Audit written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_12.thought_development.md`. Full audit text follows.

---

# Thought-Development Audit — Chapter 12: The Memory He Chooses

id: thought_development | owner: claude | tier: risk
trigger: flag:reflective-chapter (chapter card 12, flags line)
chapter file: output/chapters/chapter_12.md

## Reflective passages identified

- P1 — card-voiding interiority, lines 3 / 11 / 13 (Coney Island, radiator, the unwritten card)
- P2 — preparation inventory, line 17 (chairs, glasses, pens, twenty-two hours)
- P3 — four-questions/repairs passage, line 79
- P4 — quotation-marks beat, line 89
- P5 — "Now I have it" Tuesday projection, line 97
- P6 — closing routine and train note, lines 105–109

June's erased-wall monologue (lines 67–75) is direct speech, not interiority; it is procedural and linear because her competence is the content. Out of scope for criteria 1–3; noted under criterion 4.

## Criterion 1 — Pre-solved reflection: DEVELOPED

Straight-line test applied to every passage above.

- P5 (the chapter's highest-risk paragraph): first sentence "the card under his pen looked too small for what she had put on it"; last sentence "He looked at PARTNER on Odile's card, propped there against the tape dispenser." The last could not follow the first without loss: the middle supplies the specific tomorrow that makes PARTNER mean what it now means — "Mara would ask the table how the handoff went, because Mara would absolutely ask" (her voice card: "How did you two meet? No, the real version"), "stand next to June while she set out greens," "Ruth would watch" (Ch11: Ruth's pickup question, the uncorrected group-thread thanks). The thought stops at "Three weeks ago the performance had been a schedule. He had been good at schedules." and never states the thesis ("now the feelings are real, so acting is harder"); the conclusion is displaced into the object set up at line 9. That displacement is the developed version, not an evasion.
- P1, line 13: "Pain was not the problem." is the wrong-first-guess the rule asks for; the correction routes through the Ch10 usefulness wound ("nobody in it was useful to anyone") and lands on the unresolved actual stake ("if he gave it to June she would have it") rather than on a verdict.
- P6, train note: tested whether "GREEN FIRST. THE WHITE HAS TO COVER SOMETHING." could sit directly after "On the train he took June's card out." It could not — the line is only earned by her primer-order procedure (orange ghosts, twenty minutes of dead salmon, "you'd never know"), which the scene's middle built, and it stays in paint vocabulary in block capitals on the card, unglossed into theme.
- Strongest counter-candidate considered: the doubled "right order" (lamp, line 107; train, line 109). This is the closest the chapter comes to grading its own homework — planting the phrase so the landing clicks. It survives because the lamp habit is established as habitual and concrete ("as usual"), and the train sentence carries new content (the added line) rather than restating a conclusion already announced. Noted, not flagged.

## Criterion 2 — Missing concrete development: DEVELOPED

Every rejection and realization is object-funded, none abstraction-stacked:

- Coney Island is rejected through the kite "made from a garbage bag" that "never once gotten airborne," and the failure is named as an image ("a memory with the pit taken out"), not adjectives.
- The radiator card is rejected through the Ch10 painting: "The class had already seen that subject, at easel height, face-out on a rack." The reflection develops from a prior-chapter artifact, not restated stakes.
- P3's repairs are quoted as the actual unspoken sentences (italics), then categorized; the recognition converts to enacted behavior ("What white, exactly?") instead of a stated lesson.
- Artificial-aside check: P2 (chairs/glasses/pens) could be suspected of inserted texture, but it is in-scene action that June then reads back ("You set a table for two index cards"), so it is dramatized material, not a decorative aside.

## Criterion 3 — Split cumulative movement: DEVELOPED

Counter-candidates examined and survived:

- "Charming. Round at every corner. A memory with the pit taken out." (line 3) — fragments, but they enact the preceding sentence ("He could hear exactly how it would sound when he handed it over"): each fragment is a beat of the imagined reception, gathering toward the exact image. The merged version ("Charming, round at every corner — a memory with the pit taken out") loses the heard-verdict cadence. Voice card cover: Theo "under pressure, lists facts."
- "Pain was not the problem. The memory was nine years old and four floors up..." (line 13) — shape-matches the choppy pattern, but the full stop performs the dismissal before the long cumulative correction; the break is the doubling-back itself.
- "Three weeks ago the performance had been a schedule. He had been good at schedules." (line 97) — claim plus qualification split; the gap holds the unstated present tense ("and tomorrow it isn't one"), which a merged sentence would have to state outright, breaking the paragraph's displacement strategy.
- Where the rule wants cumulative sentences, the chapter writes them: "...and dropped them in the bin, because anything he kept in that drawer he eventually used" (line 107); "...because there was no honest way to paint that white without doing the work in the right order, and the right order was the whole memory" (line 109).

## Criterion 4 — Allowable efficiency: DEVELOPED (allowances honored, named)

- "The quotation marks felt necessary. He did not examine why." (line 89) — thought the plot needs unresolved: *you'd never know* is material for the Week 6 erased-wall fear canvas (standing canon; S-MEMORY-01/S-FEAR-01 feed Ch13/16). Demanding examination here would pre-spend later chapters. Allowed, and correctly object-bound.
- "the unlabeled panel behind them exactly where he had put it weeks ago, its problem still separate" (line 107) — S-PORTRAIT-01 is protected until Ch23; the narration names the problem without solving it. Allowed.
- June's wall monologue (lines 67–75) is linear procedure in direct speech; her voice card establishes clipped, exact, craft-noun cognition ("compresses when exposed"), and the linearity is the characterization — she narrates the erasure as a job because that is the wound. Allowed.

Watch counts: the mechanical gate's 7 WATCH patterns (repeated descriptors, trailing participles, one three-part cadence) are sentence-level tics for the tics tracker; none implicate thought development.

## REVISION ORDERS

None. No passage flagged under criteria 1–3; all criterion-4 efficiencies are covered by a named allowance.

OVERALL: DEVELOPED
