# Positive Prose Audit (Round 3) — Chapter 24: First Snow

id: positive_prose_audit | owner: claude | tier: risk | pass: cold read + round-2 verification, `output/chapters/chapter_24.md`, round 3

inputs: `output/chapters/chapter_24.md` (current integrated text); `../checks/audits/positive_prose_audit.md` (binding template); `premise/READING_GUIDE.md` §2/§4/§5/§6/§8; `output/style_and_voice.md` (June, Theo, Odile, Mara, Luis, Priya, Ben, Ruth, Sam cards); `output/tics.md` (Ch24-draft rows + Ch21 portrait-caption history); `output/critiques/codex/mechanical/chapter_24_post_tic_quality_gate_detail.json` (open=0, watch=97); `output/outline/chapter_cards.md` §CHAPTER CARD - 24: First Snow; `output/critiques/codex/chapter_24.claude_tic_audit.md` (TIC-CLEAN).

Round-3 pass: the file at `output/critiques/claude/chapter_24.positive_prose.md` held a round-2 read that verified eight round-1 orders and issued three new orders (LLM-CLEAN-FOUND). This pass (a) verifies those three against the current text and (b) cold-rescans the whole chapter for defects the prior passes missed or the repairs introduced. Standard of comparison is this book's own rules, not generic literary taste — §2 (interiority through object/action/dialogue before naming; plain-speech floor; no dialogue diagnosis), §4 (first snow literal; one deliberate light-image), §5 (care moves never captioned), §6 (mirror-epiphany and weather-as-underline banned), §8 (smallness / blind-POV / earned-stay). The mechanical gate is clean and the Claude-tic pass returned TIC-CLEAN; this audit judges a different property — portable posture, managerial summary, pre-resolved articulacy, figure-over-fact — so those clears are not clears here. Per the chapter instruction, concrete painting vocabulary and exact object logistics are not penalized where they do scene work (the L99 portrait value-description, L19 pentimento/umber, L85 flat-file check-out, and the L155 material-cost stack stand as craft and are held below).

## Round-2 repair verification (all three orders closed; no repair-site regression)

1. L31 Sam owned-care caption ("Sam was good at that: stepping aside before anyone had to ask") — **CLOSED.** Current L31 ends on the physical act only: "He made literal room, stepping back and to the side so the person behind him could have the angle he'd just been standing in." (grep: 0 hits for the caption.)
2. L53/L57 Ruth discretion captions ("she extended June the same courtesy she'd been drawing on all fall: she read the truth and left it un-itemized"; "She told no one anything, because it wasn't hers to tell and she knew the difference") — **CLOSED.** Current L53 keeps only the concrete backstory: "She and Sam had spent eight Tuesdays declining to say what they were to each other, present at every dinner, categories nobody's business." Current L57: "That was the only confession the room was going to get: two words at an urn." (grep: 0 hits for either caption.)
3. L91 portrait personification ("painted side keeping its own counsel") — **CLOSED.** Current L91: "Faced to the brick, the pencil label on the stretcher bar reading out at her in Theo's block hand: her name, and two dates." The Ch21-regression figure is gone; the literal faced-to-brick carries the hidden face. (grep: 0 hits.)

Repair sites re-read for new defects: none introduced — each cut resolved to concrete action or object, not to a replacement figure. The residue this round surfaces (below) is pre-existing text the round-1 and round-2 passes did not flag, concentrated where the finale's payoff-density pulls the narrator into glossing a beat the objects and actions already deliver.

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

No portable-paragraph finding. Checked every block for a smooth unit transplantable to another genre novel, including the gate's 16 trailing-participle sentences (a common LLM-smoothing texture): they are object-anchored, not smoothing — "wet wool going near-black at the shoulders" (L3), "the floor beneath them darkening in a rough line" (L5), "the pencil label on the stretcher bar reading out at her in Theo's block hand" (L91). The chapter's paragraphs are welded to this room and these objects (the urn/radiator/cups-tower opener L3; the CHECK-OUT clipboard and both-names signature L85; the storage-rack decision L93; the rinse-water-home close L155–161). The one genuinely portable *unit* in the chapter is a single clause inside an otherwise object-welded paragraph (L93), handled as a §2 finding because the surrounding paragraph is not portable.

Strongest counter-candidate — "He nearly said something and drank the idea instead, and she watched it cost him and watched him pay it, and she liked him so much in that second it was faintly annoying." (L145) — the most genre-shaped beat in the chapter (love-interest-holds-back / POV-charmed-against-her-will). Passes because "drank the idea instead" is idiosyncratic to Theo's this-scene restraint (it echoes the Ch22 cup-misdirect, him drinking coffee instead of fixing) and the self-annoyance is June's card-sanctioned warmth-undercut ("jokes aimed at herself"), not a portable swoon; the paragraph is welded to Theo's specific withheld line the sentence before. Also weighed: "Both of them looked like April was a real place they intended to walk into on their own feet." (L81) — uplift-shaped, held because "April" is a concrete date in their story (Priya's L47) and the physical tell "neither of them looking eleven minutes apart tonight" (their established timing-anxiety, now resolved) grounds it as June's optical read, not a free-floating maxim.

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

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "She wasn't managing it into being fine. She said it like a date she'd written down and meant to keep." … "Priya left April there: one plain aside and back out." (L47) — three narrator captions gloss a calm that Priya's shown actions already carry: she states the plan ("We're looking again in April"), drinks her own coffee, redirects to Mara's kitchen with a craft-compliment ("It's carrying the picture"), and walks the beat off. The captions summarize her arc-payoff — the optimizer/manager no longer managing — instead of letting the actions land it; "one plain aside" also edges onto the §2 no-dialogue-diagnosis line. §2 renders feeling through action first and names it only when the naming is the event; here the naming triples what the objects show. — ORDER: cut "She said it like a date she'd written down and meant to keep" and "Priya left April there: one plain aside and back out"; keep the plain "We're looking again in April" and the coffee/nod/craft-compliment/walk-away, which already show a plan stated without management; retain at most the single tell "She wasn't managing it into being fine" if the calm needs one pointer, not three.`

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "One thing she got to decide was that she could know where she stood without seeing herself through him." (L93) — a portable being-seen maxim (transplantable verbatim into any reclaim-your-agency climax) that pre-states the self-location the very next sentence proves with objects: "She had four leaving-studies and a doorway that used to be an accident and a wall in Ridgewood with north light until one." The abstraction tells what the object-list shows, and it doubles the paragraph's other proof-maxim, "She could be a person in a room without a portrait proving it." The chapter-card licenses naming here (the portrait-visibility decision is the reactive core), but the license is spent once; two framing abstractions around one object-list is the summary the objects were supposed to replace. — ORDER: cut "she could know where she stood without seeing herself through him"; let the leaving-studies/doorway/Ridgewood-wall inventory locate her, and keep the welded closer "She could be a person in a room without a portrait proving it" as the single naming the portrait-decision earns.`

Held near-misses (checked, cleared): L127 "The same withholding June had finally made Theo answer for over coffee, except Odile had done it longer and colder and would be answering for less" — the closest thing to a managerial summary (June grading the Odile/Theo parallel), held because it is June's card-established mode ("good at taking a made thing apart for the order it got made in," L117), it drives her next actions (saying the thing Odile can't at L129, tearing the page at L131), and the one figure in it — "holding a corner of the map" — is cashed out in the same breath into literal choices ("what to show, whose arm to take, what to say in a critique"). L25 "doing the honest thing, letting the object correct her" — evaluative gloss on Priya's looking, held because it is tethered to the physical re-check (step back, step in, check label against picture) and sets up the honest-viewer taxonomy the paragraph then needs ("the two or three who would stand there long enough to feel the bare strip refuse to close"). L57 "That was the only confession the room was going to get: two words at an urn" — held because "two words at an urn" welds to the scene and the restraint *is* the content, not a redundant caption on a shown action. L101 "That was the ache, standing there with the pipes going" — direct emotional naming, held because the portrait-viewing is the sanctioned emotional event and the ache is specified, not generic: the same sentence gives its non-portable content ("He had looked at her like this, carefully, at value… while he was deciding for her what she could stand to know").

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

No polished-dialogue finding. Checked every line for pre-resolved articulacy, therapy-clean fluency, or maxim, with attention to whether the reveal's mass tipped Odile into the oracle monologue the chapter card warns against. The plain-speech floor is met in every exchange (Sam's "I've got a level in the car. Two minutes." L27; June's "I washed it… Twice. Once for no reason. Here." L37; Ruth's "You didn't start this together." L51; June's "It's the first thing that's actually yours." L143; Theo's literal "Ground's too warm. It'll be wet by morning." L151).

Strongest counter-candidate — "I wanted to know what you'd make if I made you." (Odile, L125) — the most composed, most quotable line in the chapter. Passes because Odile alone is voice-licensed for high-density memorable lines, and it lands as cold, unapologetic method-admission (insult-diagnosis register) undercut immediately by "I'm retiring, not dead," not as therapeutic self-articulation. Also weighed: her reveal mass at L121 (the self-interrupted "He was handy. He's my—" paragraph), higher word-count than her one-to-two-sentence ceiling — held because it is factual and economical rather than oracular, breaks off exactly at the nephew-word (staying inside her pre-reveal guardrail), and repeats the deflating "He was handy" rather than resolving into wisdom. Theo L141 "It's the only thing in this building that is" — composed ring; held because it is grounded in the chapter-established fact that the studio, walls, and work are all Odile's (L85 "Theo's walls were Odile's walls"), a concrete ownership truth, not a floating aphorism about care. June L129 "It worked, and I got a life out of it, and it still wasn't yours to run" — the book's sanctioned direct-confrontation register (§2: "The strongest beats in this book are direct ones"), plain and unangled; the triadic repetition is rhetorical emphasis, not workshop polish.

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

No figurative-where-literal finding. The round-2 defect (L91 "keeping its own counsel") is repaired to literal, and a cold rescan of the finale — the passage most exposed to the watch-listed "weather against dark" — surfaces no new figure installed where the literal outperforms.

Strongest counter-candidate — "the fat slow kind that can't yet decide if it means it" (L149) — the snow personified, at the exact spot the #1 watch guards ("keep the first snow literal, cold, and material"). Passes because the personification maps onto a physical fact (wet, non-committing early snow that melts on contact), it is immediately literalized by Theo in the next paragraph ("It won't stick. Ground's too warm. It'll be wet by morning," L151), and — decisively — it does not function as emotional underline: June is resolved at this point, not indecisive, so the snow's "indecision" mirrors nothing in her state and cannot read as weather-as-feeling. The snow stays cold and material through the close ("Snow found every place the sweater wasn't and melted there," L155). Held craft (checked, not penalized per instruction): L99 value-description ("almost the same note, a half-step apart, the hardest edge there is to hold") — figure and fact coincident, standard painter's value-vocabulary; L153 "the glare swallowed it. She had to look where the street went black" — literal value-optics (snow visible only against dark), the repaired weather line, now clean; L127 "put the proof on a page instead of in a sentence" — "page" (the dated ledger line) and "sentence" (Theo's spoken non-confession) are both literal; L155 "The cold had finally shown up to match the calendar" — dry seasonal personification held as June's wry register plus literal seasonal timing.

## Chapter verdict: LLM-CLEAN-FOUND

Two revision orders. All three round-2 orders are executed and verified closed (grep-confirmed zero hits), and the repaired sites introduced no new defect; the chapter is largely inhabited — the showcase blocking, the blue-dish relay, the CHECK-OUT/both-names signature, the Odile ledger object, the portrait's value-craft, the material-cost close, and the first snow (which holds as literal, cold, and material, the #1 watch) all work through objects and plain speech, and none of the seven payoffs the instruction lists reads as arranged. What the prior passes missed is the same single move the finale's payoff-density keeps pulling in: the narrator captioning or pre-stating a beat the shown action already delivers. Both orders sit in §2 — L47 (three delivery-captions on Priya's April line, redundant with her coffee/nod/craft-compliment/walk-away, one edging onto the §2 diagnosis line) and L93 (a portable "seeing herself through him" being-seen maxim that pre-states the self-location the leaving-studies/doorway/Ridgewood object-list proves in the next sentence). Neither requires rewriting a scene; both are cut orders that let the existing action and objects carry the payoff unglossed. Convergence across the three cold reads (8 → 3 → 2 orders) tracks the residue thinning to narrator-gloss at the payoffs only. Odile's reveal stays inside her licensed register and her nephew-guardrail, the `Winter Kitchen` final invocation (L121) adds new meaning (recasting the origin as her deliberate casting) within cap, the portrait's craft-vocabulary is earned, and June's closing agency lands through the objects she is physically carrying — none of those are findings.
