# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 15 (`output/chapters/chapter_15.md`)

Cold read against the reading guide register (§2: warm/precise/lightly comic, interiority through object and action, June optical-dry), the June/Nia/Asha voice cards, and the chapter packet's offer-chapter risk list. Raw draft consulted for provenance only. Gate report and codex tic audit consulted; the codex audit's executed orders (jar "presence," "for a long moment," echo-line wall/press) are confirmed landed in the integrated text and are re-inspected below rather than taken on faith.

## 1. Paragraphs portable to another novel

The chapter's body is unusually well-anchored: catalog dimensions against shelf depth, the Vandercook gripper, $49,500 against $1,180 rent, net-45 Kessler math. The job is not narrated as a brochure anywhere — duties arrive as malfunctioning equipment with named failure modes, which is June's register and nobody else's. One paragraph still travels.

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "In the room that kept returning, one bank of lights stayed on over the sink and a woman stood at the press with a rag and would not turn around." — This is the second run of the line-71 vision, now depersonalized into "a woman" — a symbolic tableau of deferred vocation that could close a chapter in any artist-rediscovers-herself novel (a Katherine Center or Jojo Moyes heroine could think this sentence unchanged); it is also June watching herself feel, which the guide bans (§6). The first instance (line 71) earns the image off the notebook; this reprise installs it as a closing symbol and escalates it with "would not turn around." — ORDER: One invocation only. Keep the line-71 version; at the close, replace the reprise with the literal content of the worry in June's register — the press will always have a next thing wrong, and she already wrote the next thing down ("Etching press—bearing knock") — or cut directly from the crossed-out question on the page to propping the receipt.`

Strongest counter-candidate checked: "June had spent Wednesday on an invoice and Thursday at Marchetti Rooms, both of which were real, neither of which had taken until eight-forty." The balanced double-relative is the polished-self-knowledge shape I was sent to hunt, but it passes: both clauses are pinned to named, chapter-specific errands, the punch is a clock time rather than an abstraction, and self-rebuke-third is June's documented interiority rhythm. Also checked "Not the wall. The press." (line 69) — fragment emphasis, but it commits to two concrete nouns off her own notebook page and carries the chapter's pivot materially; it passes.

## 2. Pressure summarized rather than inhabited

The call pressure is lived on the page — the notebook, the math written in the margin (`1,180` against `1,475 now`), the pen sitting at the end of the keys/wall line. The money pressure is inhabited via the two invoices she looks at before writing *W-2*. One beat still reports its conclusion from altitude: the flyer photo, exactly where the focused check predicted stock-interruption risk.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "Her own face in it was doing the thing she'd been trying to caption since Mara sent it: not surprised. That was the trouble with it." — The pressure summarized is a week of failing to caption her own face; the reader is handed the pre-reached verdict instead of living this viewing. The text even supplies the work excuse — "June opened it to check the crop against Priya's text" — and then never performs the crop check; the one place the kiss pressure touches this chapter, June's painter eye goes dark and a summary substitutes. — ORDER: Make her do the crop check she opened the photo for. One optical fact about the 8x10 — where Mara's crop cuts, which edge survives, where her own eyes are aimed in the frame — and let "not surprised" land off that observed detail instead of arriving pre-captioned.`

Strongest counter-candidate checked: "This took four minutes to establish and involved every flat surface she owned." Summary of a search — but the next three sentences itemize it in inches (eight against ten and a half; thirty by forty), so the no-room-for-the-catalogs pressure is inhabited immediately and the summary line is just the comic header. Passes. Also checked "The whole thing was good" (line 83): a verdict, but it is enacted on the spot — she goes down the page hunting a line to cross out and doesn't find one, which is the inhabited version of "the flaw wasn't in the offer." Passes.

## 3. Dialogue polished, therapeutic, aphoristic

The raw draft's polish has mostly been sanded off in revision: "Both those things can be true and you can still say no," "the gripper bar doesn't care about anybody's reasons," and "people who list 'passion' under skills" are gone, replaced with shorter, flatter speech. One lacquered construction survives, with a lampshade that makes it worse.

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "That's the posting sentence. Sorry. What I mean is, I'm offering you work, June, not a rescue." — Nia is too articulate about her own rhetoric: she captions her own sentence (dialogue diagnosis, a defect in any speaker's mouth per guide §6) in order to license the prepared antithesis that follows. The lampshade also fails followability — "Because I need the answer to survive Monday" does not read as posting language, so a cold reader cannot tell which sentence was "the posting sentence" or why she apologized. The under-pressure version would not narrate her register shift; the paper rustle already tells us she glanced at the document. — ORDER: Delete "That's the posting sentence. Sorry. What I mean is," and let the rustle stand as the tell. "I'm offering you work, June, not a rescue" may stay bare — it is her card register ("work, not absolution") — or be roughed by having her abandon it mid-clause for the Marco/gripper fact.`

Strongest counter-candidate checked: "The coat counts. Coats are people who left their position marked." An epigram, and the generalizing shape is the aphorism pattern — but it passes on three grounds: it is composed in a text message, where crafting a line is diegetic rather than implausible fluency; it is in the label-notes register of the After Class chair-count task, not a life maxim; and Theo's reply files it as work product ("That's going in the label notes"). Also checked "You're being very fair about the part where it might evaporate" — dry, June-aimed at the situation rather than self-resolved; passes. "June heard herself and stopped. 'Hypothetically.'" — narration about her speech act, but it notes the act and converts instantly into a spoken retreat rather than characterizing the sentence; passes the §6 line, barely. Do not add siblings.

## 4. Figurative where literal would beat it

The personification sweep ordered by the focused check comes back clean against the integrated text: the jar's "developing a presence," the etching press "like a man clearing his throat," the ventilation "passed inspection out of pity," the deadline "arrived shouting," the receipt "excuse itself," the apartment that "wanted handling," and the radiator's "argument with itself" were all removed between draft and revision, each replaced with a measurement, a mechanism, or a plain action. One figure-stack remains.

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "It wasn't hers to spend yet. But she felt the shape of it sitting there, like a tool on the bench you weren't using and someone else needed" — Three figures stacked on one withheld text: Asha's name as currency ("to spend"), the unanchored "felt the shape of it," and the tool-on-the-bench simile. Only the third is in June's work register; the other two are portable soft abstraction. Meanwhile the literal object already exists in the scene — Asha's folded scrap of leads, "flattened and set to the left like a reference swatch" at the call station. — ORDER: Keep at most the tool simile and cut "to spend" and "the shape of it"; better, go literal — her eyes go to Asha's scrap on the left of the notebook, and she puts the phone face down.`

Strongest counter-candidate checked: "in case the rest of the answer came from the same pen. It didn't come." Mild pen-as-oracle whimsy — but it passes because it extends the call-station logic June herself built ("Pen that worked, established by scribble"): it is her joke about her own system, priced at one sentence and immediately falsified by the radiator-click wait, which is concrete. Also checked "like a reference swatch" and "popping with a sound like a knuckle" — both clarify a physical fact in painter/handler vocabulary; both pass.

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Chapter verdict: `LLM-CLEAN-FOUND`

Four orders: (1) cut the closing reprise of the press-room vision and end on the literal worry or the receipt action; (2) perform the flyer crop check and earn "not surprised" off an observed optical fact; (3) delete Nia's "That's the posting sentence" self-caption; (4) collapse the Asha-name figure-stack to one work-register figure or the literal scrap. All four are local; the chapter's spine — the call, the notebook math, the receipt under the jar — is inhabited and should not be touched.
