# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 21 ("Prying Loose / Faced to the Wall") — Round 3 (current-text verification)

id: positive_prose_audit | owner: claude | chapter: 21 | round: 3 | stance: skeptical cold re-read of the current text after the Characters-Wrong round-1 repairs, the §8 followability tag tidy, Dialogue Doctor round 3 (CLEAN), Comedy Doctor round 3 (CLEAR), Plain Translation round 3 (REGISTER-HOLDS), and Thought Development round 3 (DEVELOPED)
Inputs: `output/chapters/chapter_21.md`; prior clean Positive Prose (`chapter_21.positive_prose.md`, round 2, INHABITED — rendered against a text that has since changed at lines 3, 5, 11, 35, 39, 43–49, 51, 59, 65, 69–77, 81–83, 89–93, 95, 105–113); sibling round-3 audits listed above; READING_GUIDE §§2, 5, 6, 8; voice cards (Theo Brennan, Odile Marchetti, June Park); CHAPTER CARD - 21.

## Text-state and stale-clearance notes (established before re-auditing)

1. **The round-2 INHABITED verdict no longer covers this text.** Round 2's own weakest surviving pressure point — the fear-canvas thesis sentence ("She had painted a man maintaining the perimeter of a room so that he would never be required to stand in the middle of it.") — was deleted whole by Characters-Wrong Order 1 and replaced with the degraded misread at line 75. Round 2's open routing note on that sentence is closed by deletion; the chapter now contains zero thesis sentences about the canvas.
2. **Five figures round 2 cleared as survivors have since been cut by sibling repairs:** "The looking was the part he'd skipped in Week 3" (old 79), "some dates filed themselves" (old 11), "where a window would go if the painting were merciful" (old 67), "the panel stood as a finished thing" / "the unpainted cheek stayed unpainted" (old 89), and "the lender owning the loan" (old 59). Cutting below a cleared ceiling violates nothing. Each vacated site was checked for a replacement figure coined at the seam: none was — the sites now read "He looked at it a long time before he touched anything." (83), "he didn't have to check the date for that one" (11), "where a window would have gone, she had put his twelve-by-sixteen" (73), "When he stepped back it was finished. The door stayed half open. The cheek stayed bare ground." (93), and the bare initials action at 65. Every seam closes plainer than what it replaced.
3. **Residue sweep, run mechanically on the current text, zero hits for all of:** perimeter, merciful, species, counsel, load-bearing (all forms), lender, "filed themselves", "The looking was", recognized, Sunday, Okay, "honest act", "keeping its own", "foot in a door", "blanks say", "finished thing", "unpainted cheek". Nothing cut in rounds 1–2 or by the sibling repairs has regrown in costume.
4. **Object-agency ledger restated on current text:** round 2 declared the phone clause at 101 ("in his coat by the door for twelve hours saying nothing") the ceiling. The current text holds three instances total: 101, the pre-existing "until the geometry said what the night had said" (89, cleared round 1 as studio idiom), and the new "a clean square waiting" (75, adjudicated at Question 4 below as the misread's own projection). Three is the count and the cap; each is adjudicated individually below rather than waved through on the old ledger.

Round-3 target sites per order: (a) the fear-canvas misread (75); (b) the delivery-box temptation (95); (c) the sent hedge (107); (d) the dark-phone ending (111–113); plus a full cold re-run of the four questions on everything else.

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

**No findings.** What was checked: every paragraph, with extra weight on (i) the repair seams at 45–49, 59, 75, 95, and 105–113, where deletion is where generic connective tissue usually gets pasted in, and (ii) every paragraph that does not open on a proper noun or a catalog-world object. Each seam closes on an object with a history in this book: the split-tape box (59, 95), the jars and keys carried over from the ekphrasis (75), the second bubble on the screen (107), the loan sheet with *O.M.* beside his writing (111). The four focus sites are the least portable passages in the chapter: the misread cannot leave without dragging the fear-canvas ekphrasis with it, the temptation needs June's own return packaging, the hedge needs eleven years of established reflex and the sober twin at 13, and the ending needs the loan-sheet arithmetic the chapter opened on.

Strongest counter-candidate: **"The wait was terrible in an ordinary way: he wanted to move something and had nothing in reach worth moving."** (109) — the only sentence in the chapter that could open a waiting scene in any competent contemporary novel; the novel it could appear in unchanged is any quiet literary romance where a man waits on a text. It passes because it does not travel alone: the colon construction is this chapter's engine (same shape as the loan-sheet and litany sentences), the self-report is the guide's §2 plain register rather than performed flatness, and the paragraph immediately cashes the claim in three chapter-bound objects ("the study against the brick, what he'd say first, contingencies for each of her possible openings. Each time he set it down like the drill."). Extracted, the paragraph carries the drill, the brick, and the study with it and stops being portable in the first clause.

Second candidate considered: **"It was a kinder reading than he trusted, which did not stop him from wanting it to be true."** (75) — a composed, quotable turn a lesser draft of any artist novel could hold. It passes because "reading" has no content without this canvas and this misread; the sentence is the Characters-Wrong-ordered wishfulness engine, and Plain Translation round 3 showed on the page that the split-into-plain version reads worse because the simultaneity of distrust-and-want IS the misread. Flagging it would repair the error the order installed.

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

**No findings.** What was checked: all four focus sites, the deleted-thesis site at 75 (the highest regrowth risk in the chapter — the perimeter sentence was round 2's declared weakest point, and a cut thesis usually returns as a new one), the seam at 51 where the "honest act" caption was amputated, and the whole wait scene 101–113.

- **Fear-canvas misread (75):** the pressure is inhabited, not summarized — and crucially it is inhabited *wrongly*, which is the ordered design. The narration never climbs to managerial altitude over Theo's head; it commits his error with him, built out of the nouns the ekphrasis at 73 just itemized (jars, keys, the blank twelve-by-sixteen). The true reading survives only as uncaptioned painted content one paragraph up ("a small clean rectangle of nothing that the hands in the foreground were too busy to walk toward," 73), where the reader can price it and Theo can't. No sentence decodes the canvas correctly; grep confirms the thesis has not regrown. The residue is object-borne: he arrived with "the drill and a new D-ring in his jacket pocket to prove it" (71) and afterward "He left the wire a half-inch low on the left." (77).
- **Delivery-box temptation (95):** lived in objects — glassine, top fold, "silver tape split down its top seam," the named payoff "not have to start with his own sentence," refused in an action ("He put the glassine down."), no clause telling the reader it was a temptation.
- **Sent hedge (107):** the cost is priced on the screen object ("The second bubble appeared under the first before he could take it back."), not narrated as feeling; nothing captions the hedge as managing, wrong, or costly — the dark phone collects it.
- **Dark-phone ending (111–113):** the two-week silence is witnessed in inventory (strip lights, humidity log, thermostat, "every column full for the first time in two weeks"), and no cure sentence stands anywhere — the deleted "he was not going to spend them building anything" has no descendant. The wait ends unresolved, which is the card's setback actually staged.

Strongest counter-candidate: **"The wait was terrible in an ordinary way"** (109) — a named feeling, and the chapter's closest approach to reported tension. It passes under §2's discipline because the naming is a plain self-report immediately itemized (the colon delivers what "ordinary" means: wanting to move something, having nothing in reach), and because the alternative — cutting it — would leave the scene's flatness unmarked and push the ending toward the over-stripped failure Dialogue Doctor round 3 checked for. Second candidate: **"He had flattered the moment into an invitation. It had been a maybe."** (85) — two verdict sentences that could read as summary; they pass because the inhabiting has already happened in strictly literal carpentry ("he knew that door, knew the reveal and the switch plate beside it and where the strike plate threw its little vertical gleam"), and "a maybe" is bound to the door angle the scene then physically repaints ("The door stayed half open," 93).

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

**No findings.** What was checked: the full stockroom exchange (15–65) including the new speed-mispricing insert (45–49) and the rebuilt boundary speech (59); both SMS bubbles (105–107); every line against the plain-speech floor and the zero-tolerance dialogue-diagnosis rule (zero instances chapter-wide — the closest clauses, "his thumbs started the next part on their own" and "He read it over once," describe acts, not sentences).

Strongest counter-candidate: **"No," Odile said. "It is faster than nothing."** (49) — maxim-length, epigraph cadence, the most aphorism-shaped line in the chapter. It passes because it is a framed error, not delivered wisdom: it is too articulate about exactly the thing Odile is wrong about (forgiveness speed — her card's gets-wrong field), Theo's "That isn't the same as forgiving us." stands uncontradicted, the narration never ratifies her, and she exits the chapter unrevised. An under-pressure version that fumbled the line would soften the mispricing into humility she hasn't earned; the composure is the blind spot operating in her card's native economy ("declarative fragments that are complete in intent"). Quoted alone the line does not parse — "It" needs the returned catalogs standing in for a timeline.

Second candidate: **"I thought about it less than I should have,"** (43) — therapeutic self-assessment cadence. It passes as a true partial: it assigns a fact about her attention in her fragment register, contains no feelings-management vocabulary, and is immediately undercut by the mispricing at 49 — the scene does not let her self-awareness be the last word, and the round-1 hand-over ("That is true. That is mine.") stays cut.

Third candidate: **"I need- ... I need you to tell me it wasn't my fault."** (51) — a man articulating his want with complete clarity. It passes because the articulateness is the wrongness: he asks the one person who won't falsify the ledger for absolution, the ask breaks once before it lands ("I need-" He stopped.), the narration pre-marks it as shameful without captioning it ("He knew what he was about to ask for, and he asked for it anyway."), and it is refused on the page ("It was partly your fault."). Pre-resolved dialogue arrives already forgiven; this line arrives to be billed.

Fourth candidate: the hedge bubble, **"If you'd rather not, I understand."** (107) — composed, workshop-polite, therapist-adjacent. It passes because the composure is the staged failure: this is Theo's qualify-reflex verbatim, sent below the level of decision, and the chapter's design (Characters-Wrong Order 2) requires the eleven-year reflex to produce exactly this fluent, self-erasing sentence and then charges him for it with an unretractable second bubble and a phone that stays dark on both.

The boundary speech (59) was re-checked in the opposite direction — for fluency that survived the ordered breaking: it opens on inventory, stalls at "I just-", restarts off the box, and lands on "ask them yourself," which is plainer than the manifesto it replaced. No polish regrew at the seam.

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

**No findings.** What was checked: every surviving figure, the three object-agency instances (75, 89, 101), and all four round-2 survivors still standing ("the spines couldn't chew each other," 3 — packer's idiom, literal damage mechanism; "no more preparation than she gave a wall," 21 — focalizer domain comparison that cuts two ways on reread; "Each time he set it down like the drill," 109 — simile bound to an object set down on the page at 77; "saying nothing," 101 — near-literal of a phone, no messages arrived).

Strongest counter-candidate: **"a clean square waiting until he finished the jars and keys and came to it"** (75) — "waiting" personifies painted content, and the strict literal observation exists one paragraph earlier ("a small clean rectangle of nothing"). It passes because the figure is diegetic, not narratorial: the personification is Theo's projection, and the degradation from the accurate ekphrasis is the misread happening on the page — the cataloguer rounds "rectangle" to "square" and drops "of nothing" in the same breath that he installs an appointment in the blank. Substituting the literal observation would hand him back the precision the ordered misread is designed to lose.

Second candidate: **"until the geometry said what the night had said"** (89) — a speech verb on geometry, the chapter's second object-agency instance. It passes on studio idiom in this focalizer's mouth (work "says" things; the clause caps a strictly literal carpentry inventory — reveal, switch plate, strike plate gleam — that has already done the seeing), and it was cleared in round 1 with the door-repair order itself. It stands at the agency cap, not under it: with 75 and 101, the chapter holds three object-agency instances, and that is now the ceiling — any future touch that adds a fourth fails this question.

Third candidate: **"the edge of the hair going from paint to glow to gone"** (91) — triadic, alliterative, the most written phrase in the chapter. It passes because it is not figurative at all: it is the literal optical gradient of a backlit hair edge, which is precisely what he then paints ("So he painted the light doing that."), and any plainer wording would state the same three states in more words. Literal precision is what it already is.

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## Verdict

All four round-3 focus sites verified inhabited on the current text: the fear-canvas misread commits Theo's error in his own inventory nouns with the true reading held uncaptioned in the paint; the delivery-box temptation is staged and refused entirely in objects; the sent hedge is priced on the screen, not narrated; the dark-phone ending witnesses the silence in ledger inventory with no cure sentence and no caption. The character-wrongness repairs did not leave portable explanation at any seam — every vacated figure site now reads plainer than what it stood before, and the residue sweep is zero across all previously cut phrasing. Each of the four questions was re-run cold with its strongest counter-candidate quoted and adjudicated above.

Standing ceilings for any future touch (non-blocking, restated so the pass is not read as headroom): object agency is at three instances (75, 89, 101) and capped there; line 109's wait sentence is the chapter's portability ceiling — no second freestanding feeling-report may join it; Odile's shaped-line inventory stays at the five Dialogue Doctor round 3 lists (25, 29, 49, 57, 61); the misread at 75, the consent clause at 91, and the label paradox at 97 stay unquoted and uncaptioned; the ending takes no additions.

Chapter verdict: `INHABITED`

INHABITED
