# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 24: *First Snow* (Current Regression, Round 2)

Cold read of `output/chapters/chapter_24.md` (4,509 words; mechanical gate open=0, allowlisted=0). Book register per `READING_GUIDE.md`; voice cards for June, Theo, Odile, Ruth, Sam, Mara, Luis, Priya, Ben.

**Verification of the three prior current-regression orders** (before-snapshot `.0049` → after-snapshot `.0051`, matching live text):

- **Portrait decision (now L95):** the stamp `and she was done doing things to prove things` is gone. Live text stops at `...another performance. She wanted to see it. That was allowed to be the reason.` No replacement thesis inserted. **Executed clean.**
- **Odile assignment reveal (now L125):** the gloss `eight weeks of a machine built to make two strangers actually look at each other` and the `eight weeks of... eight weeks of` anaphora are gone. Live text lists the three cards and cuts straight to `And it had worked.` No replacement stamp. **Executed clean.**
- **Final goodbye (now L173):** the anaphora `Her own water, her own work, her own cold walk to her own train` is gone. Live text ends the beat on the physical action `She shifted the jar to her other hand and hooked the portfolio into the crook of the same arm.` No replacement stamp. **Executed clean.**

All three excisions removed managerial-altitude thesis and left the surrounding object/action work to carry it. The chapter was then re-read from scratch against the four questions.

---

## 1. Portable paragraphs (could slot into another novel unnoticed)

Checked the opening urn setup (L3), the Odile-watches-the-room characterization (L13), the cohort exits (L79–81), and the late two-hander romance beat (L153). The book's density of painting vocabulary, exact placement logistics, and cohort-specific care moves makes almost nothing liftable; the one paragraph that reaches toward a genre-standard sentiment is the strongest test.

**Strongest counter-candidate — `PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH` checked, passes:** L153 — *"He nearly said something and drank the idea instead, and she watched it cost him and watched him pay it, and she liked him so much in that second it was faintly annoying."* The sentiment at its core (*liked him so much... it was faintly annoying*) is a romance-genre staple and, on its own, could sit in a Beth O'Leary or Emily Henry chapter. It passes because both ends are bolted to book-specific material a generic novel could not carry: *drank the idea instead* is the established Theo restraint/cup-misdirect callback (his usefulness-swallowed-instead-of-acted, per the Ch22 lineage), and *watched it cost him and watched him pay it* runs the book's fiscal/debt register onto withheld action. The saving move is June's own deflation — *faintly annoying* undercuts the swell in her voice, which is exactly the June tic (self-aimed puncture) a portable version would delete. Strip the callback and the undercut and the sentence dies; that dependency is what makes it non-portable.

Also checked: L3 *"She left it a tower and counted that, privately, as growth"* reads faintly self-help in isolation but is anchored to a concrete cup-tower-vs-fanned-arc decision and undercut by *privately*; L13 *"the only thing... Odile ever really watched"* is mentor-shaped but load-bears the reveal engine (Odile watches people, not art). Neither is liftable.

## 2. Summarized pressure (reported from a managerial altitude vs. lived in scene)

This is the section the three excised stamps belonged to; with them gone, I re-scanned every interiority block: the portrait ache (L101–103), the ledger read (L119, L129), and the close (L163, L175). The three removed lines were the genuine managerial-altitude prose — resolved authorial glosses detached from the physical beat. What remains is June's characterized *taking-a-made-thing-apart* cognition, which the scene explicitly primes (*"She was good at taking a made thing apart for the order it got made in, and this one came apart plain"*). One passage is the chapter's closest call.

**Strongest counter-candidate — `SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` checked, passes:** L129 — *"The same withholding June had finally made Theo answer for over coffee, except Odile had done it longer and colder and would be answering for less, because she was leaving, and because she had put the proof on a page instead of in a sentence."* A strict reading could call this the narrator doing the reader's comparative math — synthesizing the Odile/Theo parallel and ranking the two betrayals. It stays on the inhabited side for three reasons: it is not detached (it sits inside live shame — *"The shame came up fast enough that she could have torn the page for that alone"* — not above it); it is book-specific and unrepeatable elsewhere (coffee/Theo, the leaving, *proof on a page instead of in a sentence*), so it fails the portability test that defines this audit's target defect; and it is June's established analytic register turned on her own grievance rather than a flat thesis-stamp. The contrast with the excised lines is the tell: those were resolved, decorative anaphora glossing the scene's meaning; this is bitter, specific, in-motion cognition. It inhabits the anger; it does not manage it from altitude.

Also checked: L103 *"That was the ache, standing there with the pipes going"* names the feeling directly, but the naming is tied to the ache's material source (week-three value, the pipes) and is the sanctioned "name it when the naming is the event" case, not a weather report.

## 3. Polished / therapeutic / aphoristic dialogue

Checked the two emotional peaks — June's autonomy claim to Odile (L131) and Odile's method-admission (L127) — plus Theo's restraint confession (L73) and the portrait exchange (L143–151). The plain-speech floor here is a feature the reading guide protects, so the test is whether any line arrives pre-resolved with workshop fluency instead of under pressure.

**Strongest counter-candidate — `POLISHED-DIALOGUE` checked, passes:** L131 — *"It worked, and I got a life out of it, and it still wasn't yours to run. I'd have made most of the same choices. They'd have been mine."* The composed triple and the clean autonomy statement are the most aphorism-adjacent lines in the chapter. It passes because it is the book's explicitly sanctioned direct-statement register (the guide names plain declaratives as the book's strongest beats), it lands under live pressure (spoken over the dry ledger line, seconds before she tears the page), and — decisively — it *withholds*: June says the autonomy claim aloud but keeps the shame from L129 entirely private, refusing to itemize the wound. That gap between what she thinks and what she says is the opposite of therapeutic over-articulation; the composure is anger held in check, not fluency.

Also checked: Odile L127 *"I'm retiring, not dead"* is a memorable-line hit, but Odile is the one character licensed for those, and the surrounding speech is a blunt refusal-to-apologize of five short sentences — not an oracle monologue and not the over-explaining-the-plants the chapter card warns against (she never walks the assignment cards). Theo L73 *"I've been carrying paragraphs around in my pocket all night and not saying them. It's exhausting"* is his over-explaining habit aimed at himself, a fumble rather than mastery. All hold.

## 4. Figurative where literal precision would beat it

Checked the snow close (L157–163), the window/mirror (L155), and the ledger interiority (L129). The instruction to keep first snow literal, cold, and material makes the snow the primary object of suspicion.

**Strongest counter-candidate — `FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` checked, passes:** L157/L161 — *"the fat slow kind that can't yet decide if it means it"* ... *"It was falling there too; the glare swallowed it. She had to look where the street went black."* The one soft personification (*can't yet decide if it means it*) is the sole spot the snow leans toward weather-as-feeling. It passes because it is immediately bracketed and overruled by pure physics in Theo's mouth — *"It won't stick. Ground's too warm. It'll be wet by morning"* — and reframed by June as an optics problem (snow invisible except in the streetlight cone; she has to look where the street goes dark to see it fall). That is a painter's material observation about visibility, not an emotional underline; the snow stays cold, wet, and literal, and the ending's meaning is carried instead by the object-and-cost stack (the rinse-water jar, *eight hundred dollars due Thursday*). No literal substitution would do more here — the literal is already doing the work.

Also checked: L129 *"holding a corner of the map"* is the chapter's one live metaphor for partial knowledge; it survives because the literal is set right beside it — the withheld specifics (*what to show, whose arm to take, what to say in a critique*) — so the figure compresses rather than replaces observation. L155's window-*mirror* is literal glass physics (dark pane + interior light) that June kills the lamps to see *through*; it is the inverse of the banned epiphany-via-mirror, not an instance of it.

---

The three prior orders are executed with no replacement thesis-stamps; the snow is held literal and material; concrete painting vocabulary and object logistics are doing scene work and are not penalized. Each section's strongest counter-candidate is book-specific, pressure-bound, or materially bracketed — none is the smooth, portable, machine-clean prose this audit hunts.

Chapter verdict: INHABITED
