# Positive Prose Audit (Round 2) — Chapter 23: Finished Together / Labels

Round-2 cold read verifying the round-1 blocking audit (`chapter_23.positive_prose.md`, seven orders, LLM-CLEAN-FOUND) against the current post-repair text, then re-scanning the whole chapter for defects the repairs may have introduced. Stance: skeptical, adversarial to the chapter's own polish; no praise, no softening. Compared against the reading guide's register rules (§2 voice differentiation / plain-speech floor, §3 heat-by-specific-attention, §5 no announced care, §8 smallness / blind-POV / earned-stay), the June and Theo voice cards, the chapter card's dials ("Theo tactile/logistical with emerging maker eye"; "no character names the two-panel metaphor aloud"; "Dana/Kessler/Asha follow-through... as practical pressure, not romance rescue"), and the tics calibration. The mechanical gate is clean (0 open findings) and the round-2/round-3 comedy and dialogue passes returned CLEAR/CLEAN; this pass judges a different property — pre-resolved articulacy, portable posture, managerial summary, and figure-over-fact — so their clears are not clears here. Per the chapter-specific instruction I have not penalized earned craft vocabulary or literal art process (pentimento, block-in, foreshortening, opacity/medium, primer, sight-size-adjacent looking all stand as craft).

## Round-1 repair verification (all seven orders closed)

1. **L7 — boundary metaphor cut (order 6).** Round-1 flagged "on his side of a line he was drawing more of lately." Current L7 ends: "set it on his own side of the tray, near hers. Her water was hers to run low. He wasn't going to top it off for her." The named "line" figure is gone; the literal jar-placement and the two following sentences carry the boundary. CLOSED.
2. **L39 — duplicate grand table figure made literal (order 7).** Round-1 flagged "the table receding off the edge of the world" as a second, cosmic figure for the same table already rendered at L35. Current L39: "the table running away from the threshold," inside the parallel series "the room leaving" (door closing / chairs turned away / table running away / lights going out), each verb keyed to the panels enumerated at L35. The "edge of the world" register is gone; the phrase now points at the panel's actual threshold vantage. CLOSED (residual-figure check in §4).
3. **L85 — portable seasons-consolation replaced with concrete timing (order 4).** Round-1 flagged "March is a long way to carry January." Current L85: *"That's two months before Kessler," he said. "That's all I get to say about it. I know it doesn't solve anything."* The transplantable seasons-aphorism is replaced by a concrete interval keyed to the established Kessler-in-March timeline (L81), inside Theo's logistical register, with the self-deflation kept. CLOSED.
4. **L87 — tidy self-diagnosis cut (order 3).** Round-1 flagged the therapy-clean bow "I only just learned to tell them apart." Current L87 ends bare: "The helpful version costs me the room." The two-part self-insight is gone; the sanctioned bare clause stands. CLOSED.
5. **L89 — balanced glad/not-go maxim roughened (order 5).** Round-1 flagged the pre-resolved "I can be glad for her and still not go." Current L89 replaces it with an action/self-correction beat — "She scraped the brush on the palette, too hard. 'Good. It should.'" — and keeps only the witnessing impulse ("I'm not sorry I'm not going. I wanted to say that out loud in a room instead of just deciding it in my kitchen"). The composed both-sides formula is gone; the gladness-without-guilt now fumbles through a too-hard scrape and a clipped self-command. CLOSED.
6. **L119 — portable posture + summary cap replaced with vantage + hands (orders 1 and 2).** Round-1 flagged "close, not touching, and looked at the thing they'd built from two directions" (genre proximity-posture plus prize-adjacent summary, in one sentence). Current L119: "They stood back from it together for the first time all afternoon. On his side the track-light bar stopped at the strip of primer. On hers the doorway held its dark. He kept his hands at his sides and looked from the leaning corner to the place where her room began." The stock posture is gone; "two directions" is now inhabited as two literal vantages; Theo's fix-it hands are held still and his eye tracks the specific crossing. CLOSED.

## 1. Portable paragraphs

Checked every paragraph for a smooth block transplantable to another genre novel. The former defect (L119) is now anti-portable — "the track-light bar stopped at the strip of primer... the doorway held its dark... his hands at his sides" is welded to this diptych and this painter's optics and could not sit in another book unchanged. L3's chair-setting, L5's check-out clipboard, L83's withheld-fix inventory (framer / advance / Ridgewood crate), L155–161's tape-lift, and L167's rinse-and-take-the-water-home stay bolted to this room and these two paintings.

PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — strongest counter-candidate — "and stepped back, and it was a finished thing standing in a room that was about to have people in it." (L163) — its content is the most genre-generic in the chapter (any artist, any opening). It passes because it is not a floating admiration beat: it is preceded by the specific, character-true action "Theo dry-mounted the label to the wall at the height he mounted every label in this building," "finished" is doing thematic work against the book's underpainting/unfinished motif (a piece finished yet showing its own first draft), and it is the earned last look at the object before the showcase, not a portable posture. Also weighed: the L3 opener "Nobody counts folding chairs twice for a room that seats eighteen unless he's counting them to keep from standing in the middle of the floor rehearsing four o'clock" — the most portable *shape* (composed "Nobody does X unless Y"), held because "folding chairs," "seats eighteen," and "four o'clock" weld it to this room and June's arrival. No portable paragraph found.

## 2. Summarized pressure

Checked for pressure reported from managerial altitude instead of lived inside the scene. The former defect (L119) now lives the two-vantage looking rather than labeling it ("On his side the track-light bar stopped at the strip of primer. On hers the doorway held its dark"). The withheld-help pressure at L83 is inhabited as a concrete forbidden-list — "a framer he knew who paid cash for a weekend hang, an advance he could float against nothing, a name at a moving outfit, a crate he could drive to Ridgewood himself on the second. He picked his brush back up" — not summarized as "restraint."

SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — strongest counter-candidate — "She had spent the fall painting her own exit from four angles and hung none of it where he could find it... where he'd painted the same room staying put: lit, tended, everything seated in its place." (L39) — it has the shape of a managerial summary of the whole fall. It passes because it is Theo's live interpretation of four specific panels enumerated one line earlier (L35: door half-closed, four chairs from behind, threshold table, lights-off room) — the objects are physically in front of him and the reader, so the read is inhabited, not reported from altitude. Also weighed: "it was a finished thing standing in a room that was about to have people in it" (L163), grounded in the imminent showcase and the just-recapped concretes (leaning corner, seam, doorway). No summarized pressure found.

## 3. Polished / therapeutic / aphoristic dialogue

Checked every line for composed, pre-resolved articulacy, with specific attention to whether the three repaired beats reintroduced a maxim. They did not: Theo's L85 "That's two months before Kessler" is a concrete interval, not a portable consolation, and his card's ban on "polished aphorisms about care" is now honored; June's L87 "The helpful version costs me the room" stands as a bare, concrete trade (his help = losing Dana's room) rather than the excised two-part self-insight, and lands rueful ("Almost a smile"), not resolved; June's L89 "Good. It should." is a clipped self-command over a too-hard brush-scrape, the opposite of the cut balanced formula. No new pre-resolved maxim, portable romance posture, or theme-summary entered at the repair sites.

POLISHED-DIALOGUE — strongest counter-candidate — "It's a wall text. It's explaining the joke before anyone tells it." (L131) — the chapter's most quotable, most aphorism-shaped line. It passes because it is June's sanctioned precise-work-critique care move aimed at a physical artifact — the label copy she and Theo are editing — not at Theo's phrasing or a feeling in the abstract; it is guarded in-scene ("She wasn't grading him. She was doing to the card what she'd done to the doorway, lifting away everything that wasn't the thing," L135); it carries unresolved pressure rather than arriving pre-resolved (the label is still wrong and gets cut and retyped twice more); and it enacts the chapter card's outcome rule by refusing to name the two-panel metaphor. Also weighed: L57 "Line them up and you get a third one neither of us saw" (a real judgment about the two literal tables that does the seam's mechanical work), Priya's L109 "I want to know what you want, not what the rent wants... That's my condition. Not the apartment. That." (a sincere plain-speech ask keyed to the lease, carrying the unresolved question of whether Ben can answer it), and L175 "tell them it's supposed to" (anchored to the literally leaning corner and undercut by the vulnerable "I'll be at the coffee pretending I'm not watching the door"). No polished-dialogue finding.

## 4. Figurative where literal would do more

Checked every image for a figure installed where the literal object outperforms, with specific attention to the two repaired sites. L7 is now fully literal (jar placement + "Her water was hers to run low. He wasn't going to top it off for her"); no figure remains. L39's replacement "the table running away from the threshold" is not a new figure-over-fact defect: unlike the excised cosmic "edge of the world," it names the panel's actual threshold vantage (L35) and takes its motion verb from the parallel departure series ("the room leaving"), so the literal orientation of the table is the observation and the verb only matches "the door closing / the chairs turned away / the lights going out." Held craft (not penalized per the chapter instruction): the pentimento passage (L65, figure and literal coincide — he drags the grays thin so the underdrawing surfaces), "pick one door and paint the other one shut" (L47, grounded in the two studies' literally opposed doorways), and "a thumb of raw pigment blacker than anything she mixed on the palette. It became the unlit rectangle of the hall" (L61, the literal stain becoming the painted hall).

FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — strongest counter-candidate — "foreshortened so hard the far end fell off a cliff" (L35) — the most figurative-seeming line in the chapter. It passes because figure and literal coincide: it renders an actual optical fact of June's threshold study (extreme foreshortening collapsing the far table edge), which is precisely the earned art-process the instruction protects; a plainer "strongly foreshortened" would do *less* work, not more. No figurative-where-literal finding.

## Chapter verdict: INHABITED

All seven round-1 orders are executed and verified closed in the current text, and a cold re-scan surfaces no new defect. The three watch-risks named for this round are clear: no new pre-resolved maxim (the repaired L85/L87/L89 land concrete, bare, and fumbled respectively), no portable romance posture (L119's "close, not touching" is replaced by Theo's specific held hands and two-vantage optics), and no theme-summary (L119's "built from two directions" is now inhabited as two literal vantages; L39's read stays anchored to the enumerated panels). Each of the four sections has been given its strongest surviving counter-candidate with the reason it passes — L163 (portable-content but thematically grounded), L39 (summary-shaped but inhabited via present objects), L131 (aphorism-shaped but guarded artifact-critique), L35 (figurative but an optical craft-fact). The chapter is inhabited and its craft vocabulary is earned. No revision orders.
