# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 15: Keys Elsewhere

Read cold against `output/chapters/chapter_15.md` (integrated), with provenance check against `output/drafts/claude/chapter_15.round_01.md`. Manifest declares one scene requiring coverage: scene 01, lines 2–117 (one continuous apartment scene containing the Nia phone call, the Asha thread, the group thread, and the Theo thread). The reading guide declares no chat-format exclusions, so all seven failure modes were applied to the text threads in full. Voice cards consulted: June, Nia, Asha, Theo, Priya.

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SCENE 01 (apartment / Nia call / text threads, lines 2–117):

**1. VOICE CONVERGENCE: CLEAN** — Read the full call with attributions covered. Nia's turns run medium-to-long and live lexically in funding and administration (board, grants, city line item, W-2, youth grant reporting); June's run two to eight words or one diagnostic sentence in mechanism and material (spring, grease, sticking open or shut). Strongest counter-candidate: the opening volley — "I had a thing with panels." / "For two days." / "They were complicated panels." — both speakers dry in adjacent lines. Survives because Nia's dryness is a flat factual challenge and June's is self-aimed deflection (her card's smoke-screen joke), and their lexicons never overlap again. Secondary candidate: Priya's "*Matte looks clean; photo holds at 8x10. Mara's crop works.*" sits near June's clipped craft-verdict register; survives because Priya's card licenses "precise, brisk," she exchanges no lines with June here, and she stays distinguishable from Asha (rate-and-slot pressure: "*You in or do I give your slot to Dario*") and Theo (ruling humor).

**2. MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM: CLEAN** — The call is interview-shaped by design (the card requires the offer to arrive as job terms). Checked volley length and weight: June's questions are 2–8 words against Nia's 40–120-word answers, so the volleys are never "of similar length"; weight shifts at the wall line ("June wrote *keys / after 8 / wall / on the paper.* She looked at the line. The pen sat at the end of it."), at the lapse Nia has to break ("June." / "I'm here. I'm taking notes."), and June twice answers with statements instead of questions ("If the line item dies, I'm six months and a reference."). Strongest counter-candidate: the run from "Define run." through "Renewal?" is four consecutive short-Q/long-A volleys. Survives because the answers carry different weights (duties, money, access, odds), and June's interiority interrupts between volleys — the invoice glance, the margin math — so the rhythm never flattens into metronome.

**3. MISSING INTERIORITY: CLEAN** — June's mind stays lit through the entire call via the notebook ("June was writing. *Vandercook—gripper, return stroke.* … Her handwriting had gotten neat."), via the two invoices the moment money is named, and via the back-room image after the Tuesday walkthrough: "The version that kept returning put her at the press with a rag. Behind her, the wall stayed clean and empty under the raking light." — the trap arrives as image, not thesis. Strongest dark-stretch counter-candidate: the renewal-through-deadline volleys (lines 51–63), where June only writes. Survives because the writing *is* the registered reaction ("The date sat in the same neat handwriting as the gripper notes.") and the post-call paragraph cashes it: "She went down the page once more, looking for the line to cross out, and did not find one."

**4. QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS: CLEAN** — Checked every June question: "Define run," "Sticking open or sticking shut?", "Renewal?", "Walk me through a Tuesday" — each is a genuine information request that gets a concrete answer June then uses on the page. Strongest counter-candidate: the bare noun-question "Renewal?" plus June's "There's a deadline." completing Nia's "One more thing. It has a date on it." Both survive: the replies are anti-portentous (grant mechanics; "Friday, December fourth, noon" plus board logistics), and June's statement is an interview-confirmation move, not a position in disguise manufacturing weight.

**5. FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM: CLEAN** — Attribution is light but never performs starkness; the beats are concrete and earn their place (the laptop sound, the pen audible to Nia, the chair creak). Strongest counter-candidate: "December fourth," June said. "Noon." — clipped close to the call. Survives because compression under exposure is June's card behavior ("compresses when exposed"), and the next paragraph immediately re-opens interiority and inventory rather than holding an unearned stark silence.

**6. JARGON-TRADING WITHOUT TRANSLATION: CLEAN** — Every world-term is priced for the reader in-scene: "Forty-nine five" becomes the margin note "*49,500 / yr*" next to "*1,180*" and "*1,475 now*"; Kessler's "net-45" is translated inside Asha's own text ("*Invoice Jan, see it in Mar*"); the gripper defect is weighed by June's "Either way it's an afternoon." Strongest counter-candidate: "There's a Vandercook with a gripper bar that sticks on the return, an etching press with a bearing that knocks at the end of the pass" — dense shop-talk. Survives because Nia frames the stakes in lay terms in the same breath ("fix the boring things before the artists arrive so they don't fix them wrong"), and the terms exist so the reader can watch the job court June's competence — and watch her catch herself enjoying it ("June heard herself and stopped. 'Hypothetically.'").

**7. ATTRIBUTION OPACITY: CLEAN** — Two-voice phone call with unambiguous turn ownership; every text names its sender, and the threads are explicitly separated ("One more buzz, separate thread."). Strongest counter-candidate: the unattributed "June." / "I'm here. I'm taking notes." — survives because only Nia can be saying June's name on the line. Non-blocking watch (not opacity, repetition): one call leans three times on the same locator — "a sound on Nia's end," "Paper rustled on her end," "A chair creaked on her end" — the latter two inside one paragraph (line 57); this feeds the gate's existing repeated-descriptor WATCH.

**FAKE-SHARP: CLEAN — verified against provenance.** Ran every exchange against the cut-list. The integration pass demonstrably stripped the raw draft's quotable-not-speakable lines: "screwdriver and an apology" → "with a screwdriver"; "a reference so good it'll be suspicious" → "a detailed reference from me"; "Noon. Eat lunch after." → "I'll send the description tonight."; "six weeks of interviewing people who list 'passion' under skills" → "six weeks of interviews"; June's "I've heard it. People say it near me." cut entire; Asha's "*Mysterious.*" cut; June's aphorism-shaped "Coats are people who left their position marked." replaced with the plainer, label-note-functional "*Somebody marked their position and left.*" Strongest surviving counter-candidates: Nia's "If the city line item holds, the six months becomes a year and the year becomes a job" (chained build, but stock grants-administrator speech, squarely her card's money/time specifics) and June's "*He overtightens everything.*" (zinger-shaped, but a verifiable work fact that is the actual reason not to give Dario the slot — speakable and consequential). Also checked the loaded-short-line bullet: "December fourth," June said. "Noon." is followed not by unmarked silence but by Nia's concrete close and June's full accounting of the page.

**INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION: CLEAN — tested both directions.** Not over-stripped (see mode 3), and not double-explaining: the flyer beat runs perception first, judgment second — "June's eyes in it were angled toward him, not the camera, and they were not surprised. That was the trouble with it." — with the raw draft's third pass ("Surprised she could have explained.") cut in integration. Strongest counter-candidate: "She told herself that was about weight distribution." — narration glossing her own move. Survives because it is the card's self-rebuke slot doing its work in one clause, and the object action (turning the stack to face the wall) still carries the beat.

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**Focused checks (per orchestrator order):**

- **Nia — direct, practical, respectful, no strawman, no advice oracle: CLEAN.** She names money without shame ("Pay's not glamorous. Forty-nine five."), refuses rescue framing ("I'm offering you work, June, not a rescue. I need somebody who can keep the rooms running. I've seen you do that."), and pointedly declines the oracle slot ("I'm not adding anything else tonight. Read the description."). The raw draft's one advice-oracle drift — the fairness speech "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." — was cut in integration. Her pressure stays deadline-and-board shaped, exactly her card's stress response.
- **June — craft-exact, dry, self-protective, never a therapist: CLEAN.** Every exposed moment converts to material ("Hypothetically. Keep going. Money."; "That's a hold. I'll know by early Dec."); no line explains her psychology to anyone. Counter-candidate examined: "Can I ask the gripper question differently … Walk me through a Tuesday." — self-referential, but it is a speech act (reframing her own request), not a caption of anyone's language, and the Tuesday answer is what springs the trap.
- **Followability of the call: CLEAN.** A cold reader can list the offer: studio-operations role at the Tasker Street printshop/arts program; W-2 full-time, six months funded, $49,500, benefits at ninety days; keys on day one; after-hours studio access written into the job description; renewal decent-not-guaranteed on two grants and a city line item; answer due Friday, December 4, at noon. Why it tempts is equally on the page: rent at 1,180 against 1,475 now, Kessler's 3,840 gross paid in March against two open invoices, Nia's respect, and a wall June keeps not standing at.
- **Dialogue diagnosis (zero tolerance): CLEAN after a line-by-line sweep of all speech-about-speech.** Candidates examined and cleared: Theo's "*That's going in the label notes,*" (he does something with what he heard — the guide's sanctioned alternative to captioning — and the label drafts are an established Chapter 14 artifact); "June heard herself and stopped." (registers that she spoke, characterizes nothing about the sentence; the deflection is then made visible *as* deflection by "Hypothetically."); "I know you're taking notes. I can hear the pen." (literal sound on a phone line, not delivery commentary); "she answered the part that was a fact" (sorts content, not phrasing). Nothing in any mouth or in narration rates carefulness, rhythm, line quality, or delivery.
- **Texts as speakers, not exposition ducts: CLEAN.** Asha's thread carries decisions, not briefing ("*You in or do I give your slot to Dario*"; "*you'd love it, it's terrible*"), in her card's invoice/rate/load-in shorthand. Priya's is a print-production report consistent with her brisk precision. Theo's chair-count text is a kept promise from Chapter 14, in his over-explainer humor ("*one occupied by a coat that I ruled counts*"), and stays entirely clear of offer substance as the packet requires.

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**REVISION ORDERS:** None — no FAIL verdicts. Two non-blocking notes for the tics tracker only: (1) the "on her/Nia's end" phone-beat locator appears three times in one call, twice in the paragraph at line 57 — vary or drop one if that paragraph is touched for any other reason; (2) "Nia thought." (line 67) renders an unhearable mental act across a phone line — a heard beat would be POV-cleaner. Neither rises to a dialogue-mode failure.

**OVERALL: CLEAN**
