All inputs read — the audit spec, current chapter text, reading guide, voice cards, gate report, tics tracker, tic audit, round 6, and the full genericization thread confirming which restorations should be present. Performing the cold read now and writing the round-7 verdict.

# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 20 (*No Advice / Keys Here*) — Round 7 (current-text verification after Genericization repair)

Cold read of the current text against the reading guide register (interiority through object and action; plain-speech floor; June compresses and gets visually exact when exposed; no dialogue diagnosis) and the June/Ruth/Sam/Asha/Nia voice cards. Verification scope honored first: all restored material named in the calibration is present in the form the genericization rounds adjudicated, and none has drifted since round 3's line-referenced collation — the painting-distance figure (line 13), the provisional stairwell scarf (line 23), Ruth's `"Some of it was easier for me."` (line 41), Sam's freight/hand-truck lines (lines 29, 51), Asha's terms turn with the decorative radiator and `"Cheap enough to forgive."` (lines 83, 87), the Theo-independent Ridgewood test with `scumbled over need` (line 99), Nia's column exchange and defended clause (lines 127–135), the spoken `"It's 10:52"` (line 139), and the Dana/Kessler day counts (line 161). The specific hunt targets — choosing-herself residue, column-exchange polish, `scumbled over need` drift, and a final-page epigram effect — were each run to ground and are adjudicated in their sections below. A full-chapter vocabulary sweep finds no *brave, deserve, leap, terrifying*, no version-of-herself construction, no staying-for slogan, and no narration that explains the care mode the tics tracker marks fragile: Sam's help arrives as equipment, and nobody captions it.

## 1. Paragraphs portable to another novel

No findings. Checked every paragraph for slot-into-any-book smoothness, hardest at the restored sites (a restoration batch is where portable connective tissue usually regrows) and at the chapter close, per the calibration's epigram warning. Strongest counter-candidates:

- "She had kept stepping back from paintings as if distance might fix a drawing problem, when the problem was in the drawing." — The most quotable narration in the chapter, and the shape (as-if X, when actually Y) could open a chapter in any artist novel. It passes on three grounds: it is welded fore and aft to non-portable matter (the receipt squared against the notebook's edge; "She'd done it four times and it came out the same every time: the left page won" — a two-page spread the reader has just read line by line); it is June's card behavior exactly (craft nouns instead of feeling words, self-rebuke third); and it is cashed literally at lines 157–159, where she steps back from the study, steps in "looking for where the corner failed," and the corner stays — the figure is a plant, not a flourish.
- "She got a nail from the drawer, and a hammer, and put the study up on her own wall, one nail, level enough. Twenty-nine days until Dana's key. Thirty-one days until Kessler's armory load-in." — The paired countdown is the calibration's named epigram risk: two parallel clauses at the final page, cadence rising. It passes because both counts are verifiable arithmetic off dates the chapter itself established (Dec 4 → Jan 2 and Jan 4), each is tethered to a named obligation rather than a summarized meaning, and the chapter refuses the cadence close — three mundane actions follow (the back-of-hand note *ask Chelsea office re: December crating*, the washed coffee cup, the study left visible from the table), so the last image is logistics, not a stamp.
- "If Tuesdays ended, if Theo never called, if the studio became a place she'd used to go, the numbers did not improve." — A triple-conditional parallel with rhetorical build; the shape travels. It passes because the apodosis is deliberately anti-rhetorical ("the numbers did not improve" prices the loss in the notebook's own currency), the three conditions are this book's specific losses in escalating order, and the verdict is an act, not a conclusion: "She left the page where it was."

## 2. Pressure summarized rather than inhabited

No findings. Checked every paragraph opening for managerial altitude, plus the three places the chapter's real pressures (Theo's absence, the noon deadline, the goodness of the offer being refused) could have been narrated from above. The Theo pressure is never essayed: it lives in the un-sent Tasker email ("She read it once. The To field was still empty. She deleted it."), the thread that "still ended *Okay. No chair.*" that she does not open, and the routing instructions for the catalog box ("If Theo is there, could you leave them at Sonia's"). Strongest counter-candidates:

- "The notebook, open to the spread she'd been avoiding." — The chapter's one told avoidance. Passes as a single clause immediately substantiated by physical evidence: the pencil "gone shiny where she'd folded and unfolded the corner" and the twenty-six-hour count "give or take the walk from the sink to the table."
- "her name on the after-hours studio sheet, in writing, a clause Nia had put there because Nia thought of it, not because June had asked." — A told character fact about Nia inside the notation paragraph; checked as summarized generosity. Passes because it is load-bearing for the no-strawman requirement, sits inside June's notebook inventory where notation is the register, and is later dramatized twice (Asha's "Who writes that?" and Nia's "I didn't put the studio clause in to sweeten it. I meant it.").
- "The five studies stayed face down under the water jar. She could see the staple lines through the back of the top one. Not yet." — "Not yet" checked again as a suspense fragment; still passes because it defers a specific physical act the chapter visibly performs when the water jar comes off the stack and the study goes up on one nail.

## 3. Polished, therapeutic, or aphoristic dialogue

No findings. Walked all three conversations under the standing suspicion, hardest at the restored lines, since restoration returned exactly the marked, shaped dialogue a polish audit would target. Strongest counter-candidates:

- "That's a worse offer," Nia said. "That's a worse offer on every line I have a column for." / "It is," June said. ... "The line it wins on doesn't fit in a column. Ten feet, north window." — The calibration's named hunt: two speakers completing one figure is the classic duet-polish tell, and out of context the exchange is quotable. It passes on the current text's specifics: the column is Nia's card diction (payroll, budgets, money named without shame), not an installed metaphor; each side holds exactly one shaped construction in an otherwise plain-spined call ("I'm calling to say no." / "But." / "It is."); the exchange is interrupted mid-turn by object business (June turning the receipt print-side up, "the Marchetti header, the faded total") rather than running as clean volley; and June's half is immediately grounded in the literal line-item ("Ten feet, north window") and then deflated into shop talk ("I itemize and I'm fast"). Nia gets to be right ("That's a worse offer") and is not softened afterward — the polish risk of the exchange resolving warm does not occur; she pivots to payroll and a deadline.
- "I want to say one thing," Ruth said. "This fall I noticed things. I kept them to myself and called it manners." She straightened the strap of her bag. "Some of it was easier for me." — The most confession-shaped speech in the chapter; "called it manners" has editorial polish. It passes as Ruth's licensed one sharp construction per appearance, spent on a self-implication rather than an insight about June; the bag-strap fumble breaks the delivery; the second line is unflattering and incomplete (what was easier is withheld, and no one supplies it); and Ruth herself refuses the therapeutic turn two lines later: "You can leave that part out. We came for the dish."
- "If the answer involves moving anything heavier than this, you have our number. That's not an opinion. That's a hand truck." — Joke-shaped, and the "not X. That's Y" template is a watched construction. It passes because the line's whole content is a refusal to say anything wiser: advice converted into equipment, in Sam's room-making register, and the exchange it caps is aggressively unquotable on the other side ("We have a car," Ruth said). Nothing in the scene explains the care mode — the tics tracker's fragility condition holds.
- "The room's not pretty. Cheap enough to forgive." — Asha's voice-card anchor nearly verbatim; checked for sample-line-recitation stiffness. Passes: delivered mid-shout ("Someone shouted Asha's name off-phone"), flanked by the deflationary radiator fact and the coat instruction, and she hangs up before June's "Okay" is finished — the exit denies the line any landing room.

## 4. Figurative language where literal precision would win

No findings. The chapter runs at exactly two craft figures (the stepping-back figure at line 13, adjudicated in section 1, and the ground-inspection figure below), which is the ceiling the earlier audits set; everything else checked as candidate atmosphere is literal and exact. Strongest counter-candidates:

- "She looked at them the way she'd look at a ground: holes, thin patches, places where wanting had been scumbled over need." — The calibration's named over-literary risk: two abstractions inside a craft verb, list turning figurative on its third term. It passes because the figure is doing inspection work, not decoration: *scumble* — a thin broken layer of opaque paint over a color that still shows through — is the precise verb for the thing she is testing for, want painted thinly over need with the need showing through; *ground*, *holes*, and *thin patches* are her card's exact vocabulary; and the sentence lands on two deflationary literals ("The $340 room barely held heat. She left the page where it was."). A literal substitution ("checked whether she wanted the room or just needed it") would be the therapeutic version — the figure is what keeps the sentence out of that register.
- "the orange scarf that made everyone else on the stairwell look provisional" — Checked whether *provisional* is an elegant-default adjective where a literal observation would do more. Passes: it is a single June-eyed judgment of relative visual weight (a painter reading saturation as authority), non-portable in its oddness, and the scene immediately drops to freight logistics; no literal replacement would carry the comic exactness.
- "bare bulb, paint-scabbed floor, the north window putting flat gray light across ten feet of empty wall. June looked at the light longest." — "Paint-scabbed" checked as the stretch's one metaphorical compound. Passes as the working word for dried drip buildup, inside a photo June reads for information, with the sentence ending on the literal observation doing the decision's real work; the chapter's one deliberate light-image allowance is spent here and at the dish glaze, nowhere else.
- "the email she'd been not-sending to Nia for nine days" — The one coinage, carried since round 5. Still passes: the progressive holds nine separate daily decisions that "hadn't sent" loses, and compression-by-coinage is inside June's card.

## Chapter verdict

`INHABITED`

The restoration batch returned the chapter's marked material without returning its pre-revision defects: the choosing-herself family is absent from the current text in any vocabulary; the column exchange holds at one shaped construction per speaker, broken by object business and cashed in line-items; `scumbled over need` is inspection craft, not drift, and sits at the two-figure ceiling; and the Dana/Kessler counts close into a hand-note and a washed cup, not an epigram. A full cold read under all four questions produces no finding that survives its own counter-argument — the chapter resolves in receipts, notations, timestamps, one nail, and dialogue that stays under pressure (the "--" fumble on the sink, the repeated not-asking, the mid-word hang-up). Nothing here is worth an order before commit. For Chapter 21: rest `against` (mechanical WATCH, 3 uses), add no third "Noted," do not reuse `FEB = coat` or the boring-parts joke, and let the pinned index card, the hung study, and the promised Tuesday dish delivery carry forward as objects without re-explanation.
