Saved to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_24.positive_prose.md`. The completed audit:

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# Positive Prose Audit (Round 2) — Chapter 24: First Snow

id: positive_prose_audit | owner: claude | tier: risk | pass: cold read + round-1 verification, `output/chapters/chapter_24.md`, round 2

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 + 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-2 pass: the file held a round-1 cold read with eight orders (LLM-CLEAN-FOUND). This pass (a) verifies those eight against the current text and (b) cold-rescans the whole chapter for defects the round-1 pass 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, L85 flat-file check-out, and the L155 material-cost stack stand as craft and are held below).

## Round-1 repair verification (all eight orders closed; no repair-site regression)

1. L45 portable "person still learning to ask" maxim — **CLOSED.** Current L45 ends: "June took it. It had too much milk."
2. L105 "some looking doesn't come with a report" maxim — **CLOSED.** Current L105 ends: "She would not describe the shoulder out of the dark or the quarter of her face he had left alone."
3. L43 Mara counterfactual gloss ("who two months ago would have translated…") — **CLOSED.** Current L43: "She closed it and let the dish sit there, exactly where Luis had wanted it."
4. L101 portrait exegesis ("The painting didn't fix that. It wasn't trying to. It recorded the looking…") — **CLOSED.** Current L101 lands on "while he was deciding for her what she could stand to know." (Residual "That was the ache" naming is checked in §2 held.)
5. L69 public/private itemization + "belonged to the two of them to keep" — **CLOSED.** Current L69: "'They know we didn't start clean,' he said. 'Nobody needs the rest.' He didn't reach for the rest."
6. L19 pentimento tags ("a room remembering an earlier version of itself"; "needed a way out of itself") — **CLOSED.** Current L19 ends the seam description on the literal built-up umber and "the doorway cut a hard edge through it."
7. L85 "inside a story" figure — **CLOSED.** Current L85: "the pairing true this time and set down on a form."
8. L69 dialogue "Like the room can hold it" (rooms-holding-truth maxim) — **CLOSED.** Theo lands on the two concrete sentences instead.

Repair sites re-read for new defects: none introduced. The residue this round surfaces (below) is pre-existing text the round-1 pass did not flag, concentrated in the finale's payoff-density — the narrator captioning or glossing beats 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; 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).

Strongest counter-candidate — "Her own water, her own work, her own cold walk to her own train." (L159) — portable in *rhythm* only (a triadic self-possession cadence that could close many arcs); passes because every noun is an object she is physically carrying at that instant — the cobalt-lidded jar of rinse-water she still takes home, the portfolio hooked in her arm, the Ridgewood train she is walking to — so it will not transplant. Also weighed: "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 (love-interest-holds-back / POV-charmed-against-her-will); held because "drank the idea instead" is idiosyncratic to Theo's this-scene restraint and the self-annoyance is June's card-sanctioned warmth-undercut ("jokes aimed at herself"), not a portable swoon.

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

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "Sam was good at that: stepping aside before anyone had to ask." (L31) — the sentence immediately before it already enacts the care move ("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"); this tag captions Sam's owned move and generalizes the single act into a habit ("was good at that"). §5 bans captioning care moves. — ORDER: cut "Sam was good at that: stepping aside before anyone had to ask"; end the beat on the physical step-back-and-to-the-side, which already shows the room he makes without narrator naming it.`

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "she extended June the same courtesy she'd been drawing on all fall: she read the truth and left it un-itemized." (L53) — Ruth's two spoken lines and her leaving to find Sam already inhabit the discretion; this clause does the reader's arc-math (transferring Ruth/Sam's own privacy onto June) and caps it with the watch-listed "keeping what belongs to two people private" workshop-maxim in narrator voice. Twin: "She told no one anything, because it wasn't hers to tell and she knew the difference." (L57) — a second narrator tag that installs Ruth's card thesis ("Privacy is not the same as cover") as caption. — ORDER: cut "and she extended June the same courtesy she'd been drawing on all fall: she read the truth and left it un-itemized" and the L57 tag "because it wasn't hers to tell and she knew the difference"; keep the concrete backstory clause ("declining to say what they were to each other, present at every dinner, categories nobody's business"); let Ruth's "You didn't start this together," June's "No. We didn't.," Ruth's "It's the best thing on the wall," and her walking off to Sam carry the discretion un-glossed.`

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 narrating the Odile/Theo parallel and grading it), held because it is June's card-established mode ("good at taking a made thing apart for the order it got made in," L117) operating at the reveal and it drives her next actions (saying the thing Odile can't at L129, tearing the page at L131); the "holding a corner of the map" figure is the one soft spot, cleared narrowly because the literal proof — the dated ledger line she is looking at — sits in the same paragraph. L81 "Both of them looked like April was a real place they intended to walk into on their own feet" — uplift-shaped, held because "April" is a concrete date in their story (Priya's L47 "We're looking again in April") 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 rather than a free-floating maxim. L25 "doing the honest thing, letting the object correct her" — evaluative gloss on Priya's looking, held because it sets up the honest-viewer-versus-technique-dismisser taxonomy the paragraph then needs ("The picture needed the two or three who would stand there long enough to feel the bare strip refuse to close") and is tethered to the physical re-check (step back, step in, check label against picture).

## 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 an oracle monologue (chapter-card risk). The repaired "Like the room can hold it" (round-1 order 8) is gone; what remains is in-register.

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, and the card warns against an Odile oracle monologue; held because it is factual and economical rather than oracular and it breaks off exactly at the nephew-word, staying inside her pre-reveal guardrail, so the mass is the sanctioned reveal, not speechifying. 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 beat (the register §2 orders protected: "The strongest beats in this book are direct ones"), plain and unangled; the repeated frame is rhetorical emphasis, not workshop polish. Theo L73 "I've been carrying paragraphs around in my pocket all night and not saying them. It's exhausting." — rueful, concrete to his logistics idiom, fumbling ("It's exhausting") rather than resolving.

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

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "painted side keeping its own counsel" (L91) — the literal "Faced to the brick" in the same sentence already establishes that the painted side is turned away and unreadable; "keeping its own counsel" installs a personification (the panel as a discreet, withholding agent) on top of the fact and softens it. This exact phrase was flagged and cut from Ch21 as a portrait-thesis caption (verified zero-hits in chapter_21.plain_translation_round3_current.md; logged "gone" in tics.md) and has reappeared here on the same study — a regression, not a fresh image. — ORDER: cut "painted side keeping its own counsel"; "Faced to the brick" carries the hidden painted face; if the panel's held-back state needs a beat, let the literal do it — the pencil label reading out in Theo's block hand while the image itself stays turned to the wall.`

Held (checked, not penalized): the first-snow close is the most scrutinized passage against the watch-listed "weather against dark." "everywhere outside the cone it was coming down unwitnessed and landing on nothing anyone could see" (L149) and "the glare swallowed it. She had to look where the street went black" (L153) hold as literal optical/value perception — June's painter-eye tracking that snow is visible only against dark and vanishes against streetlight glare and lit storefronts — not weather-as-feeling; "unwitnessed" is the one word doing thematic double-duty (it rhymes with the portrait's "painted her not knowing she was seen") but the clause keeps it physical (visibility, not emotion), so it stays material. "The cold had finally shown up to match the calendar" (L155) is dry seasonal personification held as June's wry register plus literal seasonal timing, and the snow stays cold and material through the close ("Snow found every place the sweater wasn't and melted there"). L99's value-craft ("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") held per instruction — figure and fact coincident. "put the proof on a page instead of in a sentence" (L127) — near-miss figure, cleared because "page" and "sentence" are literal (Odile's dated ledger line versus Theo's spoken non-confession).

## Chapter verdict: LLM-CLEAN-FOUND

Three revision orders. All eight round-1 orders are executed and verified closed, and the repaired sites introduced no new defect; the chapter is largely inhabited — the showcase blocking, the blue-dish relay, 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. What the round-1 pass missed is a single recurring move the finale's payoff-density pulls in: the narrator captioning or glossing a beat the shown action already delivers. Two are owned-care-move captions the §5 rule bans — L31 (Sam "was good at that: stepping aside before anyone had to ask," redundant with the step-back it follows) and L53/L57 (Ruth "read the truth and left it un-itemized" / "knew the difference," which also carry the watch-listed keep-it-private maxim in narrator voice). One is a personification-figure, L91 "keeping its own counsel," that Ch21 already killed on this same portrait object and that the literal "Faced to the brick" outperforms. None require rewriting a scene; all three are cut-or-literalize orders that let the existing action and objects carry the payoffs unarranged. Odile's reveal stays inside her licensed register and her nephew-guardrail, June's closing agency lands through the objects she carries, and the portrait's craft-vocabulary is earned — none of those are findings.
