The completed audit has been written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_24.purple_prose.md` (overwriting the stale prior round, whose single flag the current text has already repaired). Here is the completed audit document:

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# Audit: Purple Prose & Show-Don't-Tell — Chapter 24 ("First Snow")

id: purple_prose | owner: claude | tier: risk
Target: `output/chapters/chapter_24.md` (current integrated text, 176 lines)
Focalizer: June Park (close third, past). June closes the book per READING_GUIDE §1.
Stance: skeptical professional editor. No praise. Every CLEAN carries its strongest surviving counter-candidate; a pass without per-criterion evidence would itself be a failed audit.

## Method / lead reconciliation

Current text audited directly, line by line. Gate WATCH counts and the Codex Claude-tic audit are treated as leads only, verified in context; false positives are discarded by name below.

- **Banned sub-patterns verified ABSENT by search, not inherited.** No `rippl*` / `like a stone` / `stillness` / `cracked the silence` / `shattered`; no `changed everything` / `broke forever` / `held its breath` / `never be the same`; no `breath she didn't know`; no `the air changed/shifted` / `something shifted`; no `load-bearing`. Zero hits across the file.
- **This audit's own prior round is stale and was superseded by a repair.** The base file previously flagged one TELLING instance at line 153 — "and she watched it cost him *and watched him pay it*." That "watched him pay it" clause is gone from the current text (search-confirmed zero hits); line 153 now reads "and she watched it cost him" once. The sole prior flag is resolved. Re-audited fresh against current lines.
- **The Codex Claude-tic audit (`chapter_24.claude_tic_audit.md`) is STALE against this text and was not trusted for line numbers.** Its references align early (its line 57 = current line 57) but drift ~8 low by the close (its "line 149"/"line 153" snow-and-glare spans are current lines 157/161). Two of its quoted near-miss spans do not exist in the current chapter (search-confirmed zero hits): "Everything in between belonged to the two of them to keep" (its line 69; current line 69 is the plain "Nobody needs the rest") and "The painting didn't fix that. It wasn't trying to" (its line 101; current line 101 is "For a second, pity was the easier word…"). The chapter was revised in the telling-reduction direction after that snapshot. Its clearances were re-derived here from current lines, not adopted.
- **Gate WATCH false positives discarded by name:** `showcase` (diegetic event name on Ben's flyer and the chapter card's own assignment slug, not AI-vocab ornament); `carefully` (line 103, anchored to "at value," a painter-looking fact, not a mood softener); `tightened` (line 101, literal hand-on-stretcher-bar action); `swallowed` (line 161, glare consuming the snow — a value fact, not a throat/breath tell); `cold` (line 163, literal first-snow temperature at the sanctioned convergence); `guarded` (line 123, "guarded harder than her own advantage" = protected a secret, not a gaze descriptor); `finally` ×4 (lines 5/107/155/129 — all temporal/calendar, none a softened emotion); `against` ×3+ and `shoulders`/`eyes`/trailing-participle counts (June's cadence and painter-body vocabulary, verified POV-true in each hit).

## Criterion verdicts

**1. Purple spans — CLEAN.**
Checked: banned ripple/stillness similes and misapplied-epic-tone tags (verified absent, above); stacked-adjective/abstract-noun runs; and all four flagged focus zones — snow, portrait, Odile ledger, `After Class` reception.
- **Strongest counter-candidate — line 49:** "felt her stop being a person in a room and turn into a person in front of a picture, *a different and more dangerous thing*." The appositive is the nearest thing in the chapter to an inflated epic tag. It survives: this is the chapter's highest-exposure public beat — Ruth Kim is the one cohort member who reads the un-shared origin off the seam — so "dangerous" is proportionate to a real stake (the canvas telling on June), not algorithmic weight applied to a minor moment; and the clause names a concrete perceptual shift a painter actually tracks, a viewer reorienting from socializing to reading a picture. Held.
- **Second counter-candidate — line 165:** "the old reflex, *the door coming off its hinge in his hand*." The chapter's most figurative image, and the only one that is not literally on the wall. It survives the "elaborate AND conveys relatively little" test on the second half: it is high-yield, not low-yield. It compresses Theo's whole arc — competence inverting into harm (READING_GUIDE §5: his care move "must be wonderful until it becomes the instrument of harm") — into one image built from his own object-world (he fixes jammed windows and hinges; here the hinge fails in his hand). It is focalized through June's licensed visual-analogy habit, and it does not replace the dramatized reflex, which is fully present around it (the cut-off "walk you to the—", then "His hand had already started toward the portfolio strap… let it drop"). Not purple.
- **Snow — excused explicitly, not flagged (lines 157–161):** "the fat slow kind that *can't yet decide if it means it*" personifies the snow, and "coming down unwitnessed" leans lyric. Both are excused by READING_GUIDE §4 ("First snow — The clock made visible") and §6 ("the first-snow ending is the one sanctioned convergence"), and the text re-literalizes at once at line 159 (Theo: "It won't stick. Ground's too warm. It'll be wet by morning") and resolves to a value fact at line 161 ("She had to look where the street went black" — snow reads against dark, vanishes into glare). Weather, not feeling.
- **Portrait (line 99) and seam (line 19):** dense but not purple — every adjective names a visible value/edge fact: "the dark of her sweater against the dark of the wall, almost the same note, a half-step apart, the hardest edge there is to hold"; "a shoulder comes forward out of a shadow with no line to help it"; "not blended, not bridged, a join you could find from clear across the floor." This is the earned painter register the guide grants June (§2 voice differentiation; chapter-card prose dial "June painter-eye, restrained lyric"), not ornament conveying little. The "edge was harder than pity" pun (line 101) turns on a literal value-edge and is grounded in the re-look ("she looked at the half-step again. The shoulder came forward"); the metaphor reveals the perceiver, not author cleverness. Held.

**2. Telling that restates implied meaning — CLEAN.**
Checked every named-emotion span for (a) explaining what action/image already implied and (b) restating what the scene just dramatized. The chapter pairs each named feeling with a physical or material anchor rather than floating it.
- **Strongest counter-candidate — line 103:** "*That was the ache*, standing there with the pipes going. It was good, and it was from week three. He had looked at her like this, carefully, at value, with no need for her to turn around, while he was deciding for her what she could stand to know." "That was the ache" is a bare emotion label. It survives as sanctioned naming — READING_GUIDE §2 permits direct naming "when the naming *is* the event" — and, decisively, it does not restate line 101; it introduces the specific, new grievance the ache is made of (he looked carefully and *still* decided for her what she could stand to know), which is the beat's actual content and the hinge to the Odile parallel. It is anchored to the body ("the pipes going") and does not duplicate a prior dramatization. Held.
- **Second counter-candidate — line 129:** "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, because she was leaving, and because she had put the proof on a page instead of in a sentence." The chapter's most expository sentence. It survives: it delivers new judgment (the Theo/Odile asymmetry, and *why* Odile's version is worse), not a restatement of the dramatized ledger reveal; and layered syntax under reflection is pressure-matched (criterion 5), landing June on her plain line "It wasn't yours to run." Held.
- Also checked and cleared: "The shame came up fast enough that she could have torn the page for that alone" (line 129 — named emotion cashed immediately into a physical impulse, then the actual tearing at 133); "she liked him so much in that second it was faintly annoying" (line 153 — named, then undercut, and it does not restate the "drank the idea / watched it cost him" that precedes it, now that "watched him pay it" is cut). No instance explains what was already shown.

**3. Allowable telling (not over-flagged) — CLEAN.**
Confirmed the chapter's summary/compression is correct craft, not a defect, and that no telling duplicates a showing or replaces a scene the reader needed to live through.
- **Strongest counter-candidate (a span I considered flagging and declined) — line 79:** "The room emptied fast after the plateau broke. Someone's sitter needed relieving. Sam had an early call." This is pure summary of the departures. It is correctly compressed, not a cut scene — the reader does not need to live through each goodbye, and the compression preserves momentum toward the private Odile beat. Excused by criterion 3's own allowance; flagging it would be the over-flag the criterion warns against.
- Verified the ledger reveal is *dramatized*, not told: Odile's foreknowledge lands via the physical ledger ("Ink that had been dry since the night June walked in with her coat still on," line 117) and June reconstructing the order of making (line 119), never via a narrator summary of "Odile had known all along." No telling substitutes for that scene.

**4. Sensory detail must be POV-bound — CLEAN.**
Every sensory cue is the specific thing this focal painter would notice under this pressure — value, edge, glaze, temperature — not a scattergun of five senses.
- **Strongest counter-candidate — line 147:** "Theo's mouth changed. He did not defend it." "Changed" is vague for a painter who elsewhere names half-steps of value. It survives as a deliberate POV-true choice: immediately after her sharp line ("Don't hand me the thing you hid and call it mine"), June declines to over-read him; specifying the mouth would falsify the restraint the scene is built on. Under-description is the characterization. Held.
- Confirmed the licensed cues are all body-bound: "wet wool going near-black at the shoulders" (line 3), "reading a full step too bright" (line 5), "cobalt going almost green at the rim where the kiln had starved the glaze" (line 37), "sugar and cold" for the kiss (line 175). None is free-floating scenery.

**5. Pressure-matched language — CLEAN.**
Checked syntax against scene pressure (short under urgency, layered under reflection), concrete nouns at impact, and metaphor for perceiver-revelation over display; and checked the over-balanced/triadic constructions the focus brief called out.
- **Strongest counter-candidate — line 163:** "The warm coat was a February problem, a Kessler-in-March problem, an eight-hundred-dollars-by-Thursday problem." An overtly triadic, patterned close. It survives: the triad *escalates into concrete cost* (month, name, dollar-deadline) rather than smoothing the ending into lyric symmetry — it is the anti-romantic device that keeps June's stay legible as "for herself first, on her own money" (READING_GUIDE §8 earned-stay test). Ornament would soften the ending; this hardens it. Held.
- **Second counter-candidate — line 133:** "it was more than Odile gave most people and less than the thing was worth." A balanced antithesis. It survives because the two-sidedness *is* the content (Odile's apology is real but inadequate); the balance carries a genuine calibration, not decorative symmetry.
- Confirmed the final clause "and she went" (line 175) is not a profundity-stamp: it is embedded in a material-cost sentence ("a long cold way to go and eight hundred dollars due Thursday"), not isolated as an oracle. Pressure and syntax match throughout.

## Watch reconciliation summary

Gate WATCH=104 is dominated by sentence-shape (`trailing-participle`, `and/but`-start), body/object vocabulary (`shoulders`, `eyes`, `hands`), diegetic `showcase`, and literal first-snow `cold`. Every hit was checked in context; none survives as a purple or telling defect. The heaviest surviving watch — line 163's material-cost triad — is retained on purpose (criterion 5 above): it protects the un-rescued practical future the ending needs.

## REVISION ORDERS

**None.** No criterion produced a flagged instance. The current text is a later revision than this audit's prior round; that round's sole flag (line 153, "and she watched it cost him *and watched him pay it*") has already been repaired to a single clause, and no new purple or telling defect has taken its place. The four focus zones (snow, portrait, Odile ledger, `After Class` reception) were audited directly and each earns its lyric against a visible value/edge/light fact or a material stake; earned tactile detail was left intact per the brief.

OVERALL: CLEAN
