# Thought-Development Audit — Chapter 18 (`Eight Tuesdays`, "Returned Scarf")

**Sustained reflective passages identified (traced before scoring):**
- P1 — apartment/underlayer (`chapter_18.md:5`)
- P2 — catalog-return plan (`:7`)
- P3 — flyer in two photos (`:9`)
- P4 — first study, knowing the room the other direction (`:23`)
- P5 — two columns / floor-plan draft, Thursday (`:31`)
- P6 — saved-plate / lie epigram (`:43`)
- P7 — scarf loan history, exactness revision (`:47–49`)
- P8 — fifth study, the chair (`:89`)
- P9 — the row, what the studies wanted to become (`:91–93`)
- P10 — Tasker columns Monday night, nail hole (`:95–99`)

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**Criterion 1 — Pre-solved reflection: DEVELOPED**

Straight-line test applied to the two passages most likely to fail it:

- P10 (`:95`). First sentence: "The Tasker terms hadn't moved." Last: "She wasn't going to ratify it by fleeing on his schedule." The last could not follow the first with nothing lost: the middle supplies the gathering sentence ("as good as it had been on the seventeenth, riding the F, before the acknowledgments page, before Eileen Brennan's name, before the back stair") and the distinction the conclusion stands on ("she would be answering Theo, not Nia"). The wrong first pass is real and on the page two scenes earlier: P5's floor-plan draft, posed as a competent question and then caught out ("sending it tonight would have nothing to do with ceiling height"), reopened and re-closed at `:97`. The thought is developed across the chapter through one concrete object — an email that never sends.
- P6 (`:43`). "She'd told a lie to avoid a dinner so she could paint a room she was also avoiding" is a polished epigram and the chapter's most plausible announced-conclusion candidate. It survives because the material is gathered first in concrete contrast (Ruth's drumstick, Luis blurred at the stove, "We saved you a plate," soup from a can eaten standing with the wet study against the toaster), the lie itself was planted at `:13`, and "Then she rinsed the bowl" cuts off elaboration — perception, judgment, self-rebuke, exit, which is June's card-specified interiority rhythm.

P1 and P7 both contain genuine doubling-back rather than straight lines: P1 explicitly revises a Week 6 verdict ("he'd been wrong about her, she'd decided in Week 6, a wrong first pass. Standing in it Wednesday morning with wet palms, she could see the first pass differently") and lands on a concrete revision (the apartment "sitting at that underlayer for two months," with the three bright rectangles on the wall as the literal underlayer). P7 revises a prior feeling against an object ("At the time she had found that flattering. Now the exactness bothered her more than a mistake would have").

**Criterion 2 — Missing concrete development: PRE-SOLVED (1 instance)**

- P9 (`:91`): "She could already feel what they wanted to become — a counterweight, the leaving side of *After Class*, the answer panel to a question she and Theo had set up together — and she was not going to let them. Left face up, they were studies. Pinned up, photographed, mentioned, they would become a message, and there was no one she was willing to be sending it to."
  Failure type: development by abstraction. The em-dash interior is three restatements of the same thesis label ("counterweight" / "leaving side" / "answer panel"), and the hinge of the passage — how *pinned up* turns into *message* — is asserted, not developed through any object. The chapter already landed this exact thesis once, with the objects in front of it, at P4 ("*After Class* was supposed to be the room as two people kept it. This was the room as one person left it."); the second announcement adds labels, not thinking. The damning part is that the concrete proof June owns is sitting in the same chapter and goes unused: that morning she saw what a pinned-up image of hers does once it circulates ("Sonia's window had one of the flyers in it, low, by the register, crooked," `:85` — forty copies, laundromats), and the unvarnished fear canvases still hang as a pair at Marchetti Rooms under Odile's own rule that displayed pairs speak ("Pairs hang together or they lie," Ch16). The watch counts corroborate the triplet habit in this closing scene (ruleset-three-part-cadence hit at `:93`, "up, blank, and set"; "Pinned up, photographed, mentioned" is a second triplet two sentences earlier).
  Strongest counter-candidate considered and surviving: P4, same thesis, but earned — the antithesis arrives only after the doorframe out of square, the paint-sealed switch screw, the coat hooks, and "the hallway's rectangle going dark first while the room stayed lit," which is itself the leaving-image the sentence then names.

**Criterion 3 — Split cumulative movement: DEVELOPED**

Three splits examined against the choppy→connected pattern:

- `:89` "The chair did nothing. It was wood at an angle, viewed from the door." Shape-identical to the ruleset's choppy example; merged version considered: *"The chair did nothing: it was wood at an angle, viewed from the door."* The break stays because it does stated work: "She kept it dry and exact" governs the prose as much as the gouache — the flat periods enact the refusal the sentence asserts, and that suppression is what P9 then pays.
- `:95` "He had chosen for her for six weeks without her knowing. She wasn't going to ratify it by fleeing on his schedule." Merge considered and rejected; the voice card specifies "under pressure: shorter syntax," and this is the angriest cognition in the chapter.
- `:9` "Forty of those existed. Some were now in laundromats." Not a claim+reason split — the second sentence is a new fact (distribution), and the break is the deadpan escalation beat.

**Criterion 4 — Allowable efficiency: DEVELOPED (allowances honored)**

- P2 (`:7`), "The plan fit in one line, and it required no one." — clipped decisive cognition excused by the voice card ("under stress: packs, sorts… gets quieter, funnier, more exact") and by scene logic: Ch17's order that the catalogs come back "some way that is not him" makes the plan's one-line, no-one shape the dramatized severance, not rushed prose. The line is itself a cumulative sentence.
- P10's refusal to decide Tasker — the thread ledger holds the decision for Ch22 ("June declines before confession and before the deadline"); the passage correctly ends on *not tonight* rather than a resolution, and demanding further development toward an answer would break a protected thread.
- P8's flatness — the plot needs the chair's meaning suppressed until P9; not flagged (see criterion 3).

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**REVISION ORDERS**

1. `:91` (P9). Cut the em-dash triplet to at most one term and route the studies→message turn through concrete material already in the chapter instead of asserting it. Two sanctioned sources: (a) the flyer June saw that morning in Sonia's window — she has watched one image of hers get pinned up, copied forty times, and start speaking for her in laundromats and by a register; let the leap from "pinned up" to "message" pass through that window. Direction, not mandated wording: *"Left face up, they were studies. Pinned up, they would start doing what the flyer in Sonia's window was doing — saying something on her behalf to whoever walked past — and there was no one she was willing to be sending it to."* (b) Alternatively or additionally, Odile's Ch16 pair order ("Varnish neither. They're a pair now. Pairs hang together or they lie"): pinned up, the five studies would hang opposite Theo's kept-ready side of *After Class* the way the fear canvases hang now. Either source replaces "counterweight / leaving side / answer panel" with an object that develops the same conclusion; the "answer panel to a question she and Theo had set up together" label should not survive revision, since P4 already established the two-orientation premise without naming it.

*Out-of-scope observation (not counted in verdict): `:17` "Three words, nothing to argue with, nothing asked" sits near the reading guide's zero-tolerance dialogue-diagnosis ban — narration characterizing the form of Theo's message. Refer to the dialogue audit owner.*

**OVERALL: PRE-SOLVED (1)**
