroke.*" Second, the thought does not move on once stated: the next paragraph re-develops the same recognition through gathered material — "Fluorescents off except the one bank over the sink, the wall a clean field with the light raking it flat. The version that kept returning put her at the press with a rag, because the press would always have a next thing wrong with it, and fixing it would always feel like work, and standing at the wall would feel like a question." The last sentence could not have been written immediately after the first with nothing lost; the press/wall asymmetry only exists because the visualization built it. The landing is a question-image, not a verdict — the realization is noticed, not adjudicated, which the chapter card requires (no decline, no decision).

**2. Missing concrete development — DEVELOPED.**
Strongest counter-candidate: the post-call triplet "It was all true. None of it was wrong. The whole thing was good." (P4) — three restatements, no new detail, the classic abstraction-inflation shape. It survives because the concrete material is immediately adjacent and quoted (*"Vandercook. W-2. Keys. After 8. Wall, on the paper. Renewal decent. FRI DEC 4 NOON."* — read "like it was someone else's punch list"), and the restatements enact three failed passes of flaw-hunting rather than restating stakes; the paragraph then doubles back to physical objects planted in P1 ("despite the station, despite the pen that worked"). Artificial-aside check: the Asha memory (P5) is the candidate inserted-texture passage, and it clears — the material is sourced, not invented (chapter_09 rolling summary: Asha's leads and "pass her name to Nia if June declines"; her quoted line matches her voice card verbatim), it is triggered by an on-page text, and it develops through job-specific particulars (gripper bar, wet canvas, "did not need a job description to give her permission") before June shelves it with an object action.

**3. Split cumulative movement — DEVELOPED.**
Two counter-candidates, both matching the choppy→connected pattern on paper:
(a) "Her handwriting had gotten neat. It did that when the room would not line up." (P2). Merged form would be "Her handwriting had gotten neat, the way it did when the room would not line up."
(b) "That was the trouble with it. Surprised she could have explained." (P6). Merged form would be "That was the trouble with it: surprised she could have explained."
Both survive under the criterion-4 voice-card allowance, which must be named: June's card specifies "under pressure: shorter syntax" and "compresses when exposed," and both breaks occur at exposure peaks — (a) mid-call as the offer turns real, (b) confronting her own un-captionable face in the flyer. In (b) the isolation also does measurable work: "Surprised she could have explained" is an inverted construction whose force depends on standing alone; the colon merge flattens the beat the inversion needs. These are the two closest calls in the chapter; neither converts to an order.

**4. Allowable efficiency — DEVELOPED (allowances honored, named).**
Passages exempted and why: the Nia negotiation itself is linear question-and-answer ("Define run." / "What's the gripper doing exactly") — scene pressure, linearity is the point, and the plain-speech floor (Reading Guide §2) requires its followability. The Asha/Kessler text exchange ("*That's a hold. I'll know by early Dec.*") is decision-traffic the plot needs unresolved through Chapter 22 (chapter card: "reveal/payoff: set Ch22 refusal reason"). The clipped closing fragments ("Fifteen days.") are covered jointly by the voice card's shorter-syntax-under-pressure line and the packet's mandate to end on the object, not a summary. None of these were flagged above.

## Focused extra checks

- **Press-not-wall realization:** develops through concrete details — her own notes, the *Not the wall. The press.* correction, and the built visualization — and lands unresolved. See criterion 1. Pass.
- **"Offer is good but not answer" logic:** does not become a straight thesis paragraph. The path moves through the quoted punch list, relocates the problem from offer to preparer via material doubling-back ("despite the station, despite the pen that worked"), and stops at "The flaw wasn't in the offer" — the second half of that thought (where the flaw is) is withheld, left to the closing press-woman image rather than stated. Pass.
- **Receipt/deadline close:** object-based throughout — receipt flattened blank side up, label-draft lettering, two radiator clicks, "It didn't come," the receipt propped into three sightlines, the unopened jar as paperweight. The one abstraction-bearing sentence ("There was the yes that solved seven things and the no that she couldn't yet justify…") is a single cumulative movement that terminates in an image ("a woman at the press who would not turn around"), not an insight, and the final line is pure action-plus-object. No maxim, no solved choice. Pass.

Watch-count note: the mechanical gate's `fieldguide-shopping-list` WATCH at line 81 is the punch-list reread. In this audit's terms that list is the concrete anchor criterion 2 depends on, not a defect — but list-as-interiority has now carried weight in consecutive reflective beats (call notes, punch list, receipt); the tics tracker should watch for it becoming June's only development move in later reflective chapters.

## REVISION ORDERS

None. No passage met the flag threshold; the two criterion-3 near-misses (P2, P6) are adjudicated above under the voice-card allowance and do not convert to orders.

OVERALL: DEVELOPED
