# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 21 ("Prying Loose / Faced to the Wall") — Round 2 (verification)

id: positive_prose_audit | owner: claude | chapter: 21 | round: 2 | stance: skeptical verification of round-1 repairs, then full re-run of the four audit questions on the current text
Inputs: `output/chapters/chapter_21.md`; round-1 audit `output/critiques/claude/chapter_21.positive_prose_round1.md` (14 orders); snapshots `chapter_21.0013...before_positive_prose_round1_repairs.md` / `chapter_21.0015...after_positive_prose_round1_repairs.md`; READING_GUIDE §§2, 5, 6, 8; voice cards (Theo Brennan, Odile Marchetti, June Park); CHAPTER CARD - 21; comedy_doctor_round2 (CLEAR); dialogue_doctor round 2 (CLEAN).

Snapshot integrity: the current chapter is byte-identical to the `0015...after` snapshot (diff empty). The `0013...before` → `0015...after` diff touches exactly twelve lines (5, 9, 11, 13, 35, 39, 43, 45, 85, 89, 91, 103, 115) and contains the fourteen ordered edits and nothing else. No unordered drift entered with the repairs.

Cross-audit note: comedy_doctor_round2 and dialogue_doctor round 2 were rendered against the pre-repair text (`0012` = `0013`). Three items those audits held as "ceilings, not licenses" — "recognized the species" (103), "keeping its own counsel" (115), and the anger-sizing sentence (comedy item 9) — were subsequently cut by these repairs. Cutting below a declared ceiling violates nothing; no doctor constraint required their retention, and no replacement figure was coined at any of the three sites. The doctors' standing constraints (no new Odile zingers, no door/forgiveness thesis naming, no re-explained consent logic, Odile line 29 at mass limit) were checked against the diff: none is breached — the only dialogue edits shrink Odile's turns (39, 43).

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## ROUND-1 ORDER VERIFICATION (all fourteen, against the diff and the current text)

1. **EXECUTED** — "He waited for anger to come and do the work, and it did come, but it came the size it actually was instead of the size he needed." is cut whole. Paragraph 35 now opens directly on the accusation list: "You put it in my hands and I carried it to her. I taped the box myself. I did the labels. I told her which volumes had the installation shots. I told her-" He shut his mouth. The order's second half — undersized anger legible in the list itself — is satisfied without new text: the list runs at inventory volume (tape, labels, installation shots, each a flat clause), breaks mid-item, and lands on the real question. No sizing narration replaced it.
2. **EXECUTED** — "It did not flatter her or prove anything except that on a Tuesday in October a woman had paused in a doorway and a man had seen it." is cut. Line 89 now reads: "When he stepped back the panel stood as a finished thing. The door stayed half open. The unpainted cheek stayed unpainted." — the paragraph closes on the two literal states, exactly as ordered.
3. **EXECUTED** — "The shame arrived while he was still lifting out the third volume, late and riding in on the task." is cut; the paragraph now opens "He had the 1994 in both hands, checking the headcap for damage." The thumbs clause survives unaltered as the landing ("his thumbs kept checking the headcap anyway because they didn't know what else to be"). Checked the seam for damage: "checking the headcap... kept checking the headcap" is a deliberate repetition doing the work of "anyway" and was present in the before-text; the new middle clause ("It was a book his own carefulness had carried into June's apartment") keeps the indictment on the carefulness, literal, no simile.
4. **EXECUTED** — "She would want to know. Except she wouldn't. She had built a route whose entire point was that no message from him would be required at the end of it. The text he wanted to send was not information. It was a foot in a door." — all five sentences gone. Line 13 now holds exactly what the order specified: the formed reflex-text in italics plus two literal actions ("He hung the clipboard back on its nail and left the phone in the coat."). The refusal is behavior only.
5. **EXECUTED** — line 45 now ends "and he asked for it anyway." The honest-act footnote is gone; "I need you to tell me it wasn't my fault." lands uncaptioned.
6. **EXECUTED** — line 85 now ends the repair clause at "until the geometry said what the night had said." The third telling of the maybe is gone; "the angle undecided" (81) and "It had been a maybe." (81) remain the only two, and the carpentry inventory (reveal, switch plate, strike plate gleam) carries the beat.
7. **EXECUTED** — the four-sentence old-version essay (receipt monologue, freight metaphor, receiving dock) is deleted and replaced with: "The glassine lay open beside the easel. His hands went toward the top fold before he stopped them." followed by the pre-existing "He cleaned his palette knife instead." This is the order's first proposed shape (hands start toward the wrap, refusal in objects) with zero clauses of old-version voice retained — within the "at most one clause" allowance. Checked for new problems: the hands beat is literal and adds one instance to a chapter already at hands-body WATCH x16; that count belongs to the mechanical gate and the tics tracker (which already orders Ch22 reduction), and the order itself specified this shape. Noted, not blocking.
8. **EXECUTED** — "That is true. That is mine." is cut; line 43 is now "I thought about it less than I should have," Odile said. — full stop, the true partial only. Ownership lives where ordered: line 59, "she wrote her own initials, *O.M.*, small and square, the lender owning the loan."
9. **EXECUTED** — line 39 now reads "I put that page where you would find it. On purpose." The hands motif is out of her mouth; the admission (placement, intent) is intact and consistent with the reread guardrail — she asserts what she did and bounds nothing.
10. **EXECUTED** — "recognized the species," is deleted; line 103 reads "and he watched the words appear and deleted them back to nothing." The mid-word cutoff ("*I completely under*") does the diagnostic work alone.
11. **EXECUTED** — "like a lit fuse" is gone (same edit as order 3); the clause now ends at "June's apartment". Zero hits for "fuse" chapter-wide.
12. **EXECUTED** — "because logging it had felt like closing a door he wanted to pretend was still open" is replaced with the literal refusal: "If he wrote one returned, the column would have started counting the eight still out." Every door before the painting scene is now a physical door; the repainted door angle at 81–85 keeps sole ownership of the motif. (Minor: the conditional is loose — strict grammar wants "If he had written" — but it reads as period-true free indirect and is not a clean-prose defect.)
13. **EXECUTED** — "the blank had said what blanks say" is replaced with the literal accusation the order specified: "The returned column had sat blank for two weeks: nine out, one back unlogged, nothing from her since the twenty-second." Dates check against the sheet entries at line 11 (*1 rtn'd 11/22*): consistent.
14. **EXECUTED** — "painted side keeping its own counsel against the brick" is replaced with "painted side against the brick" — the literal image, with "stretcher bar out, pencil label legible from the doorway" already on the line. No personification remains in the closing look-back.

Residue sweep of the current text: "lit fuse", "foot in a door", "blanks say", "keeping its own counsel", "recognized the species", "That is mine", "honest act", "she had not decided yet", "the old version", "receipt", "receiving dock", "did not flatter", "The shame arrived", "where hands would find" — zero hits. All fourteen orders are genuinely executed; none was satisfied by paraphrase or partial trim.

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## Fresh re-run of the four audit questions (current text)

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

No findings. What was checked: every paragraph without a proper noun or a catalog-world object in its first sentence — the repair seams at 5, 13, 89, 91 especially, since deletion is where generic connective tissue usually gets pasted in. None was pasted in; every seam closes on an object (headcap, clipboard, glassine top fold, unpainted cheek).

Strongest counter-candidate: "He looked at it a long time before he touched anything. The looking was the part he'd skipped in Week 3." (79) — the second sentence is a shaped, quotable turn that a lesser draft of any artist novel could hold. It passes because "looking" is this book's loaded verb (Odile's "Looking is the assignment" is the standard the sentence is measured against), "Week 3" pins it to the study's specific history, and the sentence names the exact procedural omission the scene then repairs for eighty lines. Second candidate considered: "He ate the soup because it was there." (63) — survives as round 1 found and comedy_doctor_round2 item 14 confirmed: the flatness is only legible against Odile's "Eat before you decide anything else about yourself."

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

No findings. What was checked: the five sites where round 1 found managerial altitude (5, 13, 45, 85, 91) plus every paragraph of the wait scene (105–111), which is where cut explanation most often regrows as new summary. At all five sites the pressure now lives in objects and behavior: thumbs on the headcap, phone left in the coat, the plea uncaptioned, the narrowed door angle, hands stopped at the top fold.

Strongest counter-candidate: "She had painted a man maintaining the perimeter of a room so that he would never be required to stand in the middle of it." (71) — a single thesis sentence naming what the fear canvas means, and the closest thing in the chapter to summarized pressure. It passes here, narrowly, on the guide's §2 exception: feelings are "named directly only when the naming *is* the event," and this naming is the chapter's hinge — the card's revelation ("Theo's next right action is making, not managing") requires him to finally read the painting correctly, and the ekphrasis at 67 has already done the inhabiting (keys fanned, filled nail hole, the bright twelve-by-sixteen) before the verdict is spoken. Dialogue_doctor round 2 carries an open non-blocking routing note on this same sentence (to Narrator-Publicist / Plain Translation, against the chapter prompt's "do not summarize what it means"); that route stays open and is not converted into an order here — but this line is the weakest surviving pressure point in the chapter, and any future touch that adds a second thesis sentence anywhere near it fails.

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

No findings. What was checked: both repaired Odile turns (39, 43) against her card (material diction, no motif-speak, fragments complete in intent); the whole stockroom exchange for accountability cadence now that "That is true. That is mine." is gone; the SMS exchange for composure. "I thought about it less than I should have," full stop, is a true partial with the roughness left in — the scene now withholds exactly the self-verdict the round-1 text handed over. "I put that page where you would find it. On purpose." asserts placement and intent in her own nouns and leaves Theo's either/or question (35) unanswered, which is correct.

Strongest counter-candidate: "You will be less convenient." / "Yes." (55–57) — shaped enough to be an aphorism-delivery vehicle in another book. It passes because it is pricing, not polish: two words of cost, one word of payment, no abstraction, and the entire route/usefulness economy of the book is required for "convenient" to mean anything. Also re-checked Theo's boundary speech (53): still card-true stress arc — facts first ("The freight, the condition reports, the loan sheet"), then plain ("You don't get to send me with a box again"), with "out loud, with your own mouth" carrying grain, not gloss.

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

No findings. What was checked: all four round-1 sites (now literal: the logging refusal at 9, the dated column at 11, the clause ending at "June's apartment" at 5, the painted-side/brick/label image at 115) plus a full sweep of surviving figures. Survivors and why they stand: "the spines couldn't chew each other" (3) — packer's working idiom, literal damage mechanism; "some dates filed themselves" (11) — his filing vocabulary inverted, no borrowed domain; "no more preparation than she gave a wall" (21) — focalizer domain knowledge, cuts two ways on reread; "where a window would go if the painting were merciful" (67) — composition-literal, the mercy withheld is June's accuracy; "Each time he set it down like the drill." (105) — comparison to a named object twenty lines of chapter earlier, the callback that closes the alibi prop.

Strongest counter-candidate: "the phone, which had been in his coat by the door for twelve hours saying nothing" (97) — the last faint object-personification in the chapter now that "keeping its own counsel" is gone. It passes because "saying nothing" is nearly literal of a phone (no messages arrived) and the clause states duration and location, not mood. It is also now the ceiling for object agency in this chapter; the repairs lowered that ceiling and nothing may be built back up to the old one.

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## Verdict

All fourteen round-1 orders executed exactly, verified against the snapshot diff, with no unordered edits and no new clean-prose problems introduced at the seams. The four questions re-run on the current text produce zero findings; every section's strongest counter-candidate is quoted above with its reason for passing.

Weakest surviving pressure point: the fear-canvas thesis sentence at line 71 ("She had painted a man maintaining the perimeter of a room so that he would never be required to stand in the middle of it.") — passing under §2's naming-is-the-event exception with an open routing note already attached from dialogue_doctor round 2; it holds only as long as it stays the chapter's single such sentence.

Watch-items for any future touch (non-blocking): the order-7 replacement adds one autonomous-hands beat (91) to a chapter at hands-body WATCH x16 — the tics tracker's Ch22 reduction order stands; the mixed conditional at 9 ("If he wrote... would have started") is tolerable free indirect but should not be replicated; line 97 is the new object-agency ceiling.

Chapter verdict: `INHABITED`

INHABITED
