The audit file is written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_17.dialogue_doctor.md`, clearing the manifest's missing-coverage row. The full audit follows.

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# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 17 (`output/chapters/chapter_17.md`)

Stance: skeptical professional editor, cold read. Manifest coverage: chapter_17, scene 01 (lines 2–123; 31 dialogue lines, 46 quoted utterances) — one scene requiring coverage. The apartment discovery (lines 1–37) contains no dialogue and is examined only where its narration touches speech. Mechanical gate for this chapter: open=0. Provenance checked against `output/drafts/claude/chapter_17.round_01.md`; deltas cited where they decide a verdict.

**SCENE 01 / back stair, Marchetti Rooms service entrance (dialogue lines 41–119):**

- **1. VOICE CONVERGENCE: CLEAN** — covered attributions and re-read lines 41–119; June runs short imperatives and visual nouns ("Say it anyway," 49; "You'd have helped her stack the chairs after," 71) while Theo runs fact-lists that collapse into offers ("she pays me, there's a payroll service, I clock in, all of that is real," 51; the unfinished offer-spiral at 79); strongest counter-candidate: the shared "math" idiom — Theo's "you'd do the math and you'd stop coming" (89) against June's "You did my math for me and kept the answer" (91) — it survives because the echo is sequenced: Theo coins the figure, June seizes his own framing as the indictment two lines later; appropriation under pressure, not lexical bleed.

- **2. MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM: CLEAN** — mapped volley masses across the exchange; strongest counter-candidate: June's three consecutive interrogatives at 57–67 ("Did you know this page was in the box you packed for me?" / "So you carried it to my table..." / "How long has *boss* been the word?") — survives because the answer masses vary sharply (one-clause denial at 59 against the four-week confession at 69), the middle item is an accusation rather than a question, and June breaks the pattern twice with bare imperatives ("Stop," 53 and 81) and the declarative indictment block at 71–75 instead of a fourth question.

- **3. MISSING INTERIORITY: CLEAN** — the focalizer stays on between lines: "That was probably true, and it changed nothing" (65); "she let him, because neither of them was going to stand on this stair and name the kiss" (69); "Then the facts came, the way she'd known they would" (77); "He flinched at the word. She took no pleasure in it" (103); "She got one step down before the rest of it arrived" (111); "she heard him not following" (121). Strongest counter-candidate: the thinnest stretch, 93–97 ("I know." / "Saying *I know* isn't giving it back." / "He didn't answer that. Down on the street a car passed and its headlights ran along the bottom of the stair and went away.") — survives because the headlights marking the silence's duration are June's optical attention (her card's stress mode is visual exactness), and the next beat — Theo retreating to logistics ("The piece," 99) — shows what the silence changed.

- **4. QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS: CLEAN** — every June question demands and receives an answer (the box question at 57 is answered at 59; "How long has *boss* been the word?" at 67 gets "Since the first night"). Strongest counter-candidate: "So you carried it to my table and hoped I'd only read the plates" (61) — an accusation in declarative form, not a position dressed as a question, and Theo answers its content at 63. No noun-question/portentous-answer pairs: Theo's "The piece. The ground's still—" (99) is a genuine logistics fragment June cuts off, not a portent setup.

- **5. FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM: CLEAN** — the clipped beats ("Stop." / "He stopped," 53–55; "No," 115) sit inside a rupture the chapter built for thirty-eight lines before the first quoted word; attribution and physical staging persist through every stripped run (box against the rail at 51, hands/pockets/keys at 77–87, the catalog squared on the step at 109). Strongest counter-candidate: the bare "I know." at 93 — survives because the latch, the keys, and the flattened flyer box have carried continuous physical scene-work around it; starkness is earned, not performed.

- **6. JARGON-TRADING WITHOUT TRANSLATION: CLEAN** — checked every world-term a cold reader must weigh: "payroll service" (51) self-translates inside Theo's "all of that is real" list; "the ground" (99) and "the pair" (79) were established in the Ch14/Ch16 reader state and the pair is re-anchored on the page at 121 ("two unvarnished canvases hung as a pair"). Strongest counter-candidate: "I'll move the pair into storage tonight" (79) arriving before the 121 anchor — survives because the offer's meaning (take the paintings down) is legible even if the referent is held loosely until the exit.

- **7. ATTRIBUTION OPACITY: CLEAN** — two speakers, strict alternation; covered the tags and re-read: the longest untagged run (93–101) stays assigned because content polarity (his offers and retreats against her refusals) sorts every line. Strongest counter-candidate: "It's late, I can just—" (117), unattributed — survives because it continues the walk-offer Theo made at 113 and June's "No" at 115 cannot own it.

- **FAKE-SHARP: CLEAN** — ran the cut-list line by line; the raw draft contained three genuine hits and the accepted revision removed all three: "That's the whole grievance. It fits in one sentence. I've checked." (raw 79 — compact-aphorism self-captioning), "And then, with everything practical stripped off it:" (raw 93 — narration polishing the confession's delivery), and the exit zinger "Strangers know the way out." (raw 123). Strongest surviving counter-candidates: "Saying *I know* isn't giving it back" (95) — survives as a refusal of repair that answers his actual utterance, speakable at speed, and the scene refuses to mark it (he doesn't answer; a car passes); "Tuesday looks like a room with one less chair in use... Don't set one for me" (107) — survives because it is a literal answer to his literal question ("Tell me what Tuesday looks like," 105) in the class's actual furniture, a wound and not the chair-count comedy the packet retired; Theo's "There wasn't a week where it got smaller. I watched it not get smaller" (69) — weighed against his never-says list (no polished aphorisms about care) and passed as spoken-shaped self-accounting arriving exactly where his card says he goes plain. Cut-list bullet 7 (loaded line + unmarked silence) checked at 95–97: the silence is marked through June's perception and its consequence (his retreat to logistics) is on the page.

- **INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION: CLEAN** — rule 9 tested both directions: the mind is present (see mode 3) and never explains the exchange twice — "Then the facts came, the way she'd known they would" (77) lands before the offer-spiral and is anchored to his hands and keys, and the narration does not re-gloss the offers after June names them in dialogue ("You're trying to get a task," 85). The revision also cut the raw draft's self-watching interiority ("She heard her own voice come out level and was distantly grateful to it," raw 89; "which was the first honest thing his face had done since the door closed... which was its own information," raw 107) — both were the over-explaining direction of the failure; neither survives.

**Focused extra checks:**

- **DIALOGUE-DIAGNOSIS (zero tolerance): CLEAN** — swept every narration-about-speech clause and every spoken line for ratings of carefulness, phrasing, word choice, delivery, rhythm, or line quality. The raw draft's one true hit — "in the voice of an employee explaining shift work" (raw 43) — is excised; the revised sentence weighs the fact, not the telling ("tonight the fact carried a different weight," 39). Strongest counter-candidates, each examined: "*She's my boss* was payroll-true" (29) — tests the claim's truth status, not its phrasing (the permitted register; the Codex-tic audit calibrated this same distinction); "Then the facts came" (77) — labels his coping behavior (the voice card's lists-facts stress response), anchored to a physical tell, and rates no utterance; "How long has *boss* been the word?" (67) — interrogates the lie's duration, not the word's quality; "Saying *I know* isn't giving it back" (95) — refuses the act's sufficiency, does not caption its shape; "in the careful hand of staff" (29) — penmanship in a logbook, physical action, not speech; "telling you would've been a confession instead of a fact" (69) — Theo naming what the act of disclosure would have become over time, content not delivery. No instance in the revised chapter rates language.

- **GRIEVANCE FOLLOWABILITY (asymmetry, not generic lying): CLEAN** — a cold reader can state the grievance in one sentence straight off the page: "Every Tuesday I stood in her room knowing she could throw me out, and you stood in it knowing she couldn't" (75), set up by the concrete consequence split at 71 ("I was a stranger who'd conned her way into a class with a lie... you'd be her nephew who pulled a stunt. You'd have helped her stack the chairs after"). The scene explicitly refuses the generic version: June concedes the lie's true surface ("The job is real" stands; "That was probably true, and it changed nothing," 65) and prosecutes the safety net — keys, Sunday dinner, family standing — instead.

- **JUNE DIRECTNESS (visual and hurting, not legalistic/aphoristic): CLEAN** — her hits are situated in things she can see: the stacked chairs (71), the unset chair (107), "Write it in the book — you'll want the record straight, you're staff" (111), "You can stand where you grew up... I've been a stranger here the whole time" (119). The raw draft's one legalistic tag ("It fits in one sentence. I've checked.") is gone, and the hedge at 91 ("I would have stopped coming. Probably.") keeps her a person rather than a closing argument. Speech-mass counter-candidate: the task speech at 85 ("you want a list, you want errands, you want to carry it for me the way you carried the catalogs") — longer than her card's compact default, but it survives because every item in it is built from the scene's own objects and it ends in refusal ("You're not getting a task"), not maxim.

- **THEO ESCALATION (logistics first, then plain shame; no grand speech, no public-confession plan): CLEAN** — the sequence runs facts (51) → logistics spiral (79: tell Odile, keep June's slot, move the pair, redo the labels) → plain shame when the tasks are refused ("I was scared you'd stop coming. That's the actual reason... I kept not telling you on purpose, every week, because I wanted you in that room," 89) → shrinking asks (kettle or stair at 105, the walk at 113). "I wanted you in that room" is his card's allowed plainness, not a romantic claim; the offer to tell Odile is a private disclosure to his aunt inside a task-list June refuses — not a public confession — and nothing is enacted on-page.

- **PROTECTED THREADS (Odile's design sealed; Tasker/Philadelphia undecided): CLEAN** — June notices "Odile had named the shelf. All nine, third shelf, left side" (33) and explicitly defers the inference ("decided the pile could wait"); no speaker states or implies Odile knew the couple was fake; "Ask your aunt" (101) reassigns the piece and reveals nothing. The offer exists only as the face-down phone ("Nia's thread in it and the fourth of December in the thread... Neither was tonight's problem," 3); Theo learns nothing of Tasker, December 4, or Philadelphia, and June decides nothing.

**REVISION ORDERS:** none — no FAIL verdicts. For the synthesis record: the four raw-draft defects cited above (raw lines 43, 79, 93, 107/123) were already resolved in the accepted revision; no opposing-model rewrite is required.

**OVERALL: CLEAN**
