# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 13 (`output/chapters/chapter_13.md`)

Stance: cold read, skeptical professional editor. Standard of comparison is this book's own register (READING_GUIDE §2: warm/precise/lightly comic; June = exact visual nouns, optical noticing, self-aimed jokes; plain-speech floor; feelings through object/action before naming; no captioning of care or speech). Provenance diff against the raw Claude draft was used to check whether revision smoothed or sharpened.

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## 1. Which paragraphs feel portable to another novel?

Checked: every paragraph, with extra pressure on the kiss sequence (`chapter_13.md:127-133`) and the offer close (`chapter_13.md:183-191`), per the focused hunt. The kiss paragraphs do not travel: "She had meant one count, two. Mara's phone made its soft shutter noise. The windowpane pressed cold through her jacket" is blocked to this camera, this window, this borrowed scarf; the raw draft's portable lyric machinery ("the kiss stopped being instructional," "indistinguishable from mercy") was cut in revision and not replaced with new gloss. The offer close is nailed down by rolled posters, a mug of dead pens, "the clean wall that would need screws by January" — an installer's image of leaving that no other heroine owns.

One clause-level finding:

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH` — "which she tucked back into the roll under Sonia's rubber band with more care than paper should have required" — the sentence's objects are book-specific but the closing clause is a portable understatement caption (it could rate a kept letter in any contemporary romance) that tells the reader the tenderness the tucking already shows — ORDER: end the sentence at the object ("under Sonia's rubber band"); if the beat needs a hinge, add one physical specific in June's idiom (e.g., thumbing the pressed stripe flat again) instead of the narrator grading her own care.

Strongest counter-candidate considered and passed: "The kiss was supposed to be small." (`chapter_13.md:127`). The bare sentence could open any midpoint kiss, but it is immediately consumed by "one public correction in the short distance between Mara's phone and Theo's face" — June's repaint-the-false-passage idiom doing the planning, which is exactly the POV signature the blind-POV test demands. It passes because the smoothness lasts one sentence and is then spent on camera-blocking, not mood.

## 2. Where does the prose summarize pressure rather than make the reader inhabit it?

Checked: the showcase announcement and `After Class` subject agreement (`chapter_13.md:81-107`), the flyer-photo sequence (`chapter_13.md:109-125`), post-kiss cleanup, and the stairwell. The two beats the hunt targeted mostly pass: the showcase clock is converted into props ("Now it had 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"), and the agreement itself is dramatized in broken dialogue (Theo's "You can..." trailing into the rag), with the public cost inhabited afterward through the wet pen mark June cannot stop watching (`chapter_13.md:107`). The raw draft's managerial paragraph ("Nobody asked for anything more. That was the thing June kept turning over afterward") was correctly replaced by lived detail: "Mara did not offer to take another preview. Her thumb slid toward the next name on the list" — the no-one-asks pressure carried by a thumb, not a thesis.

One finding:

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "Nothing in the room was waiting politely for June's answer." (`chapter_13.md:167`) — the release of pressure that lets June say "Tomorrow" is certified from narrator altitude with a politely-personified room, immediately after the evidence (Theo's shoulders square to the basin, Priya sleeving cups) already proved it — ORDER: cut the sentence and let "Tomorrow" land directly off the two literal observations; if the decision needs one more beat, make it optical and specific to June (e.g., Theo not turning from the sink), not a verdict about the room.

Strongest remaining counter-candidate, passed: "June watched Ruth and Sam go before them because watching one pair was all she could manage." (`chapter_13.md:113`). The "all she could manage" is self-report, but it is rationed dread in June's dry register, and it buys the close watching of Ruth and Sam that the social-proof mechanism requires; the pressure is then lived in the six inches of air and the folded arms, not reported.

## 3. Where does dialogue sound polished, therapeutic, or aphoristic?

Checked: every Odile line, all Theo lines around the joint-piece agreement, Mara and Priya's post-kiss handling, Ruth's one line, and Nia's text. No findings; per-line work shown:

- **Odile, strongest counter-candidate:** "Do not improve it. Do not punish it for being ordinary." (`chapter_13.md:11`). This is the chapter's most aphoristic line and it sits one page after an epigraph saying nearly the same thing. It passes on three grounds: Odile is the only character licensed for high-density lines (READING_GUIDE §2); the second imperative adds an instruction the epigraph does not contain (don't condescend, as opposed to don't improve); and her diagnosis targets the work, never anyone's sentence. "Empty rooms flatter badly" (`chapter_13.md:105`) was the second candidate — compressed to the edge of legibility, but it is two words of insult-economy delivered while marking a roster, which is her exact operating mode ("kindness disguised as logistics or insult").
- **Theo:** the polished midpoint line the hunt named — a subject that can "hold both of us" — does not exist in the revised chapter; the raw draft's nearest equivalent ("We need a subject we both actually see. Not one of us narrating to the other") was excised. What survived is logistics that fracture under pressure: "Same room. I can do the after part. Chairs up, jars. You can..." with the sentence abandoned into rubbing primer off his thumb (`chapter_13.md:95`). That is the under-pressure version this audit would have ordered. "I'll send options. You can say no to all of them" (`chapter_13.md:175`) flirts with therapeutic consent phrasing, but in Theo's mouth it is list-making deference per his card (practical offer before emotional statement), and June punctures it ("Limit the list") before it can resolve into kindness-speech.
- **Mara/Priya post-kiss tact:** Mara's tact is action, not articulation — "pressed it flat against her sweater, and said, 'Ruth, Sam, give me one without the brush rag'" (`chapter_13.md:135`) — and the raw draft's caption of that tact ("so seamless it was indistinguishable from mercy") is gone. Crucially, her composure is then un-polished at the stairwell, where the over-hosting fumbles on the page: "but I can tell her... I can say the windows went wrong" (`chapter_13.md:165`) — an offered lie, mid-construction, which is what under-pressure Mara should sound like. Priya's tact is two words and a repeated noun ("Top rack," repeated; "Mm."), the opposite of workshop fluency.
- **Nia's text:** "Call tomorrow before you talk yourself out of it" (`chapter_13.md:183`) — peer-banter shaped, but concrete (PHL board, formal offer) and squarely in her card's old-peer candor; it withholds all terms, as the packet requires.

## 4. Where would literal precision beat figurative language?

Checked: all figuration in the painting passages, the canvas descriptions, the photo sequence, and the close. The chapter's figures are mostly craft-rooted and pass — "The numerals had the pleased cleverness of a restored sign" (`chapter_13.md:57`) is a restorer's diagnosis that immediately triggers a literal action (ragging it back); "secondhand daylight at the bottom of four stories" (`chapter_13.md:31`) is a value specification, not mood; the single deliberate light image ("that late-night green that made everyone look as if they needed sleep," `chapter_13.md:125`) is rooted in actual glass and stays inside the motif cap, since the other light mentions are literal inventory.

One finding:

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "The adjustment was tiny. It made the picture make sense." (`chapter_13.md:113`) — a meaning statement certifies the photo where June's optical eye should read it; in the chapter whose whole forcing mechanism is photo composition, this is the one place the narrator declares coherence instead of seeing it — ORDER: replace "It made the picture make sense" with the literal compositional fact June's painter-eye registers (the rail now clearing Ruth's head, the two of them resolving into one croppable shape), so that the later "enough air between them for either one to be cropped out" lands as the same eye finding the opposite fact.

Strongest counter-candidate, passed: "not covered and not bright enough to defend itself" (`chapter_13.md:65`) — light personification of the half-primed orange, but it states the literal paint condition (one thin coat, color grinning through) in June's judgment register and is continuous with the Ch12 memory it is rendering; a more literal phrasing would lose her verdict on her own erasure, which is the point of the canvas.

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

Three orders, all local; the chapter's load-carrying beats (memory paintings, kiss, offer) are inhabited and need no structural rework:

1. `PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH` — cut "with more care than paper should have required" (`chapter_13.md:151`); end on the object or substitute one physical specific.
2. `SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — cut "Nothing in the room was waiting politely for June's answer." (`chapter_13.md:167`); let "Tomorrow" follow the literal observations, adding at most one concrete beat.
3. `FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — replace "It made the picture make sense." (`chapter_13.md:113`) with the literal compositional change in the Ruth/Sam frame.
