Both calibration inputs are clear — the raw draft's thesis-stamp lines ("She was not staying for anyone...", the "decided for her" narrator intrusion) were removed during integration, so this pass hunts what survived in quieter form. Here is the completed audit.

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# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 20 (`No Advice / Keys Here`)

Calibration: triggered by WATCH `wp-aivocab-cluster` + decision/thematic density. Hunted: clean moral equations, brave-choice language, portable "staying for herself" phrasing, essay-summary after the Nia call, polished job-refusal rhetoric. Protected: blue dish, catalog box, receipt, Ridgewood wall, bad radiator, Kessler net-45, leaving-side study.

## 1. Portable paragraphs

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH` — "It was the one object in the apartment that didn't require a decision. Restful to look at." — The glaze observation before it is inhabited; these two sentences then caption the dish's symbolic job for the reader, and the caption could sit unchanged in any decision-fatigue chapter of any contemporary women's-fiction novel (*One True Loves*, *Maybe in Another Life*). The calibration allows the dish to be quiet only if it stays inhabited — announcing its function is the un-inhabiting. — ORDER: Cut both sentences. End the paragraph on "She left it there." The cobalt-going-gray-green observation already tells us why her eye rests on it.

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH` — "She ran the test one more time, because it deserved to be run in daylight with coffee, not at 2 a.m." — Decision-hygiene sentence; "it deserved to be run in daylight" is portable quit-your-life prose that would slot into any fresh-start novel's chapter where the heroine finally chooses. The test itself (the *Okay. No chair.* thread beside the right page) is premise-specific and strong. — ORDER: Strip the "deserved" moralizing; state the literal condition (morning, coffee, phone in hand) and go straight to putting the right page beside the screen.

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH` — "in the apartment she was leaving for a colder room with better light." — The brave-choice equation compressed to a portable epigram: sacrifice traded for art in one balanced apposition, detachable into any artist-heroine novel's last page. The nail, "level enough," and the sightline from the table are the earned material; the apposition is the moral of the story stapled on. — ORDER: Cut the apposition and end on the physical facts. The cold and the light are already paid for on the page — FEB = coat, the flat gray light across ten feet of empty wall.

Checked and passed: "It was still good. That was the entire problem with the left page." — stamp-shaped, but it is welded to the physical notebook page, and the earned-stay test requires the offer's goodness to be named once and cost something; this is the single place the chapter does it.

## 2. Summarized pressure

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "June watched her read it and watched her decline to read it out loud." — The pressure of being seen mid-decision is reported from above (and the caption skirts the diagnosis-of-silence line the reading guide bans for speech). The reader should live it in what Ruth's eyes actually stop on and what June's hands do about it. — ORDER: Replace the caption with the specific dwell — which object Ruth's look lands on longest (the receipt's penciled capitals) — and one June micro-action (not turning it over). June's receipt-stare at "so she wouldn't look at Ruth" already carries the second half; don't pre-explain it.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "It came out before she'd decided to say it." — Stock involuntary-speech report; the blurt is narrated instead of staged. The pressure (saying the deadline out loud to witnesses makes it real) should live in the scene's timing. — ORDER: Cut the sentence. Place "I have a job answer due at noon tomorrow" against a departure beat — Ruth's hand on the strap, Sam at the door with the box — so the blurt's timing shows the loss of control the narrator currently claims.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "pointed at the studio by a route that had nothing to do with her" — Elegant zoom-out that summarizes the relinquishment (the catalogs returning to Theo's orbit without contact) as theme rather than letting the reader stand in the doorway while it happens. — ORDER: Stay at door height: the box on the landing, the sound of it going down the stairs, then the visible floor. Cut the route clause; "a quarter before eleven on Thursday" and the cleared floor are doing the real work.

Checked and passed: the post-Nia-call beat — "June set the phone down with the print side of the receipt still facing her. She turned the receipt square with the table edge, Marchetti header up." — the exact spot the calibration flagged for essay-summary stays entirely in objects; the raw draft's "decided for her" intrusion did not survive and nothing replaced it.

## 3. Polished / therapeutic / aphoristic dialogue

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE` — "I'm calling before the wire because you deserve a phone call and not an email, and I'm calling to say no." — Speechwriting symmetry (two "I'm calling" clauses, the courtesy clause balanced against the refusal); June under exposure compresses and self-interrupts, and nothing here marks the polish as rehearsal or makes it cost. — ORDER: Break the parallel. Let "Torres." force her off the prepared opening — the no arrives early, flat, or after a false start; the phone-not-email courtesy can survive as a fragment if it survives at all.

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE` — "But I know myself in rooms like that. I'd hang the shows well. I'd fix what broke. I'd say I was painting after hours, and then the proof press would need trueing before a class. Or the sink would--" ... "I'd still be the person with keys." — Job-refusal rhetoric: a fluent conditional cascade opening with a therapy-grade self-diagnosis and landing a quotable inversion of Nia's own "keys day one." The proof-press concrete and the sink self-interruption are real; the frame around them is too articulate about her own pattern. — ORDER: Cut "I know myself in rooms like that." Keep the proof press and the sink fumble; then let the summary fail — she can't name the pattern cleanly, and either Nia supplies the word or the silence does. "The person with keys" must arrive damaged or not at all.

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE` — "The no is mine. It isn't about the program." — The surviving residue of the raw draft's "staying for herself" thesis line: ownership aphorism, portable brave-choice language, chapter-title shape. The ownership is already demonstrated by the call, the counter she reads off the page, and the freelance-install offer that follows. — ORDER: Cut "The no is mine." Let the paragraph run from the wall sentence to the material closer ("If the program ever needs freelance install, I itemize and I'm fast"), which is the same claim in June's actual currency.

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE` — "I ran the math with you three weeks ago and I win the math." — Coined-phrase repartee ("ran the math... win the math") in a call the chapter needs to stay plain; Ch15 already required a Nia zinger-density repair, and this rebuilds the shape. — ORDER: Flatten one clause — "I ran the math with you three weeks ago. It wasn't close" or equivalent; keep her brisk, not quotable.

Checked and passed: "February is a blank line in my notebook" — sheen-adjacent, but it is the literal notation (FEB = ) read off the right page as the scene stipulates, it is followable as fact, and it sets up Nia's plain "That's a worse offer." Also passed: Ruth's "I kept them to myself and called it manners... Not all of it was" — this is her one licensed editorial-sharp line for the appearance, and the chapter builds nothing else sharp around her.

## 4. Figurative where literal would win

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "the north window's honest light" — "Honest" is a value transferred to light, the one dressed-up phrase in an Asha speech otherwise made of rates and dates; her card bars mystique. — ORDER: Substitute the working fact a hanger-installer would give: north light doesn't move on you — "north window, the light stays put all day," or name what it's good for (matching values without chasing sun).

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "She did the rest before it could cool." — Resolve-as-temperature figure from the nerve-loss family; the timestamps that follow (11:14, 11:20) prove the urgency literally and better. — ORDER: Replace with the literal condition — she did the rest standing, phone still warm from the call is out too; simplest is a plain "She did the rest before noon" and let the timestamps carry the speed.

Checked and passed: "that milky cobalt that went gray-green at the rim if the light came from the left" and the thumb-sized pooled-black flaw that "was the best part of the dish" — this is the register the book wants: literal painter's-eye precision doing the emotional work without announcing it. Likewise the printer "feeding a page and catching for half a second" during Nia's pause.

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**Chapter verdict: `LLM-CLEAN-FOUND`** — 12 orders across four sections. The chapter's material spine is sound — the receipt, the notebook math, the dish flaw, the Ridgewood photo, and the leaving-side study all hold under pressure — but a residue of the raw draft's thesis impulse survives as captions on the dish and the closing line, a symmetrized refusal opener, and two self-diagnosis lines in the Nia call that resolve June's pattern more fluently than she should be able to. Execute the orders above; do not touch the notation lists, the freight-noise call, or the post-call receipt beat.
