Inputs gathered. The audit follows, in the template's Required verdict format.

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# Thought-Development Audit — Chapter 11: Categories

id: thought_development | owner: claude | tier: risk | trigger: flag:reflective-chapter (per chapter card 11)
Stance: skeptical professional editor. Every verdict below is shown with the strongest counter-candidate considered, per the template's no-bare-pass rule.

## Reflective passage inventory (traced)

Seven sustained reflective units identified (interiority ≥ ~3 sentences or essayistic narration):

- **P1** — "The shop felt older than the block. Probably not. It was older than Dom." (¶ beginning "Aiello Frame & Glass was on Orchard Street")
- **P2** — "June was there because she knew how to carry glass… She was choosing to call that efficiency." (¶ after the board/dollar exchange)
- **P3** — the frame-form paragraph after the hospital/HR exchange: "June taped the second corner and kept her eyes on the tape. A mixed gray could be warm and cool at once… She did not volunteer this."
- **P4** — "Forty times rent had a clean arithmetic sound. Mid-December did not. Her phone sat in her coat with Nia's unanswered thread above the group chat."
- **P5** — the empty-studio passage: "The studio between Tuesdays had no brush noise… for as long as Odile left the rack as it was," continuing through the cubby paragraph: "KIM / RIVERA had the same slash as NAIR / ADLER. So did PARK / BRENNAN. The cubbies were all one width."
- **P6** — the text-deletion beat: "June typed *he wasn't*, watched the cursor blink twice, and deleted it letter by letter."
- **P7** — the closing reflection: "Who picks up for you. At the street door she'd meant her answer as a dodge… a shelf where her name sat left of the slash," through "carrying nothing."

## Criterion 1 — Pre-solved reflection

**DEVELOPED.**

Straight-line test applied to each landing:

- **P3** (the highest-risk passage). First sentence: "June taped the second corner and kept her eyes on the tape." Last: "She did not volunteer this." Moved adjacent, "this" has no referent — the middle ("A mixed gray could be warm and cool at once. She knew that from paint; she disliked meeting it on a half-sheet at a frame shop") *is* the thought, not connective tissue. Critically, the passage does not adjudicate Ruth vs. Sam. Sam's six hours and Ruth's affidavit year are both left standing, and June's only conclusion is a refusal to speak — which is the chapter card's required outcome ("thematic pressure without advice"; the banned abstract sentence "privacy and cover are not the same thing" does not appear in any paraphrase). The thought is unresolved and grounded in paint craft; per this audit's own allowance, that is correct, not evasion.
- **P5**. The landing "The cubbies were all one width" cannot be written after the opening "The packet cubbies ran along the shelf above the flat files" without loss: stripped of the middle ("KIM / RIVERA had the same slash as NAIR / ADLER. So did PARK / BRENNAN"), one-width is shelf carpentry, not category pressure. The middle supplies the equivalence — a real married couple, an unlabeled twenty-year partnership, and a fake couple identical in Odile's pencil — and the prose never names that equivalence; the slash does it. Same result for the rack sentence: "The painting kept showing what it had shown since Tuesday, to anyone who came in, for as long as Odile left the rack as it was" requires the preceding drying-rack detail (Theo at the bolt, capped umber — correctly inherited from the chapter 10 summary) to mean *her attention is on public display in her absence*.
- **P7** (strongest counter-candidate in the chapter, examined hardest). Path traced: the question → reclassification of her own dodge against Ruth's "twenty years" → the chained honest version ("The honest version had a phone number in it, and the number had a name, and the name was already penciled into a cubby eight feet away with a slash holding it to hers") → external evidence (the line filled in by others "since the first night at Sonia's"; "Mara had just done it again from a couch in Queens" — both verifiable in continuity: the Ch 03 cohort adoption, Mara's FRAME HEROES text two paragraphs up) → "The box, like Dom's, was too small for *authorized*" → refusal of the question. Test for a polished conclusion movable to the top: "The box, like Dom's, was too small for *authorized*" placed after the opening sentence fails — "the box" only means the cubby slash because the number→name→cubby chain built it. The thought genuinely moves: it opens believing the dodge worked and discovers mid-paragraph that the answer is already written down by other hands. It ends unresolved (she refuses the question rather than answering it), which the thread ledger requires — June's stay/leave decision is PROTECTED until Ch 22 and the fake-couple lie until the showcase. A resolved version here would be a continuity defect, not better prose.
- **P2**. "She was choosing to call that efficiency" cannot follow the opening sentence; "that" is the concrete middle fact (typed *I'm in* "before she reached the part about timing"), which contradicts the stated reasons and is the development.

No passage poses a question, states its answer, and moves on.

## Criterion 2 — Missing concrete development

**DEVELOPED.**

Checked every reflective unit for development-by-abstraction (stacked adjectives, restated stakes) and for artificial asides faking texture. All seven develop through scene-resident objects: tape and kraft (P3), the half-sheet form's actual printed lines (RELEASED TO / RELATIONSHIP TO TICKET HOLDER), mixed gray from June's trade (P3), the lease email's arithmetic against her own mid-December lease clock (P4 — the Nia thread is carried correctly from Ch 09), nested stools and historical turpentine (P5), the cursor blinking twice and letter-by-letter deletion (P6), the cubby slash and Dom's too-small box (P7). Strongest counter-candidates for artificial aside: "It was the nicest thing about him" (Dom) and P1's "Probably not. It was older than Dom." Both survive — each emerges from material already on the counter (Dom's incuriosity about the form; the DOM masking-tape bib), and P1 is in fact the rule's sanctioned doubling-back, a first guess corrected on the page. (The mechanical gate's `fieldguide-amplification-echo` WATCH hit on that line should be read as this sanctioned move, not echo padding.) No flags.

## Criterion 3 — Split cumulative movement

**DEVELOPED.**

Every claim/reason split in the reflective passages was tested against its merged alternative, per the focused instruction:

- "At the street door she'd meant her answer as a dodge, and Ruth had matched it with twenty years of her own. That was worse." Merged candidate: *"…twenty years of her own, which was worse."* The break survives: the fragment is the beat where the dodge reclassifies, and June's voice card specifies "perception first, judgment second" interiority and shorter syntax under pressure — the verdict arriving as its own sentence is her cognition, not chop.
- "Forty times rent had a clean arithmetic sound. Mid-December did not." Merged candidate: *"…a clean arithmetic sound; mid-December did not."* The period survives because the second sentence is where Ben's math snags on June's private lease clock — the break enacts the snag, and the semicolon version smooths exactly what should catch.
- "She did not want the question. She especially did not want it standing in an empty studio…" Merged candidate: *"She did not want the question, especially not standing…"* The anaphoric repetition is escalation doing useful work; the merge deletes the second subject-verb and with it the refusal's intensification.
- Counter-evidence that cumulative movement is present where it belongs: "She knew that from paint; she disliked meeting it on a half-sheet at a frame shop"; "The honest version had a phone number in it, and the number had a name, and the name was already penciled into a cubby eight feet away"; "That part was simple, and it was hers alone"; "The bundles rode well; Dom's twine was the good kind, and June revised her opinion of the dollar." The chapter already writes claim-plus-consequence inside single sentences when the movement is one movement.

No split flagged: every break examined does identifiable work.

## Criterion 4 — Allowable efficiency (allowances honored explicitly)

**DEVELOPED** (correctly applied; nothing wrongly excused, nothing wrongly flagged).

- The Dom counter transaction and the Priya/Ben lease debate are dialogue scenes under the plain-speech floor (Reading Guide §2); their linearity is the register, not pre-solved reflection. Sam's hospital story ("I wasn't on the form. That's the whole story.") is clipped *spoken* testimony and matches Sam's card ("names the avoidant thing gently but directly").
- June's clipped interior fragments are licensed by her voice card: "under pressure: shorter syntax," "compresses when exposed," "gets quieter, funnier, more exact, then exits." The chapter's close ("She pulled the door until the latch caught… carrying nothing") is the card's exit reflex performed, with the unresolved question deliberately left in the studio — and the ledger's protection rows (stay/leave not resolved before Ch 22; fake-couple lie not resolved before showcase) require exactly this irresolution.
- P7's refusal to answer "Who picks up for you" is a thought the plot needs unresolved; it was not flagged under criterion 1 for that reason, and that allowance is claimed here explicitly rather than silently.

## REVISION ORDERS

None. Every candidate failure examined above survives with its evidence quoted; issuing cosmetic orders against passes would itself violate the stance. One non-blocking note outside this audit's scope, for the tics tracker rather than revision: the gate's `reddit1-repeated-descriptor` WATCH (39 hits, "against" ×7 in scene 1) is a diction-frequency matter, not a thought-development defect, and is referred to the prose-tic audit owner.

**OVERALL: DEVELOPED**
