# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 06: Sightlines

Auditor stance: cold read, skeptical. Inputs: `output/chapters/chapter_06.md` (current), `output/drafts/claude/chapter_06.round_01.md` (raw), Codex assessment + tic audit, voice cards, `premise/READING_GUIDE.md` + `premise/patterns/reading_guide_bans.tsv`, dialogue scene manifest (ch 06 = one scene, lines 2–169), chapter card 06, mechanical gate (0 open, WATCH only). No reading-guide exclusions apply: this is standard quoted dialogue, an ordinary-outing scene — the calibration that ordinary talk may circle and stall *raises* the bar against over-sharpening, which is where this chapter fails.

---

SCENE 01 / gallery walk, Orchard basement → Vestibule on Rivington → frame shop → Allen St. walk → bodega (entire chapter per manifest):

- **1. Voice convergence — FAIL** — Too many speakers share one house cadence: the clipped declarative followed by a corrective restatement. Priya: "It's not a question about how you feel. It's a stool." Sam, same scene, same move: "Stand here. Not symbolically. You can actually see all three from here." Two different speakers deflating an emotional reading with furniture/placement, back to back at Vestibule. Add Mara's "It's staying cold through the weekend. It stays where it is.", Priya's "It's a Thursday.", June's "It's the only data.", Ruth's "Find her one. Not me." — cover the attributions and only the content domain (body, room, weather, data) identifies the speaker; the rhythm is interchangeable. Worst case is Mara, whose card specifies "warm, socially fluent, a little too explanatory… overexplains and over-hosts": every Mara line here is an economical two-beat command or punchline ("You two take this wall and report back. I want a ruling."; "He measured. With his eyes. It's a whole thing."). Her card's parenthetical warmth and silence-filling are absent; she has been flattened into the same dry-correction register as Priya and June. Secondary instance: Ruth's "I think the room is arranged so you'd never have to ask" — room-arrangement is Sam's card vocabulary ("room, tempo… makes physical room"), not Ruth's editorial domain ("privacy, promise, category, sentence, exact"). Cites cut-list: "dialogue where every speaker has the same dry correction rhythm"; Rule 7.
- **2. Monotone Q/A rhythm — CLEAN** — Checked the Ruth–Theo walk (the longest sustained exchange) and the Ben rent thread for evenly weighted volleys. Strongest counter-candidate: Ruth's multi-clause build "If the class stops being good for her, week five, say, and she wants out, and she doesn't want to explain herself, who can she tell who isn't you?" against Theo's degrading answers ("Yes." → "I close out the tins. Odile counts them." → "Yes. I hear it." → "It had a shortcut on it."). It survives because the weights are asymmetric and Theo's side audibly loses material as the pressure lands; this is not a ping-pong of equal panels.
- **3. Missing interiority — FAIL (Rule 9, second direction: explaining the exchange twice)** — Theo's mind is never dark, but at the Ben question it over-explains. Before June answers: "There it was again: included by default, consulted as a unit, treated as a settled fact people could build questions on top of." After she answers: "Theo had received the ease. June had paid for its boundary." The dialogue itself ("I can answer that. We don't live together." / "It's the only data.") plus the existing reactive beat ("The route card seemed less necessary for a dangerous instant") already carry everything. The trailing sentence is a balanced theorem about the exchange, not a reaction to it — the raw draft's flagged "He'd gotten the warmth. She'd done the work." (raw line 59, ordered repaired by the tic audit as narrator-as-philosopher) was repaired into an equally polished antithesis, not removed. Rule 9: interiority must react to the exchange, not explain it twice.
- **4. Questions-as-statements — CLEAN** — Checked Ruth's walk, Ben's overlap question, Mara's sightline ask. Strongest counter-candidate: "who can she tell who isn't you?" — it carries the chapter's thesis but it is a genuine question demanding a genuine answer, and Ruth says so in plain text ("I'd like there to be an answer."). She is not delivering a position in question costume; she explicitly withholds her conclusion ("Not enough to be right"), per her card.
- **5. Fake-McCarthy minimalism — CLEAN** — Checked the bodega beat and the closing exchange for unearned starkness. Strongest counter-candidate: "'Two,' he said. 'Ask her first.'" — clipped to four words, but the chapter has spent its full length building the over-anticipation reflex this line breaks, attribution is intact, and June's follow-through ("Coffee. Black. Separate.") converts the starkness into action. Earned.
- **6. Jargon-trading without translation — CLEAN** — Checked "plate tone," "miters," "glassine sleeves," "cortado." Strongest counter-candidate: "Is that plate tone, or did they just not wipe it?" — the term goes untranslated, but the exchange's payload is Theo's "I genuinely don't know," which needs none; the reader weighs his honesty, not the printmaking. Reading guide smallness test affirmatively sanctions technical craft truth; declining to flag on that named basis.
- **7. Attribution opacity — CLEAN** — Eight speakers; checked the two densest passages. Strongest counter-candidate: the unattributed "I'm fine." at Vestibule — pinned to Mara because the prior line places Priya's stool "behind Mara," and Priya's reply re-anchors it. The Ben/Priya volleys carry tags every two lines; Sam/Ruth/Luis lines are all tagged. No drift found.
- **FAKE-SHARP — FAIL (3 instances)** — (a) "Somebody's financing fell through. I'm choosing to read that as a sign. Priya is choosing to read it as a Tuesday." / "It's a Thursday," Priya said. / "For them it was a Tuesday." — a composed sitcom three-beat: Ben pre-scripts his partner's reaction, she deadpans on cue, he tags it. Chapter card and chapter risk both require the rent-math thread to be anxious and practical; this is performed for an audience, and the cohort is positioned as one. Cut-list: every line lands; Rule 7. (b) "You're considering it. I'm watching you consider it." — workshopped antithesis; combined with "It's a Thursday," "That means no," and "It's not a question about how you feel. It's a stool.", Priya goes four-for-four on landed cappers in one chapter. Rule 8: choose friction. (c) Ruth's walk: "Don't solve it on this block. That's the reflex I'm asking about." + "I think the room is arranged so you'd never have to ask." + "Find her one. Not me." — three editorial-sharp landings in one appearance against the style bible's explicit cap ("Ruth gets at most one editorial-sharp line per appearance"). Her core question and her card-sanctioned "I saw enough to be worried. Not enough to be right." are not the problem; the problem is that every remaining Ruth line also lands clean, making the walk read as a composed cross-examination (Rule 7) and tipping toward the wise-NPC register the chapter card forbids ("Ruth's warning oblique, not wise").
- **INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION — CLEAN** — Checked whether any exchange runs with the focalizer stripped out. Strongest counter-candidate: the bodega counter beat, where the exchange is three short lines but Theo's interiority ("He knew it from Sonia's, twice over, the way he knew the alarm code. His mouth was already open to say it for her…") fully orients the cost of the moment. The Ruth walk's *Boss*-inventory paragraph does the same. No over-stripped scene.
- **BOOK-SPECIFIC (zero-tolerance dialogue diagnosis, §2) — FAIL (1 instance)** — "Good answer." (June, basement, after Theo's "I genuinely don't know.") June rates Theo's answer as an answer — a caption on his wording, which the reading guide bans in any speaker's mouth, not once per chapter, not at all. Her approval is already shown by what she does with it ("She kept looking."). Nearest misses checked and declined: "Sam said, not in a whisper" (volume staging — a physical fact establishing Ruth was meant to hear, not an evaluation of phrasing); "Ruth said good night to everyone equally, which landed worse than being singled out" (Theo's guilt registering a behavioral fact — distribution of goodbyes — not a caption of her language; watch it, but it is doing-with-what-he-heard); "*Boss* had passed because every public fact supported it" (the mechanics of the lie's cover, plot-required by the asymmetry secret, aimed at the fact pattern rather than the sentence). `load-bearing` ban: zero hits, confirmed against `reading_guide_bans.tsv` and the gate report (0 open findings).
- **VOICE-CARD / RULE 4 CHECK** — Contractions: all casual dialogue contracts; the uncontracted "Rent math is not a proposal" is quoted written text from the shared note (sanctioned, and verbatim from Ben's card). Gate's 3 uncontracted-casual WATCH hits resolve to Mara's emphatic ruling "It stays where it is" and equivalents — deliberate emphasis, Rule 4 compliant. June's agency lines ("I was going to start at the front."; "We don't live together."; "Which way are you walking?") and Theo's never-speaking-for-her ("Ask her first") satisfy the chapter risk; Luis ("It's the wall. The floor slopes. The painting's level.") and Sam ("Two blocks. Say it or let it go.") are card-true and plain under pressure. The two card breaches found (Mara's missing over-explanation register; Ruth's sharp-line cap) are carried in failure modes 1 and FAKE-SHARP above.

REVISION ORDERS:

1. **Mode 1 / Mara flattening.** Rewrite Mara's lines at the basement and Vestibule ("It's staying cold through the weekend. It stays where it is."; "You two take this wall and report back. I want a ruling."; "He measured. With his eyes. It's a whole thing.") to restore her card register: warm, socially fluent, a little too explanatory, fills silence. At least one Mara line should run a clause longer than it needs to and explain before asked (e.g., the scarf order should come with the unrequested reasoning a host gives). Do not make her quotable; make her audibly the person who over-hosts. This alone breaks most of the chapter's cadence convergence.
2. **Mode 1 / furniture-deflation doubling at Vestibule.** "It's not a question about how you feel. It's a stool." (Priya) and "Stand here. Not symbolically. You can actually see all three from here." (Sam) perform the identical move in the same room. Keep Sam's — it is near-verbatim from their card. Rewrite Priya's into her own channel: body/conditions observation without the antithesis ("You've been on your feet since five" already does the work; let the stool land without the epigram).
3. **FAKE-SHARP (a) / rent-math three-beat.** Rewrite "I'm choosing to read that as a sign. Priya is choosing to read it as a Tuesday." / "It's a Thursday." / "For them it was a Tuesday." so Ben does not pre-script Priya's reaction and no one supplies a tag. Direction: Ben reports the broker text with too much information and visible nerves (his card: more words when nervous, contingency spiral — the later "There's track work. There's always track work. I have three theories." is the correct model); Priya's pushback should be practical and unpolished, aimed at the numbers or at Ben's state, not at winning the exchange.
4. **FAKE-SHARP (b) / Priya capper density.** Replace "You're considering it. I'm watching you consider it." with a flat functional line or an action (her card: checks variables, controls conditions). Across the chapter Priya may keep at most one landed dry line; "That means no." with the clementine is the one to keep — it is care, not performance.
5. **FAKE-SHARP (c) + Mode 1 / Ruth's walk.** Keep the evidence inventory (slot, tins, the bar map) and the core question verbatim; keep "I saw enough to be worried. Not enough to be right." (card-sanctioned). Reduce her other landings to one. Specifically: rewrite "I think the room is arranged so you'd never have to ask" out of Sam's room-vocabulary and into Ruth's editorial/practical domain, or replace it with something incomplete — her misread is supposed to be partial and professional (impropriety, dependency), and a line this totalizing reads as wise-NPC diagnosis. Either "Don't solve it on this block. That's the reflex I'm asking about." or "Find her one. Not me." may keep its edge; the other should be roughened into ordinary speech (e.g., let one of them arrive as an unfinished or flatly practical sentence). Friction over landing, per Rule 8.
6. **BOOK-SPECIFIC + Mode 3 / caption cuts.** Cut "Good answer." — let "She kept looking." carry June's approval, or replace with a content response about the print itself (her lane: edge, value, wipe). Cut "Theo had received the ease. June had paid for its boundary." entirely, and compress "There it was again: included by default, consulted as a unit, treated as a settled fact people could build questions on top of." to a single reactive clause; the route-card beat ("The route card seemed less necessary for a dangerous instant") already dramatizes the seduction and must remain the carrier.

Per the audit contract, these findings route to opposing-model rewrite; self-repair by the drafting lane is not an accepted resolution.

OVERALL: BLOCKING (6 findings)
