# Voice Check — Chapters 01–05 (Round 2, post-repair verification)

Scope: `chapter_01.md`–`chapter_05.md` (current repaired state) against `style_and_voice.md`, READING_GUIDE §2/§4/§6, `reading_guide_bans.tsv`, the round-1 check (`voice_check_05.md`, 17 revision orders), and the unchanged Chapter 05 calibration sample (ch05 lines 79–91, "The card had removed every reason…" through "The mouth, lower on the left…"). Mechanical gate state: open=0, allowlisted=0, WATCH=316. This round verifies the round-1 orders and re-sweeps for new damage introduced by the repairs; it does not manufacture fresh objections to justify itself.

**Calibration sample rhythm signature (step 1, for the record):** The sample builds long perception sentences by accretion of verified optical fact — the sentence ends when the looking ends ("The line went out along the temple arm to where it hooked his ear, and the ear was wrong, lower than the glasses pretended.") — and closes circuits with flat declaratives of two to six words ("He did not know. She was not going to tell him." / "She kept her eyes up. The card said."). Diction is craft-technical (temple arm, collar point, catalog version); abstraction is paid for in objects before it is admitted ("Stenographers did not editorialize."). Self-deflection arrives mid-clause ("because hardware was easy and she was a coward"), never as a staged punchline. Stops are periods; no em-dash apposition; no balanced pairs; pressure rises by patience, not by figure. The sample is textually unchanged from round 1, so all round-1 contrasts remain valid.

---

## 1. Rhythm mismatches

CLEAN — verified all three round-1 findings against current text:

- **ch05 line 77 (order 3) — repaired.** The anaphora/triad/profundity-stamp block ("Three minutes is a pop song, a subway stop… She knew duration.") is gone. Current text: "Three minutes should have been nothing. June had stood in front of single paintings for forty minutes without noticing the floor. The first thirty seconds still took her apart." (ch05, line 77). One concrete duration fact, full stops, escalation by observation — the sample's pattern. It now hands off into the calibration passage without a register seam, which was the point of the order.
- **ch04 line 131 (order 4) — repaired.** "Wrong. Wrong in every particular he could name… the wall was thin" is gone. The paragraph now ends on a Theo-card task-displacement move, as ordered: "He reached for the check presenter that had not arrived yet and found only his mug." (ch04, line 131).
- **ch01 line 111 (order 16) — repaired, over-executed in the right direction.** Both exhibit fragments ("The early train out of the weekend." / "The email sent at a civilized hour, regretting.") were cut, not just one; the frame/walls/door conceit stays and resolves into June's installer vocabulary: "Six years of exits, all hung straight enough to pass." (ch01, line 111).

Strongest counter-candidate considered: "The first attempt was a disaster of a specific and humiliating kind. It failed because she looked at the page twice, fast, the way you check a phone in a movie theater, and because of what she did when she got away with it." (ch05, line 59) — two-clause forensic build with a withheld payoff; it survives because the withholding is resolved in the next sentence by drawn fact (the chin, the drawer), i.e., escalation by observation, not by figure.

## 2. Banned phrases

Verbatim sweep of all five chapters against `reading_guide_bans.tsv` and the §6 catalog:

- `\bload[ -]?bearing\b` — **0 hits** (grep + gate concur).
- **Dialogue diagnosis (§2 zero tolerance) — 0 findings; both round-1 blockers verified gone:**
  - ch01 line 7 (order 1): "his voice got wider when contradicted" is replaced by action — "The man shifted half a step sideways and turned his shoulder until the woman in the leather jacket and two new arrivals faced the painting with him; June folded down the corner of her program and retreated…" No delivery caption; June's retreat now stands on what he *does*. No new violation introduced.
  - ch04 line 119 (order 2): the full caption ("She had lied the way a good hang lies… truer in six other memories") is cut. The replacement is a Theo-mode fact inventory — "Nothing they had said was false. The opening, corrected to a Thursday. The label, with a count attached. … June had invented nothing." — and the perception is carried, as ordered, by the receipt list at lines 165–169 ("*Thursdays. 43 labels, one flipped. The pencil. Line eight.*"). Truth-status checking, not technique-rating; compliant.
- Counter-candidates examined and surviving: "as if the sentence had clicked level under glass" (ch01, line 65 — the *replacement* for round 1's "tone of a woman filing a document") — it renders the utterance's effect on the situation in June's installer vocabulary (a label re-set), marked subjective by "as if," and is immediately cashed as plot ("June could not tell whether the labels or the evening had just been approved"); it does not diagnose Odile's craft or delivery. "It came out flat and then it came out as inventory" (ch04, line 127) — self-narration of Theo's own utterance, instantly demonstrated by the inventory itself on the page; the rule targets captioning *one another's* speech in lieu of doing. "Her voice stayed level and carried to the nearest dozen people" (ch01, line 77) — acoustic fact (volume, pitch), not interpretive diagnosis. All three are logged as watch notes below: each is one step from the banned move and the pattern must not be extended.
- Remainder of the §6 catalog — breath-catching, flips/flutters/pooling/electricity, "something shifted between them"/"the air changed," smirk/chuckle/"a beat," one-word reaction paragraphs, beauty-unawareness ("recognizable," ch05 line 103, holds), postcard NYC, mirror epiphany (the kettle reflection is a shape simile), weather-as-feeling — **0 hits**; the only "flipped" matches are the literal label dimensions (ch04 lines 79/111/167), as in round 1.

## 3. AI-sounding constructions

CLEAN — the round-1 templates are cleared or at ordered cap:

- **", which"-evaluation (order 5) — cleared.** Raw ", which" counts fell from 8/11/11/10/7 to **0/1/2/0/0**, and all three survivors are in character speech, not narration: June's email ("we met at the gallery, which is true," ch02 line 33), Ben's voice-card line ("which I will now know forever," ch03 line 45), Mara ("which, fair, was the assignment," ch03 line 137). The narrative sentence template is gone; spot checks confirm rewrites, e.g. ch01 131 → "He didn't ask if she was sure. That helped."; ch05 103 → full-sentence form "June had been in enough crit rooms to recognize the expensive kind of nothing when it passed her."
- **Refusal-to-conclude (order 5) — at cap, differentiated.** Five instances remain across the span, ≤2 per chapter per POV: June — "Kindness or bet; she left the motive alone." (ch03, 29), "June noticed and left it alone." (ch03, 127), "She left that thought where it was." (ch05, 21); Theo — "He wrote no opinion on it." (ch02, 47; converted to task displacement as ordered, the writing is literal), "'Huh,' she said, and let it stand." (ch02, 155). Compliant; logged to watch because one more instance anywhere breaches the cap.
- **Hedged thesis (order 15) — repaired.** ch03 line 105 now states it plainly: "Being looked at was mostly being measured." No "it turned out."
- **Theo epigram stamps (order 6) — at cap.** ch04 retains the licensed "There was no procedure for it being easy" (119) plus "That was the whole trouble with it." (89) — two. The ordered replacements landed as object handling: ch04 151 → "His water glass had left a ring on the paper, and he moved it onto a dry square."; ch02 163 → "The ink only made the card match the list." (procedural, not aphoristic-about-care); ch04 11 → "His hands needed the job before the seating solved itself without him."; ch04 53 → "Tonight his fingers kept moving after the cups were already right."
- Strongest counter-candidate: "Ruth wasn't reading romance into anybody. She was checking terms: who set them, who paid for them, and whether the person saying *separate* had any room to say anything else." (ch04, line 131) — the round-1 not-X-but-Y scaffold survives in altered form. It survives this round because it is now the *only* instance of the scaffold in five chapters (the template pressure that made it a finding is gone), and the contrast is cashed immediately in concrete terms after the colon. Watch-listed: a second instance in ch06+ re-opens the finding.

## 4. Anachronistic language

CLEAN — **the chronology error is repaired without a replacement problem.** ch03 line 159 now reads: "The honest answer was that she had been done being looked at since middle school, and that tonight it had not killed her, and that both facts could be true on the same Tuesday." June is twenty-eight (ch01, line 9) against the 2026 class calendar (ch01, line 5), putting middle school at roughly 2009–2011 — consistent, and the non-dated span removes the brittleness entirely. Swept all five chapters for other date anchors: the remaining years are 1974, 1983 (catalog/painting dates, correct) and the class dates. Register sweep for off-period idiom, therapy-speak, corporate vocabulary: nothing. Strongest counter-candidate: "the charcoal had gone back, on its own recognizance" (ch05, line 59) — arch legalism, contemporary, June-dry, singular; survives as in round 1.

## 5. Repetitive metaphors

CLEAN on every ordered domain, with counts:

- **Filing/ledger (order 7) — domain reassigned to Theo.** June's three figurative instances are rewritten into her trade: ch01 65 → "clicked level under glass"; ch01 111 → "hung straight enough to pass"; ch01 131 → cut. Theo keeps the domain: "the lie reduced to objects he could file" (ch02, 161), literal filing (ch02, 165), "the file she was assembling… he would have built the same file" (ch04, 131). June's sole remaining instance, "file under reasonable" (ch05, 83), sits inside the protected calibration sample and was exempted by round 1's own order. Ownership now differentiates the POVs.
- **"Arithmetic" (order 8) — one owner, one use:** only "He did the arithmetic standing up, because the arithmetic was the part he could do." (ch02, 9) survives; ch01 29 and ch04 117 reworded ("measuring a path she could follow"; "kept the three versions of the story in order").
- **Door-pose (order 9) — spent once, on its owner:** "like someone who had been asked to hold a door" (ch03, 55, Sam) is the only figurative door left; ch05 93 now uses Theo's domain — "with his own pad pressed against his sweater like a crate with a loose side."
- **"the time it takes to lose an argument" (orders 3/10) — exactly one instance, the sanctioned one:** the bin decision, "She stood over it for the length of time it takes to lose an argument." (ch05, 107). The line-77 twin is gone.
- Residual density, watch not blocker: the occupational/person simile scaffold runs ~15 across the span (ch05: waiter, dinner-party guest, court stenographer, passport photo, conservator's patch; ch03: inspector, proofreader, kitchen-shift stance), essentially round 1's count — round 1 flagged it but issued no order, so nothing was breached. The blind-POV risk it carried has dropped anyway, because the *domains* now split correctly (June's are optical/conservation/craft; Theo's are gallery/crate/museum-piece). Logged to tics.md with a forward cap recommendation rather than ordered, since ch05's cluster is partly licensed by the drawing conceit and the calibration sample itself runs the mechanism ("catalog version").

## 6. Sentence length problems

CLEAN — verified the two ordered repairs and re-sampled distribution:

- **ch05 trailing participles (order 12) — 11 → 0.** Grep for `, [verb]ing` returns nothing in ch05, and the gate no longer lists the pattern for the chapter. The cited lines now close on finite verbs or appositives: "She did it without hurry. Each card ended square under its bulldog clip." (line 27); "She sharpened one over the trash can with a blade, unbothered, ordinary: a tool made ready." (line 35) — the sample's stop pattern.
- **ch05 line 23 dead staging (order 13) — repaired through the installer's eye:** "June counted six sightlines and no polite way to look past the person opposite you; every stool had been placed to make attention travel one direction." followed by "You did not face chairs at each other unless you wanted the people in them to have nowhere else to put their attention." Pressured seeing, not inventory.
- **ch04 117 connective tissue (order 14) — repaired with named mechanics:** "Mara turned toward Priya with the fries between them; Sam asked Ben about neighborhoods over the sugar caddy." The two 130–160-word analytical paragraphs are broken up by the Ruth exchange and trimmed; diner tempo (Dee clearing, the sugar caddy) now interleaves Theo's inference.
- **Paragraph-final stamp cadence (order 17) — varied.** Sampled closers across ch01/04/05: lengths now run 2–53 words with action closers ("dragged one stool four inches left with her foot"), dialogue closers, and long-sentence closers ("…made the face of a woman watching a guest try to wash dishes at a dinner party," 50 words) interleaved with the coins. Stamps remain the book's signature, no longer its metronome. Strongest counter-candidate: "It could not. She had checked twice anyway." (ch05, line 9) — a round-1 exhibit that survives because order 17 required variation of a third of closers, not elimination, and this one carries the chapter's opening joke.

---

**VOICE SCORE: 8/10** — All seventeen round-1 orders verified executed, several beyond the letter (both ch01-111 exhibits cut, participles to zero). The two zero-tolerance captions are gone and their replacements are action and inventory, not new captions. The shared sentence templates that were eroding blind-POV — ", which"-evaluation, refusal-to-conclude, the filing bank — are cleared or at ordered cap with domains correctly split, and the chronology misfire is fixed without a new date. What keeps this at 8 rather than higher: three pressures sit exactly *at* their caps rather than below them (refusal-to-conclude at 5 span-wide, Theo coins at 2 per chapter, person-simile density unchanged), and three near-the-line constructions ("clicked level under glass," "came out flat… as inventory," the Ruth not-X-but-Y) survive on reasoning rather than margin. The voice is holding; it has no slack.

**POLISHED-BUT-DEAD ZONES: NONE.** Both round-1 zones are repaired (ch05 line 23 quoted above; ch04 line 117 quoted above). Nearest call this round: "The rest of class was variations." (ch05, line 103) — a summary connective that could open any workshop montage; it survives because the same sentence-cluster immediately pays in non-portable specifics ("the paired easels filling with mutant cohort," the granola bar set down "without comment and… gone before it could be declined," Ruth filing her drawing "like a proof"), against which the connective reads as a beat, not a void.

**REVISION ORDERS: NONE.** No blocker remains from round 1 and no new blocker was introduced by the repairs.

**Watch notes for `output/tics.md` (non-blocking):**
1. Refusal-to-conclude family at exact cap (ch02 47, 155; ch03 29, 127; ch05 21). Any new "left it alone / let it stand / left that thought where it was" variant in ch06+ breaches order 5's cap.
2. Occupational/person simile scaffold ~15 across the span, unchanged from round 1 (never ordered). Domains now differentiate by POV, which defuses the blind-POV risk, but ch06+ should run below ch03/ch05 density; editor stage may thin ch03's inspector/proofreader cluster first.
3. Sentence-as-object near-caption: "as if the sentence had clicked level under glass" (ch01, 65) and self-delivery "It came out flat and then it came out as inventory" (ch04, 127). Both survive on stated reasoning; do not extend either pattern — a second sentence-simile or self-delivery caption converts to a §2 finding.
4. Not-X-but-Y has exactly one survivor ("Ruth wasn't reading romance into anybody. She was checking terms…," ch04, 131). A second instance re-opens the round-1 finding.
5. Theo coin count at cap in ch02 ("the lie reduced to objects he could file" / "The ink only made the card match the list") and ch04 ("That was the whole trouble with it." / "There was no procedure for it being easy").
6. June's one remaining filing figure ("file under reasonable," ch05, 83) lives inside the protected calibration sample; do not let it propagate into her narration elsewhere.
7. Gate WATCH items worth the editor's eye: ch05 transition verbs at 7 ("settled" cluster), ch04 hands/body at 12 (still predominantly literal service/drawing mechanics, as round 1 judged — keep none foregrounded as tenderness outside the week-4 sanction).

**OVERALL: VOICE-HOLDS**
