# Purple Prose & Show-Don't-Tell Audit — Chapter 20: "No Advice / Keys Here" — ROUND 2

Repair verification first. All six round-1 orders are executed in the current text:
1. "The left page won on every line" is gone; line 13 now reads "She'd done it four times and it came out the same every time: the left page won" — one instance of "won," per the order's fold-in option.
2. The dish/Mara `which` chain is broken; line 35 now reads "and it was the best part of the dish. Mara knew it; she'd never let Luis buy her a new set" — juxtaposition, no explanatory connective.
3. "Specific" is deleted; line 61 reads "freight noise behind her, the boom of a gate coming down."
4. The post-call receipt orientation is collapsed to one beat; line 141 reads "June set the phone down and turned the receipt square with the table edge" — the orientation itself now lands exactly once, mid-call at line 129.
5. "Lived" is made literal; line 155 reads "pinned the card where the receipt had been pinned since November."
6. The "spread where both pages were" clause is cut; line 155 ends the receipt's sentence at "put inside the notebook."

No obsolete wording remains to flag.

Watch-lead disposition (leads verified in context, discarded by name): `against` x3 (line 13 receipt squared against the notebook's edge, line 11 "$490 a month against the $1,475," line 15 phone buzzed against the table — all literal position/comparison; the tracker already orders `against` rested in Ch21); `from the sink to the table` (line 3, literal distance joke) and "from here to March" (line 83, Asha's dialogue); `, lifting` (line 29, literal box test); `hands` (line 31 box grip, line 51 Sam's "hand truck" in dialogue, line 161 note inked on the back of her hand — all literal); `time, knees, and carried` (line 37, literal lifting sequence, not thesis cadence); `eyes` (line 39, Ruth visibly reading the table — observable from June's position); the line 91 notebook list (intended logistics notation, gate-cleared as such); "It is" (line 128, June's bare full-form agreement to "That's a worse offer" — voice card licenses full forms "when trying not to fall apart"); "And June, when it opens" (line 135, Nia dialogue continuation); `key` (line 151, "I'll take the key Jan 2," literal object). The tics-row `showcase` lead remains stale — the word appears nowhere in the current chapter text (verified by full read).

## Criterion 1 — Purple spans

**CLEAN**

Banned sub-patterns verified absent: no ripple/stillness similes, no "like a stone"/"rippled through," no "changed everything"/"broke forever"/held-breath epic inflation anywhere in the chapter. The register is arithmetic and object-bound throughout; the two round-1 ornament failures (personified receipt, symbolic spread clause) are gone.

Strongest counter-candidates considered:
- Line 155: "pinned the card where the receipt had been pinned since November" — the executed repair produces "pinned … pinned" in one clause. Checked whether the repair introduced a new defect: the repetition is literal substitution parallelism (new card into the old card's exact station), conveys the swap the paragraph is about, and personifies nothing. Survives.
- Line 55: "the box of catalogs left June's apartment a quarter before eleven on Thursday. The rectangle by the door was bare except for a strip of dust where the box had been." Box-as-subject is mild stylization, but the box literally left, the timestamp is June's deadline-clock habit, and the dust strip is concrete absence as image, not claim. Survives (held from round 1).
- Line 95: "the email she'd been not-sending to Nia for nine days" — a coinage, but it distinguishes active avoidance from neglect, information "hadn't sent" would lose, and it is June's documented self-interruption register. Survives.
- Line 159: "The corner stayed." — fragment-stamp shape of the kind prior rounds killed. Survives because it is the literal result of a stated inspection ("She stepped in once, looking for where the corner failed") in June's exact critique register ("The left edge is good. Don't fix it."). Action-outcome, not maxim.

## Criterion 2 — Telling that restates implied meaning

**CLEAN**

Both round-1 telling failures (the doubled "won" verdict, the tripled receipt orientation) and the `which`-caption are repaired; no narration now seconds what an object or a line of dialogue has already carried. The chapter's emotion runs through the dented VANDERCOOK cross-out, the shiny fold crease, the re-washed dish, and the deleted draft, none of which gets glossed.

Strongest counter-candidates considered:
- Line 43: "June looked at the receipt so she wouldn't look at Ruth." A stated motive — but not a restated one: without the clause the gesture reads neutral, so the clause supplies information rather than duplicating an implication. One clause, no emotion named. Survives.
- Line 99: "The $340 room barely held heat." Third airing of the room's flaw after Asha's "Wear the coat inside until February" (line 83) and before June's "no real heat" to Nia (line 125). Survives because each occurrence is a distinct transaction — warning received, cost weighed alone before the call, cost stated aloud to make her counter honestly worse — and the payoff stays in the notebook ("FEB = coat," line 155) with no narration explaining it. At cap: Ch21 must not restate the cold room.
- Line 13: "She'd done it four times and it came out the same every time: the left page won." Summary of off-page re-checking — but evidenced by the object ("The pencil had gone shiny where she'd folded and unfolded the corner," line 3) rather than duplicating the ledger, and now stated exactly once. Survives.
- Line 77: "I did want to feel less bad." Direct naming under Asha's direct challenge — the naming is the event, which the guide's interiority discipline explicitly permits. Survives.

## Criterion 3 — Allowable telling

**CLEAN**

Checked every compression stretch against the duplication/replacement test. "She did the rest before noon" (line 145) and the logistics run (Asha text, Kessler email, Dana text, landlord notice) remain correct compression: the scene the reader had to live through — the no, with its reason found mid-call — was fully dramatized at lines 101–141, and the aftermath executes at the speed June executes. Strongest counter-candidate: "She had not believed that when she painted it" (line 159) — one line of past interiority that buys the present verification beat; compression, not duplication of anything shown. The Dana-terms recital inside Asha's call (line 83) is dialogue doing first-delivery of facts, not summary of a needed scene. Survives.

## Criterion 4 — POV-bound sensory detail

**CLEAN**

The round-1 self-labeling adjective is gone; the gate boom now stands unlabeled. Every sensory notation in the chapter routes through June's body or the phone at her ear.

Strongest counter-candidates considered:
- Line 71: "A pallet jack went by wherever she was." Sound down a phone line, explicitly marked as unlocated — the narration refuses knowledge June doesn't have. POV-true. Survives.
- Line 107: "a printer feeding a page and catching for half a second" — the half-second catch is the ear of someone waiting through a pause after saying no. Survives.
- Line 5: "the glaze that milky cobalt that went gray-green at the rim if the light came from the left." Conditional-light color behavior is the focal painter's eye exactly; excused explicitly by the guide's voice line "she names pigments, edges, kinds of light." On the light cap: the chapter's one deliberate light image remains the Dana photo ("flat gray light across ten feet of empty wall," line 151, with "June looked at the light longest" as the shown want); the dish rim is object description and "the floor going warm where the afternoon came in" (line 159) is depicted content inside the Ch18 study. No breach; Ch21 should not add a fourth light notation of any kind.

## Criterion 5 — Pressure-matched language

**CLEAN**

Syntax tracks pressure across all four sections: short declaratives through the Thursday table math and the Friday execution run; clipped call rhythm with Asha (freight-door urgency) and with Nia (the no delivered in single facts); the chapter's only layered syntax arrives in the study-inspection close, its one reflective beat. Concrete nouns hold at every impact point — receipt, dish, box, W-9, nail.

Strongest counter-candidates considered:
- Line 3: "Twenty-six hours, give or take the walk from the sink to the table." Deadpan under deadline — but self-aimed jokes are June's documented stress behavior, and the joke's content is the deadline itself. Survives.
- The ten-feet-of-wall/north-window refrain (lines 11, 83, 125, 129, 151): each occurrence is transactional in a different mode — notebook figure, Asha's terms, stated counter, turned-over receipt, photo evidence — and none is captioned as meaning. The chapter buys the wall and never says the wall is hope. Survives; a lyrical fifth in Ch21 would breach.
- Line 161: "one nail, level enough. Thirty-one days until Kessler's armory load-in." Plain nouns and a count where a lesser draft would thesis the ending; the earned-stay caption the calibration fears never appears in narration. Survives.

## REVISION ORDERS

None. All six round-1 orders are verified executed (see repair verification above), and round 2 found no remaining instance in any criterion that clears the flagging bar. Standing cautions carried to Ch21, not orders on this text: rest `against`; no fourth light notation; no further cold-room restatement; no lyrical fifth use of the wall/window refrain.

OVERALL: CLEAN
