Completed audit written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_24.thought_development.md`. Returning the document itself:

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# Audit: Thought-Development (pre-solved prose) — Chapter 24, "First Snow"

id: thought_development | owner: claude | tier: risk
binding: `checks/audits/thought_development.md` (Writing ruleset rule 11, "Let the thought develop")
trigger: flag:reflective-chapter (showcase coda; sustained June interiority, POV June)
chapter: `output/chapters/chapter_24.md`

## Stance
Read adversarially. Every passage of interiority three sentences or longer got the straight-line test (could the last sentence have been written immediately after the first with nothing lost?). The two densest analytic paragraphs (L103, L129) and the closest sentence-level split in the chapter (L13) were pressed specifically to defeat the known LLM bias toward performed-literary approval. Each pass below carries the strongest counter-candidate I could build against it; where I could not build one, I say so. Line numbers are the source file's paragraph lines.

## Reflective passages traced (start -> gathers -> lands)
This is the inventory the four criteria are applied to.

- **P1 - L3, urn and cup-tower.** Ranks wet coats by value -> takes the urn/back wall over the door and reasons it (exit-clocking) -> stacks cups in a tower, not an arc -> "counted that, privately, as growth." Moves on one physical object.
- **P2 - L7, expected dread vs. actual ease.** "She'd expected to mind it more" -> gathers the weekend dread (the seam "telling on her and Theo," the imagined coat-at-the-door exit) -> reverses to the urn, the good sweater, Sam's black coffee. Wrong-first-picture.
- **P3 - L25, watching Priya read.** Priya steps back/in "letting the object correct her" -> others "clocked the seam, decided it was a technique" -> lands on what the picture needs ("the two or three who would stand there long enough to feel the bare strip refuse to close").
- **P4 - L49/L57, Ruth as reader.** June feels Ruth "turn into a person in front of a picture, a different and more dangerous thing" -> the private line -> "the only confession the room was going to get: two words at an urn."
- **P5 - L89-95, the errand-shaped decision.** "an errand-shaped decision before she'd finished shaping it" -> the label's two dates, Theo's deliberate refusal to turn it -> doubling-back ("She could leave it": gathers the diner promise, four leaving-studies, the Ridgewood wall, "a person in a room without a portrait proving it") -> "She turned it anyway," with the cup callback ("its own composed arc of cups").
- **P6 - L99-103, reading the portrait.** Value first ("fast and a little scared") -> the held half-step, the shoulder out of shadow, the quarter-face left alone -> "He'd painted her not knowing she was seen" -> wrong-first-word "pity" -> re-look ("Then she looked at the half-step again") -> "The edge was harder than pity, but the word stayed... because he had still hidden it from her" -> "That was the ache."
- **P7 - L107, what's hers to do.** "the seeing was what was hers to do with it" -> squares the panel -> "She would not describe the shoulder out of the dark or the quarter of her face he had left alone."
- **P8 - L117-119, reading the ledger.** The dated line quoted ("Park, J. - Brennan, T. Last slot.... Ink that had been dry since the night June walked in") -> "took a made thing apart for the order it got made in" -> "it predated the pairing... before there was a together to write down."
- **P9 - L125, the cards rearranged.** The eight assignment cards recalled and re-read ("paint the one across the table," etc.) -> "the wreckage of how well it had worked, with a wall in Ridgewood and a man up front putting away someone else's drawings."
- **P10 - L129, Odile's withholding.** "no apology after it" -> the line's "smaller, meaner work" cashed concretely (coat still on, work stopped for years, good eye made a problem) -> the map / eight weeks / three specific choices -> the Theo parallel ("longer and colder... answering for less").
- **P11 - L131-133, only ink again.** "looked at the dry ink until it was only ink again, not a verdict on what she had needed" -> the plain refusal ("It wasn't yours to run") -> Odile's two words -> tears the page, reason attached.
- **P12 - L157-175, the snow.** Perception of cone/glare/black street -> the cobalt jar lid, sweater-not-coat, the dated money -> corner kiss -> "and she went."

## Criterion verdicts

**1. Pre-solved reflection — DEVELOPED.**
Strongest counter-candidate is **P6 / L103**: "That was the ache, standing there with the pipes going. It was good, and it was from week three. He had looked at her like this, carefully, at value, with no need for her to turn around, while he was deciding for her what she could stand to know." In isolation this is close to claim->conclusion (name the feeling, explain it). It survives the straight-line test only because the development is upstream and genuine: **L101** runs a wrong first guess ("For a second, pity was the easier word"), forces a concrete re-look ("Then she looked at the half-step again. The shoulder came forward"), and lands a *revised* position ("The edge was harder than pity, but the word stayed in the room because he had still hidden it from her"). L103 harvests that doubling-back; it is a landing, not a shortcut. Strike L101 and L103 becomes an announcement — but L101 is on the page.
Second counter-candidate, **P10 / L129**, is where pre-solving usually hides: an analytic-assertive paragraph. Straight-line test — could the closing Theo-parallel sentence ("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...") follow "There it was, and no apology after it" with nothing lost? No. It depends on the concrete grievance built in between (coat still on / work stopped for years / good eye turned into a problem; the three itemized choices "what to show, whose arm to take, what to say in a critique"). The comparison is earned by that middle.
Focus check — do the portrait and Odile sections explain conclusions before the scene earns them? No. Both show the object first and infer after: the half-step and quarter-face (L99) precede "not knowing she was seen"; the dated ledger line (L117) precedes "it predated the pairing" (L119). The one fast recognition, **P8 / L119**, is exempt under criterion 4 — the ink is quoted at L117 before the inference, and this is the pivot the scene turns on (plot-required, not rushed).
Focus check — does the snow become thesis? No. The drift candidate is **L161**, "She had to look where the street went black": the chapter stops there and refuses the gloss (no "the way she had to look at the truth"). It carries the painting's value problem by rhyme, not statement. Perception, not thesis.

**2. Missing concrete development — DEVELOPED.**
Every reflective passage advances on an object or a remembered particular, not on adjectives or restated stakes: the cup tower (P1), the seam and the imagined coat-at-the-door (P2), the held half-step and quarter-face (P6), the quoted assignment cards (P9), the dried ink and torn perforation (P11), the cobalt jar lid and the "eight-hundred-dollars-by-Thursday problem" (P12). Strongest counter-candidate is the single abstract framing inside the chapter's most analytic paragraph, **P10 / L129**, "did the smaller, meaner work" — but it is cashed in the same breath ("coat still on, work stopped for years, good eye turned into a problem Odile could solve by writing in a man"), so the abstraction labels the concrete instead of substituting for it. Second: **P6 / L103** "That was the ache" is the chapter's one direct feeling-name that leans abstract; it rides on the L99-101 half-step and does not develop *through* the naming. No artificial asides: the two dry asides that could be inserted texture — "For Ben, practically skywriting" (L47) and "she liked him so much in that second it was faintly annoying" (L153) — are each triggered by an on-page action (the flyer left a half-degree off level; Theo "drank the idea instead"), so they read as June's judgment on scene material, not decoration.

**3. Split cumulative movement — DEVELOPED.**
No claim-plus-reason chopped into mini-sentences where the break idles. Strongest counter-candidate, and the closest structural match to this book's one prior finding (the Ch02 "She had ruled a line... It was the line she drew under invoices" splice): **L13**, "She was looking at the people looking at the work. It was the only thing, June had learned this fall, that Odile ever really watched." A colon merge is available ("...looking at the work: the only thing... Odile ever really watched"). It survives because the second clause is not a re-predication of the first — it adds new information (a season-long pattern and June's acquisition of it, "June had learned this fall") and end-stops a deliberate Odile reread-key (READING_GUIDE section 8's forward/backward plants). Merging subordinates that key into the visual beat and flattens it; the break buys a characterization landing the colon would spend. Considered, not flagged.
Ruled developed rather than split: the parallel date fragments at **L91** ("Week three, the day he started it. Last Thursday, the day he made himself finish.") are appositives to "two dates" whose parallelism is the point; the three short predications at **L99** ("The face he'd barely given himself. He hadn't invented one. He'd painted the quarter of it that was turned...") each add distinct visual fact and track the eye moving, rather than refusing to be one sentence. For the record, the prose already defaults to cumulative movement — the colon at L57 ("the only confession the room was going to get: two words at an urn"), the because-chains at L3 and L163 — which is why this criterion has little to convert.

**4. Allowable efficiency — honored (no forced flags).**
Clipped landings are excused by June's voice card, not pre-solving: "compresses when exposed"; "interiority rhythm: perception first, judgment second, self-rebuke third"; "allowed plainness." Instances left unflagged: "It was a good flyer." (L9), "Fine. June let them go." (L25), and the close "eight hundred dollars due Thursday, and she went." (L175) — each a June-typical dry stop after concrete perception, i.e., the decisive cognition the card establishes. Plot-mandated non-resolution left open, not pre-solved: "a folded page in her pocket she hadn't decided anything about yet" (L175) and the refusal to name what the snow means — both required by the chapter card ("avoid Odile oracle monologue... over-explaining plants") and continuity ("literal weather, not a second emotional climax"). Odile's reveal dialogue (L123, L127) is outside this audit's scope — it is speech, not June's interiority or narration — and is not adjudicated here.

## Revision orders
None. No passage flagged under criteria 1-3; the criterion 4 allowances hold without forcing a pass.

OVERALL: DEVELOPED
