# Positive Prose Audit - Chapter 09 - ROUND 2 (post-repair)

Target: `output/chapters/chapter_09.md` (repaired)
Inputs reviewed: Round 1 audit `output/critiques/claude/chapter_09.positive_prose.md`, raw draft `output/drafts/claude/chapter_09.round_01.md`, Codex tic audit `output/critiques/codex/chapter_09.claude_tic_audit.md`, chapter card 09, `output/style_and_voice.md`, `premise/READING_GUIDE.md`, `premise/premise.md`, canon cross-check against `output/continuity.md` and chapters 01/03.

Stance note: the repair was executed with unusual fidelity — all five summarized-pressure cuts landed, both polished-dialogue replacements are in Asha's actual register, and the carryover Codex debt ("apparently," "with some effort," "briefly and against her own policy," the bold name, "wall confessed," the phone that "waited," "teeth in a jaw," the polygraph signature) is paid in full. The two problems below are both repair-induced: one spot where the Round 1 order was transcribed rather than absorbed, and one line of Asha's that went out with the bathwater.

## ROUND 1 ORDER CHECK:

1. `RESOLVED` — Thesis paragraph roughened to "This was the job: arrive, make a damaged white room usable by four o'clock, get paid. June liked it." The "nothing about the room remembered you" clause is gone; the erasure idea now lands exactly once, at "would be able to stand in this room and prove she had been in it."
2. `RESOLVED` — The leaving-New-York essay ("a thing she was doing the way the wall was beige... she realized... You could not fail to move into a thing that did not exist") is gone entirely; the lunch beat now ends on objects ("Asha's peeled label was still stuck to the bucket between them") and a grounded ledger. The replacement created residue — see NEW FAILURES #1.
3. `RESOLVED` — "watching the thing happen that she had not planned for" is cut; the beat is now "June laughed, and the laugh came late," which is the realization enacted, not spectated.
4. `RESOLVED` — "The cover had not worked..." caption cut. The beat now runs "Asha looked at the middle square, and at the run beneath it, and went to pad the elevator. June set the foamcore face-down on the crate dolly before she could make another mark" — exposure carried by action only.
5. `RESOLVED` — "kept this to herself with some effort" replaced with "June, holding the ladder by the door with her invoice folded in her back pocket, tightened one hand on the rail." Hands doing the restraint, per her voice card.
6. `RESOLVED` — Now reads "She thought of the rack at Marchetti Rooms: her portrait of Theo riding it in public..." The policy qualifier is gone; the foamcore going into the tote at pack-out proves the policy is failing, as ordered.
7. `RESOLVED` — The "job working as designed / in those words" paragraph is cut entirely; the dried-wall paragraph ends on "prove she had been in it" and the walk-through follows directly.
8. `RESOLVED` — The stable-things/rent-money couplet replaced with "I took a museum prep job in 2019 for health insurance and didn't stretch a canvas until May." One named gig, one year, what it paid, parallel half left unsaid; "That's not advice" gone.
9. `RESOLVED` — "Don't make her chase you. Once it posts, she's calling whoever answers first." Maxim tail replaced with exactly the ordered logistics (when it posts, who Nia calls).
10. `RESOLVED` — "a straight run of screw holes at title height from the vinyl lettering crew." Constellation gone; the trade fact is the image.
11. `RESOLVED` — "the city growing a handle" absent from the chapter.
12. `RESOLVED` — "alphabetized together as if that settled anything" cut; the clock-out paragraph now ends on the literal screen: "Nia's thread still sat unanswered above the deli's order confirmation. She opened it, watched the cursor blink in the reply field, typed nothing, and backed out." The repair also reordered saves-then-thread, which strengthens the ending on the refusal.
13. `RESOLVED` — "a valve she had spent six years assuming was hand-tight." The count is restored and the number is correct: Round 1's order to restore "two years" was wrong against canon. `output/continuity.md` line 30 ("has not painted in six years"), chapter 01 ("I don't paint anymore. I haven't in six years"), and chapter 03 ("the ugliest decent drawing she had made in six years") all fix six; the raw draft's "two years" was the continuity error. Precision restored *and* canon corrected. Do not revert.

Carryover Codex debt also verified executed: "apparently" cut from the valve sentence; `**Nia Torres.**` de-bolded; "the wall confessed" → "the wall showed everything"; the phone no longer "waited"; "teeth in a jaw" → "in their foam slots"; "polygraph result" → "looked nothing like her name"; the foamcore count corrected from "four white squares" to "three white squares and the long pulled run."

## NEW FAILURES FROM REPAIR:

1. `DOUBLED-LEDGER / ORDER-TRANSCRIPTION` — "June laughed, and the laugh came late. Asha's peeled label was still stuck to the bucket between them. High hundreds. Freight elevator. Dana. Kessler. Two phone numbers before Friday." followed four lines later by "Now it had a corner in a Ridgewood studio and six weeks of armory wages. Philadelphia had a set of keys on Tasker Street." — The Round 1 section-4 order ("staying in New York has a rent figure, a freight elevator, and two phone numbers") was pasted in as a fragment chain *and* restated as a full before/after paragraph; the same inventory appears twice in adjacent paragraphs. The bare-name fragments "Dana. Kessler." are the order's wording, not June's interiority rhythm (her card: perception first, judgment second — not manifest entries), and the recap paragraph is the cut essay's skeleton wearing nouns. One statement of the ledger is materialization; two is bookkeeping.
2. `COLLATERAL-CUT / ASHA FLATTENED` — The raw draft's "And if you pass on it, send her my name. I'm serious. I can do the boring parts and still paint at night" survives nowhere in the repaired chapter, and no Round 1 order asked for its removal. Three documents depend on it: chapter card 09 ("reveal/payoff: set... Asha for Ch 22"), Asha's voice card ("premise-specific behavior: ...receives June's care move through the Nia recommendation," with "If you pass on Philly, send Nia my name" as a listed example line), and her card's contradiction ("wants stability and knows stability can eat the hours she needs to paint"), which currently has zero on-page evidence. Without it Asha is a pure lead-dispenser with no want of her own — generous, plausible line by line, but instrumentally shaped, which is the exact implausibility this round was told to watch for.

Checked and passing against the round-2 risk list: the comic/warm register survives the cuts ("I will personally lie down in the loading dock and let him wait on top of me," "She'd rather hand it to someone who won't microwave fish," "the good kind of terrible jacket," knees told "it was billable"); the lost "people who paint to the corners and people who feather" exchange was itself a coined taxonomy and its absence is compliant, not a flattening. Emotional pressure is intact where it matters: the fourth square, the face-down foamcore, the cursor blinked at and backed out of, the unpushed white edge at the end. The new Dana logistics block ("Studio rent on the first... No fish in the microwave. Probably a photo of whatever you keep in a corner") stays conversational because June's questions ("How cheap is forgive?" "What does Dana need?") pace it. "Renewal odds?" and "People tell three people before they post" are network facts in work shorthand, not maxims.

## SURVIVING POSITIVE PROSE RISKS:

None at order strength. Watch only, no order: "The artist would learn it from the wall eventually, the way everyone did" — the generalizing tail is one clause from a maxim, but it sits directly on the swallowed correction ("tightened one hand on the rail") and reads as trade knowledge rather than narrator wisdom. Leave it unless a later pass touches the paragraph.

## REVISION ORDERS:

1. In the lunch close, state the ledger once. Cut the fragment chain "High hundreds. Freight elevator. Dana. Kessler. Two phone numbers before Friday." and keep the laugh and the label ("June laughed, and the laugh came late. Asha's peeled label was still stuck to the bucket between them."), letting the following paragraph ("At eleven this morning... Neither one was nothing.") carry the inventory alone. The laugh's trigger becomes "I can send both" — the accumulation itself — which holds.
2. Restore Asha's stake in one line, in her register, attached to "I'd call. I don't know if I'd go." — e.g. "If you pass, send her my name. I can do the boring parts and still paint at night." (her voice card's sanctioned line). This re-arms the Ch 22 payoff named on the chapter card and gives "I'd call" a motive the reader can see. One line; do not let it grow a speech.

## Chapter verdict

`OVERALL: NEEDS REPAIR (2 orders)` — Both orders are repair-induced, localized to the lunch scene, and executable without touching the wall-job spine, which is now the cleanest sustained stretch in the chapter and must not be reopened.
