# Chapter 04 Claude-Tic Audit

Mechanical WATCH input: repeated descriptor 38; titlecase heading 1; hands/body 10; trailing participle 7; transition verbs 2; and/but starts 5; eyes 1. Final gate: open=0, WATCH=64.

- CLEAR — tic 1 em-dash overuse — checked full text after synthesis — nearest miss: `"She came to the opening in September," Theo said. "The fall hang."` — the two raw em dashes were removed; no em-dash rhythm crutch remains.
- CLEAR — tic 2 shimmer prose — checked action-pressure passages — nearest miss: `"the couple by the window had reached the stage of pie"` — comic physical specificity, not atmospheric drift.
- CLEAR — tic 3 recurring mood verbs — checked for mattered/earned/weighed/carried family — nearest miss: `"what remained of the seating"` — functional seating pressure, not mood verb repetition.
- CLEAR — tic 4 default-elegant noun phrases — checked for kind/something/small/quiet/careful — nearest miss: `"a volume you could seat discreetly"` — concrete diner logistics, not elegant abstraction.
- CLEAR — tic 5 habitual qualifiers — checked adverbs/softeners — nearest miss: `"vaguely, on a chair for himself"` — one focal hesitation, not a drain on momentum.
- CLEAR — tic 6 narrator-as-philosopher intrusion — checked Theo interiority — nearest miss: `"There was no procedure for it being easy"` — this is Theo's work-procedure idiom attached to the live cover-story turn, not free-floating wisdom.
- CLEAR — tic 7 theme-explanation gloss — checked after major beats — nearest miss: `"Wrong. Wrong in every particular he could name."` — it sharpens Ruth's misread in scene mechanics rather than explaining a theme.
- CLEAR — tic 8 recursive negation — checked syntax — nearest miss: `"Ruth wasn't reading romance into anybody. She was reading an arrangement"` — binary correction, not not-X/not-Y accumulation.
- CLEAR — tic 9 self-aware meta-clause — checked for "if that was the word" pattern — nearest miss: `"which defended nothing and wasn't asked to"` — focal comic judgment, no self-aware hedge.
- CLEAR — tic 10 over-balanced parallel clauses — checked long paragraphs — nearest miss: `"he managed it, he smoothed it, he absorbed the cost"` — a deliberate three-beat Theo management thought, isolated and scene-specific.
- CLEAR — tic 11 profundity-stamp ending — checked scene/chapter close — nearest miss: `"He folded the smudged corner in and filed the list in the pocket where the stub lived."` — ends on action and continuity object, not a short moral stamp.
- CLEAR — tic 12 default lovely/quiet/small register — checked diner chaos and Ruth suspicion — nearest miss: `"a volume you could seat discreetly"` — the register is comic-workmanlike, not softened.
- CLEAR — tic 13 physical reaction default — checked interior stress moments — nearest miss: `"he turned the mugs so the handles faced out"` — stress is externalized through Theo's handling habits, not heartbeat/throat shorthand.

Book-specific additions:
- CLEAR — protected relation leak — checked for aunt/nephew/family/mother/sister — nearest miss: `"a third with one more person in it"` — the line withholds Odile rather than naming the relation.
- CLEAR — banned romance body tics — checked for breath/flutter/smirk/chuckle/air changed — nearest miss: `"Tonight it had a motor in it"` — not a banned body tic.
- CLEAR — motif caps — checked Winter Kitchen/snow/light/hands — no Winter Kitchen or snow; hands occur as literal diner/coats/receipt business and are not romantic foregrounding.

WATCH reconciliation: the hands/body WATCH count is accepted as literal blocking and object handling; the repeated-descriptor count is an engine-style count with no repeated purple descriptor cluster on read-through; trailing participles appear in sentence-level blocking but not as uniform cadence. Chapter verdict: TIC-CLEAN.

REVISION ORDERS: none.
