# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 15: "Keys Elsewhere"

**Stance:** Cold read against the reading guide's register rules (warm, precise, lightly comic; feelings through object/action before naming; plain-speech floor; June optical/dry/self-aimed), the chapter card's specific prohibitions (no brochure prose, no thesis-line revelation, no self-help closer), and the focused hunt list (portable offer-choice prose, work/life maxims, polished self-knowledge, brochure job narration, stock romance interruption, object personification). Raw draft compared against the revised chapter throughout to verify where the integration cut tics and where it left residue.

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

Checked: the opening tote/apartment sequence, the post-call quiet paragraph, the phone-interruption ladder (Asha → group thread → Theo), and the closing triad. No paragraph-level finding. The chapter's specificity density is high and the revision visibly raised it: the raw draft's portable furniture ("the kitchen table was the kitchen table," "the quality of a place where things went to be forgotten") was replaced with measurements ("eight inches; the catalogs were ten and a half... thirty inches by forty"), which is June's installer eye doing the work and would survive in no other book.

Strongest counter-candidate, considered hard because it is the chapter's most quotable sentence and uses a recognizable literary-close template (the estranged self in third person):

> "between them there was a back room at eight-fifteen with one bank of lights on and a woman at the press who would not turn around."

The template is portable; the filled-in content is not. Every noun is chapter-installed furniture (the eight-fifteen room from Nia's Tuesday walkthrough, the one bank of lights from June's own imagining, the press from the gripper diagnosis), and "the yes that solved seven things" earlier in the sentence is literally counted — the notebook punch list has seven lines. The depersonalized "a woman" sits at the edge of the banned watching-herself-feel-things mode, but it enacts the avoidance (she cannot put "her" in that room) rather than captioning a feeling, and it pays off the ¶69 image rather than introducing a new one. Passes — contingent on the Section 2 orders below, which protect this sentence's claim that June "couldn't yet justify" her no.

Second check (focused): stock romance interruption around the flyer photo. The interruption structure is genre-standard, but the execution de-stocked it in revision — Priya's raw gush ("they look INCREDIBLE... prints like a movie poster") became print-production register ("Matte looks clean; photo holds at 8x10. Mara's crop works."), and "classrooms and coffee shops where she'd never check the hang" is install-trade language no other romance would produce. Passes.

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

This is where the residue lives. The codex tic audit already marked the raw draft's narrator-as-philosopher passages as "retained provisionally"; the integration cut the worst (the "called the competence a personality" run, "The flaw wasn't in the offer") but left three composed self-diagnoses that resolve pressure from above the scene.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "She was good at seeing rooms; it was most of what she had." — Polished self-knowledge delivered as a narrator's thesis: June rates her own wound in one composed clause, exactly the formulation the focused hunt names, and it would slot unchanged into any lapsed-artist novel — ORDER: cut "it was most of what she had." The capability half can survive only if it stays concrete; the deficit claim must come from the picture that follows (the press, the rag, the untouched wall), not from a verdict sentence above it.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "because the press would always have a next thing wrong with it, and fixing it would always feel like work, and standing at the wall would feel like a question." — A balanced work/life maxim that resolves the chapter's discovery on the spot; the double "would always" turns a live moment of noticing into settled doctrine. Worse, it contradicts the close: forty lines later June "couldn't yet justify [the no] with anything Nia would recognize as a real reason," but the narration has just justified it in one clean antithesis, which makes the closing inarticulacy read as authorial withholding instead of truth — ORDER: strip both "would always" abstractions; keep the behavior (she is at the press with a rag; the wall stays a lit, empty field) and let the wrongness register as picture only, so that "couldn't yet justify" at the close is actually true of the page.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "because she needed a task with a beginning and an end." — Names the coping mechanism the next paragraph is about to demonstrate; the clause could appear unchanged in any contemporary novel with an avoidant protagonist, and the pressure (the undecidable thing versus the finishable things) should be lived in the task sequence itself — ORDER: end the sentence at "stood up" and cut the motive clause; then repair the orphaned pivot "She handled it." (its antecedent dies with the clause) by opening the paragraph directly on the first task. The dishes, the stack turned back around, and "the slip was just paper" already carry the need without a caption.

Also checked and passing — the strongest counter-candidate:

> "She went down the page once more, looking for the line to cross out, and did not find one. She had not prepared for that, despite the station, despite the pen that worked."

This is the "good but not right" beat done correctly: no formulation, no maxim — the pressure of an offer with no flaw is inhabited as a failed proofreading pass, which is June's specific behavior (the crossed-out *what happens if no* set it up), and the raw draft's epigram residue ("She'd prepared for an offer she could find the flaw in. The flaw wasn't in the offer.") was correctly cut. Likewise "It wasn't hers to spend yet" (Asha's name) passes: the currency framing is invoice-world, and the ethical weight lands through the tool-on-the-bench object logic and the phone going face down.

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

Checked every Nia line against brochure risk and the "not a villain, not a strawman" constraint; checked June's text register; checked the Theo exchange. No finding. The pitch is anti-brochure throughout — gripper bars, a bearing that knocks on the return, filter schedules, net-45, a city line item — and the most brochure-adjacent run ("Keys on day one... Big wall in the back, decent sink, nobody scheduling around you") is immediately dragged back into paperwork register ("I want to be clear that's in the actual job description, because I wrote the job description"), which is Nia's voice-card tic doing exactly its job. June, critically, is never articulate about the real thing on the call: she asks gripper questions and Tuesday questions and lets the wall go unmentioned, which is the under-pressure withholding this audit exists to protect.

Strongest counter-candidate, considered because it is a genuine aphorism:

> "The coat counts. Coats are people who left their position marked."

It passes for three reasons: it is typed, not spoken — a composed register is honest for a text message; the narration frames it as visible deflection ("answered the part that was a fact"), satisfying the plain-speech floor's requirement that deflection read as deflection; and its content is June's licensed move — the true thing said sideways, since the woman with an umber mark left deliberately on her cuff is describing herself. It is specific to the Ch14 chair-count ledger and could not migrate.

Second counter-candidate: Nia's "I'm not going to talk you into it and I'm not going to talk you out of it. The job's good. You'd be good at it." The balanced construction borders on counselor-speak, but Nia planned this call for two days, her card licenses plain practical statement and "makes leaving rational," and the speech lands on her sanctioned sample line ("If you say no, send me someone good. I still have a program to keep open"). A recruiter's pre-resolution is in-world composure, not workshop polish. Passes.

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

Checked the focused personification list: catalogs, mineral spirits, deadline, apartment, phone. The revision already executed most of this hunt — "It was developing a presence" (jar), "ticking through its argument with itself" (radiator), "or otherwise excuse itself" (receipt), "the apartment had gotten small in a way that wanted handling" are all gone from the chapter. "The tote strap quit" passes as handler vernacular for material failure, and "left the deadline pinned under the jar" is metonymy with a literal referent (the receipt is physically pinned). One residue:

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "Her handwriting had gotten neat. It did that when the room would not line up." — The bare tell is the good part; the gloss is a figurative riddle ("the room" — which room? the offer? the apartment? the situation-as-composition?) that asks the reader to decode what the neat handwriting already shows, and grants the handwriting agency in the process — ORDER: cut the second sentence outright, or replace it with a literal observation of the writing itself (the letters getting smaller and squarer as Nia talks), and trust the established stress-tell to carry the meaning.

Strongest counter-candidate, considered because it is the chapter's most extended simile:

> "she felt the shape of it sitting there, like a tool on the bench you weren't using and someone else needed"

Passes: the comparison does work no literal statement could — it converts the ethics of holding Asha's name into shop terms, which is the only vocabulary June permits herself for guilt, and "you weren't using" quietly indicts her without a feeling-word. Same ruling for "popping with a sound like a knuckle," "flattened... like a reference swatch," and "the letters squared off like a label draft" — each clarifies a physical fact in trade language. The single light image ("the wall a clean field with the light raking it flat") uses a literal painter's term (raking light) and stays inside the motif cap.

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**Chapter verdict: `LLM-CLEAN-FOUND`**

Orders, in priority:

1. ¶69: cut "it was most of what she had"; deficit claim must live in the press/wall picture, not a thesis clause.
2. ¶69: strip "would always feel like work / would always feel like a question"; keep the behavior, lose the maxim — this also repairs the contradiction with "couldn't yet justify" at the close.
3. ¶105: cut "because she needed a task with a beginning and an end"; open the next paragraph on the first task and remove or re-anchor the orphaned "She handled it."
4. Call scene: cut or literalize "It did that when the room would not line up."

All four orders are local; no structural rewrite is licensed. The closing image and the Theo exchange must not be touched by these repairs — order 2 exists precisely to keep them honest.
