**Correction applied up front:** this manuscript is highly *performed*-literary — fragments for emphasis, significance-flag tags, object-button chapter endings, withholding-as-depth. I discounted that surface and scored on what survives it: a genuinely specific procedural texture (art handling / painting technique) and tight plotting, set on conventional romance bones.

**Originality and surprise: 7/10** — weakest passage: "*PHL board said yes. They want to make the offer formal. Call tomorrow before you talk yourself out of it.*" (stock will-she-leave-the-city lever; the macro-arc — fake couple, secret family tie, matchmaker mentor, snow ending — is genre-standard) — strongest passage: "His other arm stayed lifted, elbow locked, brush tip up, burnt umber clear of Mara's scarf." (a kiss rendered as a handling problem — fresh, funny, character-true, and *usable*; the same method drives "Paint the memory your partner gave you. / Do not make it kinder. / Do not make it yours.") — revision order: rebuild the Nia/PHL thread and the "Odile planned it" twist to carry the invention the painting scenes already have, so surprise lives in structure and not only in texture.

**Narrative coherence and payoff: 8/10** — weakest passage: "June looked at the dimensions for a while. Then she decided not to think about the dimensions." (a detail flagged as loaded — twelve-by-sixteen, the back-room painting — whose payoff never lands within these samples) — strongest passage: "*Park, J. - Brennan, T. Last slot.*" (night-one ledger entry that closes the switched-labels seed and the blank ampersand line, "where the line stopped being hers to fill," without breaking causality) — revision order: pay off or cut the flagged back-room dimensions; nothing else here is loose.

**Voice and sentence-level craft: 7/10** — weakest passage: "He did a thing she would think about later more than she meant to" (announces significance instead of earning it, and it's a recurring crutch — "That helped." / "That was new." — while the whole cast, Odile, Mara, Priya, Ruth, speaks in June's single subtext-competent register) — strongest passage: "hair cropped as if she had done it herself over a sink and been right to" (wit and character-judgment in one clause; cf. "a scorch mark painted exactly as ugly as it was") — revision order: thin the significance-flag tags and give the secondary characters diction that isn't June's.

**Imagery and emotional resonance: 7/10** — weakest passage: "It was falling there too; the glare swallowed it. She had to look where the street went black." (the snow close spells its own symbolism, doing the reader's feeling for them; cf. the strained "She'd built an apartment's worth of dread") — strongest passage: "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. And he'd held it." (technique, image, and the book's central withholding fused; "He'd painted her not knowing she was seen") — revision order: trust the images — cut the articulated meaning from the snow so the picture carries it, as the portrait does.

**Technical control without generic polish: 7/10** — weakest passage: "He straightened a crate label that was already straight, and June noted it with the fellow feeling of one professional watching another." (an engineered motif — the repeated straightening of already-straight things, plus the composed resonant beat that ends every chapter — is house-style polish signaling craft) — strongest passage: "Glassine over the face, foam collar, corner blocks, two handlers on the stair, don't let the new guy take the bottom." (control expressed as trade-specific, non-generic diction that also does character work) — revision order: reduce the recognizable-literary tells (the already-straight straightening, the object-button endings) so the genuinely specific control isn't read as a well-run template.

**Book verdict: JUDGE-PASS** (lowest criterion is 7; no criterion ≤ 6). Accomplished and distinctive in method, tightly paid off, but capped by conventional bones, a monotone cast, managed/airless emotion, and pervasive house-style polish — good, not top-tier.
