# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 16

Target: `output/chapters/chapter_16.md` (post-integration revised text). Provenance checked against `output/drafts/claude/chapter_16.round_01.md` and both codex critiques.

Manifest note: `output/critiques/codex/dialogue_scene_manifest.md` carries no chapter 16 row (table ends at chapter 15). Scene derived per the gate's segmentation rules: one markdown heading, no horizontal-rule breaks — a single scene, lines 2–111, ~30 quoted utterances, well over the 4-line threshold. Doctor required; this file is the coverage artifact. The manifest needs its chapter 16 row added.

Mechanical input: gate PASS, open=0, WATCH=70. The two `legacy-uncontracted-casual-dialogue` WATCH hits (lines 89/101) are "where they are" and "whenever we are" — clause-final copulas that cannot contract in English. False positives; no Rule 4 exposure behind them.

**SCENE 01 (lines 2–111 — Week 6 studio: flyer arrival → assignment card → fear painting → critique circle → supply table):**

- **1 VOICE CONVERGENCE: CLEAN** — covered attributions and re-read every speaker: Mara (warm direct address: "Theo. You're famous"), Sam (spatial-social: "There... Now people see it first" + dragging the table), Ben (route/zones narration, "Nice save"), Luis (terse craft verdicts), June (compression plus self-interruption), Odile (imperatives and materials), Theo (practical offers: "Nine's a lot of shelf"). Strongest counter-candidate: Luis's "It's better than the assignment" (line 65) against June's "It's a clear assignment" (line 31) — both dry, assignment-referencing corrections. It survives: Luis's is a verdict on someone else's object delivered in passing and closed by walking away; June's is a self-directed admission broken across her card-true self-interruption ("I hate it. It's clear."). Neither could speak the other's line with attribution covered.
- **2 MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM: CLEAN** — checked all four exchanges for same-length volley patterns. The flyer exchange runs statement→correction→deflection; the critique circle runs verdict→defense→verdict-and-exit; Odile's runs observation→"Yes"→order. Strongest counter-candidate: the supply-table close, where June answers two Theo logistics lines with "Okay." / "Okay." (lines 99–103) — near-symmetric volleys. It survives: the weights are unequal (his lines are deflecting a confession the narration has just armed, hers are minimal uptake), the repetition is June's voice-card compression under pressure, and she breaks it herself with her longest line of the chapter ("Theo. Tonight was the most honest you've ever been in this room.").
- **3 MISSING INTERIORITY: CLEAN** — checked Theo's presence in each exchange. Flyer scene: he loses his chair count, puts his copy face-down, finishes the chairs wrong twice. Supply table: the readied sentence ("*Odile's my aunt*--three words, short enough to say while the tap kept running") sits under every spoken line. Strongest counter-candidate: the "You made it mine" exchange (lines 67–73), where Theo's mind goes thinnest. It survives: he registers the closing of distance ("close enough that this was now between the two of them and the canvas and nobody else") and registers the audience-cost of June's unsaid reply ("whatever she was going to say she didn't say it there, with Ruth four feet away") — the silence is weighed, per the cut-list's seventh bullet, not left unmarked.
- **4 QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS: CLEAN** — inventoried every question: "Okay?" (line 29, genuine echo-query, answered), "Do you want me to take the catalogs back?" (line 87, genuine offer, refused), "You know that, right?" (line 103). Strongest counter-candidate: "You know that, right?" — a position carrying a tag-question. It survives: it follows an already-stated plain claim rather than disguising one, it presses for acknowledgment, it is answerable and gets answered ("In paint"), and June's card licenses the honest warning delivered straight. No noun-question/portentous-answer pair anywhere in the chapter.
- **5 FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM: CLEAN** — attribution and physical beats persist through every clipped run (palm flat over the cup at "Thanks," the easel-leg tap under Odile's verdict, brushes rolled into cloth under the "Okay"s). Strongest counter-candidate: "She moved on to Sam's." (line 83) hard-cutting off Odile's pair line. It survives: the critique-circle convention is built on the page first (eight seconds at June's canvas, "Don't touch it again," kept walking), so the clip is the scene's established mechanics, and Odile's brevity is card-licensed ("one sentence, sometimes two"), not performed starkness.
- **6 JARGON-TRADING WITHOUT TRANSLATION: CLEAN** — terms in dialogue: underpainting, varnish, the ground at six coats, due-date/logging language. Strongest counter-candidate: Luis's "You left the underpainting" (line 61). It survives: the referent is on the canvas in the same paragraph ("the moving boxes ghosted under the interval, the abandoned first guess showing through") and Theo's reply translates the stakes ("That was the assignment"). "The ground's at six coats" is weighable from line 57 ("primed white and bare") plus the running After Class thread; "Varnish neither" is resolved by the hanging instruction that follows it.
- **7 ATTRIBUTION OPACITY: CLEAN** — tracked every speaker switch, including the four-person arrival. Strongest counter-candidate: the line-19 pile-up (Priya, Ben, Sam arriving inside one paragraph). It survives: each arrival carries an action tag (banker's box and clementines; route with three zones; table dragged six inches) before the only quoted line, which is explicitly tagged ('"There," Sam said.'). The critique circle and supply table are two-handers with named tags throughout.
- **FAKE-SHARP: CLEAN** — ran every exchange against the cut-list. The highest-risk line, as forecast: Odile's "Varnish neither. They're a pair now. Pairs hang together or they lie." (line 81). It survives, narrowly, on four tests: (a) the exchange does not exist mainly to deliver it — it follows two material observations ("You started with furniture." / "And you used something she gave the whole class for this.") and a real conservator's instruction, and the aphorism is itself a hanging rule about pendant canvases, aimed at the work, not a reading of the two people; (b) it is speakable — shop talk from a woman who has hung shows for fifty years; (c) Odile is the one speaker the style bible licenses for high-density memorable lines ("best lines, fewest words"), and her card names pair/couple drift as a sanctioned material clue, which this is — no wink, no claimed knowledge; (d) it arrives in her teaching mode, not at a moment the cut-list says demands confusion or quiet. Second candidate: Theo's "In paint" (line 105) — a clipped line at a moment he should be ashamed. It survives because it is the shame: a qualification that indicts him rather than a zinger, and the narration immediately prices it ("He recognized the plan making itself useful and kept it anyway"). Third: "Phones are very advanced" (line 17) — deflection visible as deflection inside the sanctioned comic register, and the exchange stays followable (Mara: the photo is real; Theo: refusing to own it). The revision also removed the raw draft's three genuine fake-sharp offenders: Mara's "You both look like you mean it" → "The brush stayed in"; Sam's "Now it does the work" → "Now people see it first"; and June's paired echo-closer ('"In paint," she agreed') → cut, so the chapter no longer ends its key beat on a banned echo confirmation.
- **INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION: CLEAN** — the integration stripped four raw-draft commentary clauses ("which was its own kind of answer," "in a voice he didn't fully recognize," "which from Luis was a paragraph," "stopped being able to do anything about his face"), so I checked whether the stripping left the focalizer dark. It did not: the tic-13 replacement ("left his brush hand open at his side," line 55) is immediately followed by two full paragraphs of Theo reading June's canvas ("It was not cruel. That was the worst part."), and at "I know. I saw you write it" (line 93) the interiority pivots to the withheld sentence rather than restating what June meant — reacting to the exchange, not explaining it twice.

**FOCUSED CHECKS (orchestrator-ordered):**

- **DIALOGUE DIAGNOSIS (zero tolerance): zero instances.** Swept all speech and all narration about speech. Nearest misses, each examined: "It's a clear assignment" (line 31) rates the task's inescapability, not the card's wording; "You told it that way. I just heard it late." (line 71) locates ownership of the telling as evidence for "It was always yours" — a fact claim with no craft adjective, and Theo's perceptiveness is carried by what he did with what he heard (the repainting), which is exactly the rule's prescribed channel; "they'd all heard the wall story told as a story" (line 61) and "he had treated it as a story and not as a wound" (line 43) categorize Theo's filing of information, not June's delivery — and the raw draft's actual delivery-rating ("her voice even, like a person reading a manifest") was removed in integration; "Nobody said the word *fear* once" (line 83) records an absent word without rating anyone's phrasing. Advisory, non-blocking: "You told it that way" is the chapter's closest approach — any later repair pass must not add a manner-adverb or adjective to it.
- **ODILE MATERIAL, NOT ORACLE: holds.** Full line inventory: the rules speech (line 35 — poses, photographs, props, "Leave the wrong where I can find it. Two hours."), "Brushes down. Turn them.", "Don't touch it again.", "You started with furniture.", "And you used something she gave the whole class for this.", "Varnish neither. They're a pair now. Pairs hang together or they lie." Every line is rule-, object-, or hanging-bound; she explains no painting, claims no knowledge, and "for this" stops short of decoding — the raw draft's "made it say what it was actually for" was the decode, and it is gone. The palette-knife turn and the eight jars keep her in logistics. Consistent-with-knowing on reread without a wink.
- **NO THESIS-NAMING BY JUNE OR THEO: holds.** "Usefulness without chosen desire" is voiced nowhere. June's two interpretive lines stay on objects ("You made it mine. The roller... You made it mine.") and on the person ("Tonight was the most honest you've ever been in this room"), not on what either painting means; Theo's reply stays at ownership and lateness. Nobody on the page says what anyone is afraid of.
- **THEO KNOWLEDGE FIREWALL: holds.** Swept for Tasker, Philadelphia, December 4 / deadline, Asha, Dana, Kessler — zero hits in dialogue or interiority. Theo's known facts on the page remain the lease, the catalogs he logged, and the Week 5 wall story.
- **CATALOG PROTECTION: holds.** The supply-table exchange (lines 87–93) contains offer, refusal ("They're fine where they are... I'm not done with them."), and logging facts only. No acknowledgment page, no Eileen Brennan, no aunt/nephew; "*Odile's my aunt*" stays interior and unsaid, and the closing paper-slip image names nothing.
- **COHORT DISTINCT AND KIND: holds.** Mara teases without investigating; Sam moves furniture and says what the move does; Ben's "Nice save" is two words of logistics-recognizing-logistics; Priya speaks entirely in clementines; Luis gives two material verdicts and moves on; Ruth says nothing and squares an easel. Nobody is cruel, nosy, or running commentary on the couple; the raw draft's two chorus-flavored lines were replaced in integration.
- **PLAIN-SPEECH FLOOR / FOLLOWABILITY (reading guide §2): holds.** June's direct sentences: "I hate it. It's clear." and "Tonight was the most honest you've ever been in this room." Theo's: "It was always yours. You told it that way. I just heard it late." Every exchange yields a statable want/learn/refuse for a cold reader; well under two oblique exchanges; functional, unquotable lines ("Okay." ×3, "Yes.", "Thanks.", "I'll send you the layout.") comfortably outnumber the shined ones.

**REVISION ORDERS:** none — no FAIL verdicts.

OVERALL: CLEAN
