The completed audit, saved to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_24.positive_prose.md`:

---

# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 24: First Snow — Round 1 (cold read, current integrated text)

id: positive_prose_audit | owner: claude | tier: risk | pass: cold read, `output/chapters/chapter_24.md`, round 1

inputs: `output/chapters/chapter_24.md` (current integrated text, post Claude-tic repair batch); `../checks/audits/positive_prose_audit.md` (binding template); `premise/READING_GUIDE.md` §2/§4/§5/§6/§8; `output/style_and_voice.md` (June, Theo, Odile, Mara, Luis, Priya, Ben, Ruth, Sam voice cards); `output/tics.md` (Ch24-draft calibration); `output/critiques/codex/mechanical/chapter_24_post_tic_quality_gate_detail.json` (open=0, watch=97); `output/outline/chapter_cards.md` §CHAPTER CARD - 24: First Snow; `output/critiques/codex/chapter_24.claude_tic_audit.md` (TIC-CLEAN).

Standard of comparison: this book's own rules, not generic literary taste — §2 register (interiority through object/action/dialogue before naming; no paragraph-length emotional weather; plain-speech floor; no dialogue diagnosis), §4 motif caps (first snow literal; one deliberate light-image), §5 care moves never captioned, §6 tic catalog (mirror-epiphany and weather-as-underline banned), §8 smallness / blind-POV / earned-stay. The mechanical gate is clean and the Claude-tic pass returned TIC-CLEAN; this audit judges a different property — portable posture, managerial summary, pre-resolved articulacy, figure-over-fact — so those clears are not clears here. Per the chapter-specific instruction, concrete painting vocabulary and exact object logistics are not penalized where they do scene work (the L99 portrait value-description, L19's pentimento, the L85 flat-file check-out, and the L155 material-cost stack stand as craft and are held below).

Scope note: this is the finale carrying seven-plus payoffs (showcase, blue dish, Ruth read, portrait, Odile ledger, first snow, cold walk). The failure mode it is most exposed to is not a bad sentence but an *arranged* one — a narrator tag or character maxim that closes a payoff the objects already delivered. The findings concentrate there. Line numbers cite the current file.

## 1. Which paragraphs feel portable to another novel?

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "Priya remembered June's coffee as the coffee Priya would have wanted, and that was fine; that was what it was to be handed something by a person still learning to ask." (L45) — the beat itself (a friend brings the wrong-milk coffee unasked) is owned and specific, but the closing clause converts it into a transferable aphorism about "a person still learning to ask," a generic characterization that would sit unchanged in any Emily Henry or Beth O'Leary ensemble where a well-meaning friend's imperfect gesture earns a warm summarizing tag. — ORDER: cut "that was what it was to be handed something by a person still learning to ask"; end on the too-much-milk fact and June taking it anyway; Priya's manage-to-ask arc is already carried by the physical tell present in the same line ("caught herself doing it, and set it down anyway") — let that stand untagged.`

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "a man who paints you from the back and won't swing you toward him already understands that some looking doesn't come with a report." (L105) — "some looking doesn't come with a report" is a free-standing maxim about seeing and being-seen; detached from the flat-file it could headline any literary romance about an artist and a sitter. It is the watch-listed "being seen" workshop-maxim in narrator voice. — ORDER: replace the aphorism with the concrete decision it abstracts — June resolving to tell Theo she turned the panel but not what she saw — rendered as the specific thing she will and won't say, keyed to this canvas; strip the generalizing "a man who... already understands" frame that lifts the sentence out of the room.`

Held (checked, not portable): L3's opening cups-tower paragraph reads composed but is welded to this urn/radiator/wall and to June's arc-object (the tower she refuses to fan into an arc); L159 "Her own water, her own work, her own cold walk to her own train" is portable in *rhythm* only — every noun is an object she is at that moment carrying (rinse-water home, portfolio, the Ridgewood train), so it does not transplant. Strongest counter-candidate under the "being seen" watch: L99 "He'd painted her not knowing she was seen." — passes because it is welded to the specific painted pose (three-quarter from behind, eyes on the rinse-water) and to his refusal to swing her toward the painter; it names this composition, not a portable truth.

## 2. Where does the prose summarize pressure rather than make the reader inhabit it?

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "and Mara, who two months ago would have translated that into a warm gloss about how Luis always understood a space, closed her mouth and let the dish sit there saying exactly what Luis wanted it to say and nothing extra." (L43) — the pressure is Mara's effort not to translate Luis (her arc); the counterfactual "who two months ago would have..." reports that growth from altitude and does the reader's arc-math, when "closed her mouth and let the dish sit" already inhabits it. — ORDER: cut the counterfactual gloss; keep "closed her mouth and let the dish sit"; if the restraint needs a beat, render the swallowed translation as a physical tell (a half-started sentence she stops), not a narrator summary of the habit she used to have.`

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "The painting didn't fix that. It wasn't trying to. It recorded the looking and left the rest faced to the brick, where he'd left the last of the deciding to her." (L101) — the pressure is June's ache at seeing herself painted "not knowing she was seen"; the narrator manages that ache into a settled reading of what the portrait is and isn't doing — the watch-listed gloss explaining what the portrait already makes visible. The faced-in panel and the pose have already said "recorded, not fixed." — ORDER: cut the "didn't fix / wasn't trying to / recorded the looking" exegesis; leave the ache raw on the object (the half-step edge he held, the face he denied himself) and let June's next act — turning the panel back to the brick (L103) — carry "left the deciding to her" without the narrator naming it.`

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "None of it went onto a wall or into the air, because one part was never the room's to have and the other part had turned out to be sayable in two words by a woman with a good eye. Everything in between belonged to the two of them to keep." (L69) — the scene already inhabited the public/private line (Ruth's two-word read; June's "No. We didn't."; Theo not reaching for the rest). This sentence itemizes that settlement and caps it with the watch-listed "keeping what belongs to two people private" maxim. — ORDER: cut the "one part... the other part..." itemization and the "belonged to the two of them to keep" tag; end on Theo's plain "Nobody needs the rest" and his not reaching, which enact the boundary; do not let the narrator ratify what the two lines of dialogue withheld.`

Held near-misses (checked, cleared narrowly): L93 "She could be a person in a room without a portrait proving it" is arc-thesis shaped and adjacent to the banned mirror-epiphany, but it is June's live reasoning at the decision point and is immediately enacted (she turns the panel anyway, L95), so the thought spurs action rather than replacing it; L123 "eight weeks of a machine built to make two strangers actually look at each other" is summary-shaped but held as reveal-cognition tied to the eight physical cards she is re-seeing ("the eight cards she'd carried home and pinned up and painted from"), the objects present as she reads.

## 3. Where does dialogue sound polished, therapeutic, or aphoristic?

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "Like the room can hold it," he said. (L69) — answering June's "How's it feel to get caught," Theo — logistics-and-objects man, "least articulate with himself," card-banned from "polished aphorisms about care" — reaches for a composed, emotionally-fluent metaphor (the watch-listed "rooms holding truth" maxim) instead of the fumbling plainness his card forces under exposure. He is too articulate about the relief; the line arrives pre-resolved. — ORDER: replace "Like the room can hold it" with a plainer or more fumbled answer, or cut it so he lands directly on the two concrete sentences that follow ("They know we didn't start clean. Nobody needs the rest."); the "the room holds it" reading may be true, but he must arrive at it through fact, not deliver it as a maxim.`

Held (checked, cleared): Theo's "I've been carrying paragraphs around in my pocket all night and not saying them. It's exhausting. I don't know how you've done it your entire life." (L73) is the strongest counter-candidate but passes — a rueful complaint in his "over-explains when ashamed" register turned self-deprecating, concrete to his logistics idiom (paragraphs as objects in a pocket), fumbling ("It's exhausting") rather than resolving, and not a maxim about care. Odile's quotable lines — "You're work that left the building. I keep a record." (L113), "I'm retiring, not dead." (L125) — are licensed by voice card (she alone is cleared for high-density memorable lines) and land as insult-diagnosis, not therapy. June's "It worked, and I got a life out of it, and it still wasn't yours to run." (L129) clears the plain-speech floor unangled. Mara's "That's why dishes exist." (L79) is warm-social plainness inside her register, not wisdom-performance.

## 4. Where would literal precision beat figurative language?

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "all of it thin enough that the first drawing surfaced under the last one, a room remembering an earlier version of itself." (L19) — the literal clause ("the first drawing surfaced under the last one") is the exact pentimento fact and does the full job; the appended personification "a room remembering an earlier version of itself" installs a figure on top of the observation and softens it. Twin in the same paragraph: "the dark she'd built up until the room needed a way out of itself," a figure over the literal painted doorway. — ORDER: end the sentence on the underdrawing surfacing and cut "a room remembering an earlier version of itself"; for the twin, keep the literal (the built-up umber, the doorway that "used to be a stain") and drop "needed a way out of itself."`

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "the pairing true this time and set down on a form instead of inside a story." (L85) — "inside a story" is a figure glossing the meaning (their earlier fake premise) of what is literally two surnames entered in the out/back columns; the concrete act — June signing both their names in her own hand, "the pairing true this time" — already carries the contrast. — ORDER: cut "instead of inside a story"; let the literal signing (both names, her hand, the columns) stand as the true-pairing beat; if a counterweight to the old lie is wanted, point at the form itself, not at "a story."`

Held (checked, not penalized per instruction): L99's portrait description ("the dark of her sweater against the dark of the wall, almost the same note, a half-step apart, the hardest edge there is to hold") is earned value-craft, figure and fact coincident. The first-snow close is the most scrutinized weather passage against the watch-listed "weather against dark": "the glare swallowed it. She had to look where the street went black." (L153) holds as literal optical fact (snow visible against dark, invisible against storefront glare; June's painter's-eye value-perception), not weather-as-feeling; "It won't stick... Ground's too warm. It'll be wet by morning." (L151) and "Snow found every place the sweater wasn't and melted there." (L155) keep the snow cold and material. Also held: "put the proof on a page instead of in a sentence" (L127) — near-miss figure, cleared because "page" and "sentence" are literal (Odile's dated ledger line versus Theo's spoken non-confession), the contrast keyed to two real objects in the scene.

## Chapter verdict: LLM-CLEAN-FOUND

Eight revision orders. The chapter is largely inhabited — the showcase blocking, the blue-dish relay, the ledger object, the portrait's value-craft, and the material-cost ending all work through objects and plain speech — but the finale's density of payoffs has pulled in a recurring arranged move: a narrator tag or character maxim laid on top of a beat the scene already delivered. The load is the two portable maxims (L45 "a person still learning to ask"; L105 "some looking doesn't come with a report") and the three managerial glosses (L43 Mara's counterfactual; L101 the portrait exegesis; L69 the public/private itemization plus "belonged to the two of them to keep") — each names an emotion or arc the objects had already made visible, and each maps to a chapter-specific watch item (being-seen, keeping-two-people's-private, narrator-gloss-on-portrait). Theo's "Like the room can hold it" (L69) is the one dialogue line pitched above his register into the rooms-holding-truth maxim. Two figures (L19 pentimento tag; L85 "inside a story") sit where a literal fact already present outperforms them. None require rewriting scenes; all are cut-or-literalize orders that let the existing objects and plain lines carry the payoffs unarranged. The first snow passes as literal/cold/material and the portrait craft-vocabulary is earned; neither is a finding.
