# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 20 (No Advice / Keys Here)

Cold read against the reading guide's register rules (plain-speech floor, interiority discipline, smallness test, earned-stay test) and the June/Ruth/Sam/Asha/Nia voice cards. Calibration honored: the chapter's physical spine — blue dish, catalog box, receipt, Ridgewood wall, Kessler net-45, leaving-side study — was audited for inhabitation, not flattened for quietness. The predicted failure sites (post-Nia-call essay, brave-choice vocabulary) were checked specifically; findings below are where the chapter does slip into LLM-clean resolution.

## 1. Paragraphs portable to another novel

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "The $340 room barely held heat. It was enough to work in." — A balanced two-beat künstlerroman thesis stamp — bad room / enough for art — that could sit unchanged in *Writers & Lovers*; it adjudicates the chapter's central trade in eight words the scene has not yet earned at this point (the Dana photo and FEB = coat do this work later, materially). — ORDER: Delete "It was enough to work in." The comparison must stay in objects: she has *Okay. No chair.* on the screen and the right page beside it — let the juxtaposition sit unresolved, and let the later photo beat ("June looked at the light longest") and FEB = coat deliver the verdict they already deliver.`

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "She had not believed that when she painted it and did not entirely believe it now." — Symmetrical then/now artist self-doubt, portable unchanged to *Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow*; the reflective balance is narrator polish where June's disbelief should be optical behavior. — ORDER: Replace the clause from "and did not" onward with an action of looking — she steps in to find where the value structure should fail in that corner and can't find it; disbelief rendered as a search, not a composed symmetry.`

Pass-work: the strongest counter-candidates are the ledger paragraphs (left page/right page). On shape they are the most portable-looking material in the chapter — job-math is generic furniture — but every line is premise-nailed (VANDERCOOK crossed out hard enough to dent the page, Nia's unrequested clause, net-45 landing in March, the $340 back room) and the pencil-shiny receipt corner is this book's object, not stock. They pass.

## 2. Pressure summarized rather than inhabited

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "She read it once. She was not going to work in that room. She deleted it." — The middle sentence adjudicates nine days of secret wanting from managerial altitude; the pressure (she had been drafting a plan to paint on Tasker's north wall) lives in the email's specifics, and the verdict lives in the deletion — the narrator's ruling between them is redundant summary. — ORDER: Cut "She was not going to work in that room." If the beat needs weight, add one literal hesitation object (the draft's nine-day-old timestamp, the empty To: field) before the delete; do not restate the conclusion.`

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "June stood in the apartment and noticed she could see the whole floor by the door for the first time in a week." — Relief reported through the noticed-frame — a character watching herself feel lighter, which the reading guide bans; "for the first time in a week" is the emotional summary doing the scene's work. — ORDER: Strip "noticed she could" and the duration gloss; give the literal floor (the clean rectangle where the box sat, Sam's chair still six inches off its spot) and let June do one small thing about it — the washing of the dish that follows is already the right kind of beat.`

Pass-work: the calibration's predicted essay-ish summary after the Nia call does not exist. I checked the full post-call run (receipt turned Marchetti-header-up, "She did the rest before noon," timestamped texts, the landlord email with January 31 typed twice, the index card pinned where the receipt lived). It is logistics under a deadline, inhabited to the minute, and the chapter closes on a nail and a hammer rather than a meaning. It passes.

## 3. Polished, therapeutic, aphoristic dialogue

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "It was both this morning." — A clean moral equation: challenged by Asha ("If you're trying to feel less bad, don't"), June produces instant, perfectly-weighted ownership of her mixed motive, complete with a temporal audit ("this morning") — self-knowledge arriving pre-resolved, therapy-fluent, no cost paid on the line. — ORDER: The admission must cost a beat. Make it incomplete or caught mid-deflection — she starts somewhere easier and Asha's silence pulls the rest out, or she concedes the charge without the tidy "both" (e.g., admits the feel-less-bad part and stops, leaving "qualified" unsaid for Asha to supply). She should not arrive with her motives pre-itemized.`

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "The wall is why I'm writing it down at all." — The staying-for-herself thesis compressed into a portable why-clause aphorism and spoken aloud to the person she's refusing; job-refusal rhetoric at its most quotable, delivered without resistance mid-call. — ORDER: Route the why through the object and let Nia infer it. June has the right page under her hand — she gives the material fact (ten feet, north window, nobody to ask) and stops; the "why" stays unspoken. If she must gesture at it, she should fail to finish the sentence, not mint it.`

Pass-work, since the rest of the dialogue was under the same suspicion: Ruth's "I kept them to myself and called it manners. … Not all of it was." is aphorism-adjacent but is her one licensed editorial-sharp line this appearance, costs her a real admission, and comes with a physical fumble (the bag strap) — passes. June's failure-mode speech to Nia ("I'd hang the shows well. I'd fix what broke…") runs an articulate anaphoric triple but breaks off mid-sentence and lands on concrete machinery — "They'd call the key number. It would be my phone." — which is premise-specific dread, not rhetoric; passes. "February is a blank line in my notebook" is literal — she is reading FEB = . off the actual page; passes. No brave-choice vocabulary anywhere in the chapter; checked for brave/leap/terrifying/deserve and found none.

## 4. Figurative language where literal precision would win

No installed figures found; this chapter is unusually literal and its precision is doing the work the audit exists to protect. Pass-work — the three strongest counter-candidates considered:

- "Twenty-six hours, give or take the walk from the sink to the table." — time measured as apartment-distance; passes because both endpoints are the receipt's literal geography this chapter (it lived under the mineral spirits jar by the sink, and she just moved it to the table).
- "the box of catalogs left June's apartment a quarter before eleven on Thursday" — box as grammatical agent, adjacent to the retired secret-object-personification family; passes because Sam and Ruth's carrying is on the page in the same sentence and the timestamp belongs to the chapter's clock spine (9:52, 10:40, 4:05, noon).
- "paint-scabbed floor" — the one compressed figure in the Dana photo; passes as a literal condition report of a room June is appraising by its light, and the sentence ends on the exact literal observation ("flat gray light across ten feet of empty wall") the audit would otherwise order.

The freight-gate boom, the printer feeding and catching for half a second, the cobalt pooled almost black near the dish's foot — all literal, all specific, all this book's.

## Chapter verdict

`LLM-CLEAN-FOUND`

Orders, in revision priority:

1. Delete "It was enough to work in." (line 99); let the object juxtaposition sit unresolved.
2. Cut "She was not going to work in that room." (line 95); optionally add one literal hesitation object before the delete.
3. Rewrite "It was both this morning." (line 77) so the admission is incomplete or extracted, not pre-audited.
4. Replace "The wall is why I'm writing it down at all." (line 129) with the material facts of the wall, why-clause unspoken.
5. Replace "and did not entirely believe it now" (line 159) with an act of looking that tests the corner.
6. Strip the noticed-frame from the cleared-floor beat (line 55); render the floor literally and give June one action.
