# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 22: The Booth — Round 4 (post Characters-Wrong repair + dialogue-diagnosis preemptive repair)

id: positive_prose_audit | owner: claude | tier: risk | pass: cold read, current integrated text, round 4
inputs: `output/chapters/chapter_22.md` (current: post Characters-Wrong round-1 repair batch and dialogue-diagnosis preemptive repair, per Dialogue Doctor round 5's snapshot accounting); prior clean state `output/critiques/claude/chapter_22.positive_prose_round3.md` (INHABITED, on the pre-repair text); `output/critiques/claude/chapter_22.dialogue_doctor_round5.md` (OVERALL: CLEAN); `output/critiques/claude/chapter_22.comedy_doctor_round5.md` (VERDICT: CLEAR); `premise/READING_GUIDE.md` §2, §5, §6, §8; voice cards (June Park, Theo Brennan).

Standard of comparison: §2 register (plain-speech floor, blind-POV differentiation, zero-tolerance on narration about speech), §5 care moves never captioned, §6 tic catalog, §8 smallness / earned-stay / followability tests.

Scope note: round 3's INHABITED was issued on the pre-Characters-Wrong text. Two repair batches have since changed live prose in the booth scene's middle — the pocket near-miss (L61), the completed crates offer (L83), the stall (L87–93), the revised measured reply (L99), the four-line misread run (L101–107), and two deletions ("That's the right amount."; the refill's "correct level of involvement" tag). Several round-3 pass rationales are therefore stale and are re-derived here on current grounds rather than carried — most importantly the L99 composed-speech clearance, whose round-3 defense cited a line that no longer exists. The whole chapter was reread cold; the repaired middle got priority. Line numbers cite the current file.

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## Regrowth verification (prior blockers, grep-checked on current text)

1. **Dana mind-read (round-2 order 1): NOT REGROWN.** L5 holds the repaired observable version verbatim: "Dana had cleared the north wall before she arrived and stood out of the way until June asked about the outlet." Grep "expression of a": zero hits.
2. **Sugar/memorizing (round-2 order 2): NOT REGROWN.** L175 still ends at plain fact: "black with three sugars, the single inefficient thing in his entire operation, and she had watched him doctor it this morning." Grep "memorizing": zero hits.
3. **Opening comedy tag: NOT REGROWN.** L3 runs owned observation ("cobalt going almost green where the glaze thinned at the rim") → action → practical reason ("because Tuesday was two days away") with no narrator-overlay clause. Grep "cataloguing": zero hits.
4. **Known/not-known: count holds at exactly one epistemic fold**, the sanctioned kiss chiasmus: "he tasted like too much sugar, which she had known he would and had not known she knew" (L177). Full family sweep, sixteen sites. The repair added two "knew" instances in dialogue — "You knew where to stand for either answer." (L105) / "I knew where to stand for one," (L107) — both plain past knowledge traded as accusation and admission; no fold, no scaffold. All other members re-adjudicated unchanged from round 3: L13 (single uncertainty resolving into behavior), L29 (shared physical fact), L73 (single filing note, count still one), L81 ("no way to know" inside her marked prediction), L117/L125/L161/L171/L173/L181 (dialogue, plain knowledge or plain admission). One fold, as sanctioned.
5. **Deleted-line absence confirmed by grep:** zero hits for "right amount," "correct level of involvement," "That sounds prepared," "brought one sentence," "right sentence." The "load-bearing" family: zero hits, all spellings.

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

No findings. What was checked, and the strongest counter-candidates:

- **The stall paragraph (L87):** "He stopped with his mouth still a little open. The coffee between them had stopped steaming." — the strongest candidate in the chapter, because cooled coffee marking a conversation's death is common property; the second sentence could sit in any contemporary romance's diner quarrel. It does not port as a paragraph: the open mouth is the cut end of a sentence still running (the dash at L83), and the steam is one link in this chapter's owned coffee chain — came fast because it was all she asked for (L41), set on somebody else's ring (L41), stopped steaming here, watched climbing at the refill (L109), doctored and tasted at the kiss (L175–177). Moved to another book, the paragraph loses both its cause and its ledger. Passes — with the Comedy Doctor's standing condition co-signed from this audit's side: the sentence stays tagless; one deflecting clause added here would convert it to portable narrator wit.
- **The crates offer (L83)** — new text at a repaired site, tested as a block: "If you're going, I can get crates from the stockroom. Freight elevator at eight. I wouldn't come up. Or I could leave them with Sam, or downstairs, or--". The nouns are welded (the stockroom, the freight elevator that is his instrument-of-harm identity, Sam), and the sentence's refusal to end is the character firing, not fluency failing. No generically competent paragraph breaks off mid-list on purpose. Passes.
- **The misread run (L101–109)** — bare dialogue plus one narration sentence; tested because quarrel-in-a-diner is a stock scene. The accusation's vocabulary ("where to stand") is June's own scene-01 private frame (L13), so the paragraph cannot be lifted without carrying the chapter that built it. Passes.
- **Carried round-3 counter-candidates re-verified verbatim-stable on current text:** the booth entrance (L27, "Third booth, the one with the taped seat... she would not have to walk in and wait alone"); the sweater beat (L23, cashed at L189); the kiss paragraph (L177); the closing index card (L189, `TUES = 4:00 / jar stays / I turn it or it doesn't turn`) — still unreadable outside this book; §8 smallness at full strength.

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

No findings. The repaired middle was the priority sweep, since it added narration at pressure peaks:

- **Strongest candidate: "He touched the inside pocket of his coat, found the paper there, and took his hand out empty." (L61)** — new text; "found the paper there" asserts a fact of Theo's fingertips in a June chapter, one step from the Dana mind-read this chapter was repaired for in round 2. Adjudicated PASS, narrowly, on three grounds: (a) the inference is hers and framed as hers — the sentence before is her explicit anticipation ("She waited for the list, schedules and keys and how he would restructure the known world"), so the pocket means the list to her before it means anything to the reader; (b) it is cashed in his own mouth two lines later ("I wrote six things. I'm not going to read them." L63) — fact-then-confirmation, not narration inventing knowledge the page never verifies; (c) the beat's actual pressure — whether the list comes out — is lived in the gesture and its refusal, not reported from altitude. Distinguish the repaired Dana defect: that clause installed a whole psychology on a face with no confirmation structure; this puts one object in one pocket and gets confirmed. WATCH: this is the chapter's one narrated Theo-interior fact; a second one in any future touch converts the device to POV drift and a finding.
- **"June watched the coffee climb the cup and let her own line sit there, meaner than she had meant it, because taking it back would make him comfort her." (L109)** — the over-captioned-thought candidate. Passes: four bare dialogue turns precede it, so this is the orienting sentence, not a redundant caption; its three members are perception (coffee climbing — literal, optical, hers), a verdict on her own conduct ("meaner" grades what the line did to Theo, not any sentence's craft), and a reason that IS the flaw operating a second time — retraction would trigger his comforting, so she withholds it. Nothing is pre-resolved: the cost stays unpaid, the exchange dies, and Theo restarts at his own expense at L111. No feeling-weather, no managerial altitude.
- **The stall cost (L87)** — given as two literal objects (open mouth, dead steam), zero summary; the pressure is inhabited in June's spoken rebukes ("Don't be useful right now," L85; "Don't make that useful either." L91), not narrated over.
- **"He had made the blank into a prize. It cost her a second to answer." (L117)** — carried; the naming is her orienting judgment and the pressure is a time fact, followed by her spoken correction ("It's a portrait, Theo.").
- **Carried sites re-verified verbatim on current text:** "She made herself finish." (L97) — effort of completing the utterance, an act; the draft-composing beat (L15) — two drafts on screen verbatim, the deletion lived ("she held her thumb down until it disappeared"); "there was nothing to do at the top of that gesture and they both knew it" (L29) — fully specified geometry, no unspecified tension.

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

No findings — but two clearances had to be re-derived because their round-3 grounds are stale:

- **"If you were going, I'd hope it went well. Since you're staying, I'm glad. I don't want to make more of it than that." (L99)** — still the chapter's most composed speech, and its round-3 pass leaned on a prop the Characters-Wrong repair deleted (June's on-page grade "That's the right amount."). Re-derived, and it passes harder now: (a) the line itself was softened in repair — "I don't want to make more of it than that" confesses effort where the old "I'm not making more of it than that" certified success; (b) the composure is no longer merely permitted by the chapter card's no-grand-gesture term, it is interrogated by the scene — June mishears exactly this polish as management ("That sounds like you made a plan for either answer." L101) and is wrong, which converts the speech from author-polish into the misread's trigger; (c) the composing is shown ("He looked at the cup before answering."). A polished line the book makes a character pay for delivering is content, not workshop-clean fluency. He gets no second speech this composed; the chapter still doesn't give him one.
- **"I knew where to stand for one," he said. "It was worse." (L107)** — the repair zone's one quotable-adjacent shape: parallel structure plus a two-word landing. Passes on this audit's terms, tested independently of both doctors: the under-pressure version of this line would withhold or fumble — and this IS the withholding version. It declines to describe the plan, declines to defend against the wrong half of the charge, and the two words are his card's forced-plain terminal phase ("qualifies when guilty, then forces himself plain"). It buys nothing back — no smile, no returned beat; the exchange dies into the refill and the unretracted line, and he has to restart the scene himself at L111. The doctors' standing warning is co-signed here as a positive-prose condition: any lightness marker near L105–107 flips this to aphorism on sight.
- **"Don't make that useful either." (L91)** — quotable-adjacent paradox (an apology graded as a service). Passes: five words, her card's compression-under-exposure minus the funny, and its function is to stop speech, not display fluency; the reply it earns is a man looking at the table.
- **Carried clearances re-verified verbatim on current text:** "Like if I finished enough of everyone else's problems, eventually there was a square with my name on it." (L115) — still passing at the same narrow margin; the saving restart ("He looked at his cup and started again.") is intact and remains non-negotiable in any future touch. "It isn't evidence of anything and it doesn't fix anything." (L125) — anti-gesture disclaimer embedded in his logistics inventory (labeled, name, dates, storage rack, faced to the wall). "I want to watch you finish it instead of finding out you did it at two in the morning so nobody would see you try." (L161) — her owned §5 care move, craft-anchored ("The underpainting's good... the color under it is good"). "That happened because the terms are set... Not instead of them." (L179) — protected direct register, §8 earned-stay; Theo declines to match it ("I learned it this morning, but I know it").
- **Plain-speech floor spot-check (§2):** June — "I'm staying, Theo. It isn't for you." (L97). Theo — "I was being scared and slow." (L71); "I'm asking. Are you going?" (L93). Both principals clear the floor unangled. The round-1 fracture repairs hold verbatim: the "No. With you standing right there with it." restart (L57); the stall at L79 ("because then I'd have to..." She stopped.); the confessed-not-performed polish impulse (L67, "I keep wanting to make it sound cleaner." / "Don't." L69).

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

No findings. What was checked, and the strongest counter-candidates:

- **"how he would restructure the known world so this could never happen again" (L61)** — still the section's strongest candidate, an abstraction at scale, and its round-3 anchor changed: the correcting literal behavior used to be "He reached for his cup instead" and is now the pocket near-miss. Re-derived pass: the hyperbole remains June's dry joke about his character, tied in-sentence to his card's nouns ("schedules and keys"), and the literal correction got stronger, not weaker — a physical near-miss with a real object instead of a cup sip. The figure-to-fact ratio at the site improved.
- **"where to stand" (L101–107, promoted from L13's "somewhere to stand if she said no")** — a spatial figure the repair moved into dialogue; tested for whether a literal term would beat it. No: the figure is the misread's vocabulary, built by June on the page in scene 01 and thrown at Theo in scene 02, and a literal substitute ("a response ready," "a plan for what to say") would reinstate the sentence-inventory register the repair existed to remove. The figure is doing the zero-tolerance rule's work; replacing it would be a regression.
- **"watched the coffee climb the cup" (L109)** — flagged as the model, not a finding: literal, optical, a refill rendered as an exact visual fact. This is what the section's standard asks the rest of the chapter to live up to, and it does.
- **"I'd been walking past it for a month like it was going to file a complaint." (L111)** — figurative personification, his. Passes as a self-aimed character joke in his bureaucratic register, immediately un-deflected by "I read it wrong." (L115); a literal version would delete the warmth re-entry the restart depends on.
- **Carried clearances re-verified verbatim:** "which looked like a dentist's reminder" (L15); "the exit installed before she'd even reached for the door" (L13); "somebody else's morning" (L29); "She sent it before the hour could argue with her." (L21); "Her life had earned one confusing receipt." (L155); "the single inefficient thing in his entire operation" (L175). The chapter's ground level stays literal: salt dried white on the bike tires (L169), the cleared north wall and the outlet question (L5), the dates on the portrait label (L125), the umber stain with the jar under it (L159).

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## Chapter verdict

`INHABITED` — zero revision orders. The two repair batches were verified at every changed site: none of the prior Positive Prose blockers regrew (Dana observable-fact sentence intact, sugar sentence still ends at "this morning," opening dish paragraph still tagless, known/not-known at exactly one sanctioned fold, all grep-verified). The new middle was swept cold against all four questions: the crates run-on and the misread run are welded to this book's nouns and this chapter's built vocabulary; the stall and its aftermath render pressure as objects and unpaid cost rather than summary; the repair zone's one composed speech (L99) and one quotable-adjacent landing (L107) both pass on re-derived current-text grounds after their stale round-3 props were discarded; no figure in the new material would be improved by literalizing. Standing watch items for future touches, all conditions rather than findings: the L61 narrated Theo-interior fact stays singular; the L87 stall stays tagless; L105–107 stays unlit by any smile or softening beat; the L115 restart and the L73 filing-note count of one remain non-negotiable. Chapter 22 is clean on this audit's four questions.
