# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 11 ("Categories") — Repair Verification (Round 2)

Stance: cold re-read, skeptical professional editor. Inputs verified: current chapter text, prior Dialogue Doctor audit (`OVERALL: BLOCKING (5 findings)`), Codex repair memo, voice cards, reading guide + `reading_guide_bans.tsv`, mechanical gate report (open=0, allowlisted=0, WATCH=52). I also diffed the current text against the pre-repair draft (`output/drafts/claude/chapter_11.round_01.md`) to confirm nothing was relocated rather than removed. Scope per orchestrator: verify the five prior orders, then re-run the zero-tolerance dialogue-diagnosis sweep and the fake-sharp sweep across the whole current chapter.

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## ORDER-BY-ORDER VERIFICATION

**ORDER 1 — Fake-sharp Ruth/Sam thesis recap: FIXED.** The parallel point-counterpoint is gone in both its forms — neither the audited "At the hospital… / At HR, the same line became…" baton-pass nor the draft's aphorism trade ("Labels are for folders, until they're for safety." / "A label is a caption. People read the caption and stop looking at the picture.") survives anywhere in the current text. The replacement run (lines 61–67) is: "Sam rubbed the edge of the stool with their thumb. 'I am still angry about the chair.'" / "'You should be,' Ruth said." / "'Quiet cost us six hours.'" / "'It did.'" This is what the order asked for: Sam keeps one concrete consequence register anchored to the literal line-53 waiting-room story (the chair is the chair they sat in for six hours); Ruth's reply is plain assent, not a matched formulation; nobody re-delivers testimony already given. I checked the residue: Ruth's "And the other box cost me a year of wedding questions…" was present pre-repair as "And the caption cost a year…" — the repair correctly swapped "the caption" for "the other box" because the caption metaphor it depended on was cut; it is the setup that grounds the sanctioned waiting-room close, not a new recap. The knock-on trim also executed: June's line-69 paragraph is now "A mixed gray could be warm and cool at once. She knew that from paint; she disliked meeting it on a half-sheet at a frame shop. She did not volunteer this." — the "Dom's form existed so that the right person could act" restatement of Sam's case is cut; what remains reacts (and "half-sheet" ties it to the literal form from line 27) rather than re-deriving the dialectic. Sam's full-form "I am still angry" against their default-contract policy is Rule 4 emphasis (a year-old anger stated deliberately); the gate logged it WATCH only. No order-1 residue found.

**ORDER 2 — Ruth sharp-line cap: FIXED.** The line-59 epigram ("To certify the category, we'd have had to go out and become it first.") is gone, replaced by exactly the factual register the order specified: "We didn't have those documents, and I wasn't going to build a paper household for HR." Strongest counter-candidate for a smuggled replacement epigram: "build a paper household for HR." It survives — the phrase is denotative, not editorial: the "paper household" is literally the document list Ruth has just enumerated (notarized letter, joint account statements, shared lease, utility bills), it is speakable in scene, and it states a refusal rather than formulating a category thesis. Recount of editorial-sharp lines this appearance: "I'm saying the other version has its own waiting room." (line 67, the sanctioned keeper, anchored to Sam's literal waiting room) — one. Not counted, consistent with the prior audit's own rulings: the flower-in-the-subject-line email (concrete-comic), "That was my answer for about twenty years" (plain confession), "You should be" (plain assent), the PARK question (practical question), and the wedding-questions clause (pre-existing setup for the waiting-room close, ruled part of the same single sharp turn in round 1). Cap of one: met.

**ORDER 3 — June interiority during the lease exchange: FIXED.** Two beats now break the formerly ~420-word blackout. Beat one, line 81, immediately after the application terms: "June pulled the board square against the walnut frame. Forty times rent had a clean arithmetic sound. Mid-December did not. Her phone sat in her coat with Nia's unanswered thread above the group chat." Beat two, line 99, immediately after Sam's "occupant" translation: "June smoothed tape over the board edge. Occupant was an ugly word for a person carrying groceries up four flights." Both are perception-first and material (board, tape, coat), both land the chapter card's "June implicated by analogy" through her own mid-December lease and Nia's thread without naming the theme, neither anticipates the cubby reckoning at line 145, and neither explains the Priya/Ben argument back to the reader. The remaining unbroken stretch (lines 83–97, the case-for and the occupant exchange, ~230 words) is acceptable under Rule 9: June's relation to the content is now established on both sides of it and the retroactive "had been quietly building" at line 113 is no longer carrying the whole load. The over-explaining direction also checks out: the beats are one judgment each, no doubling.

**ORDER 4 — Spoken dialogue diagnosis ("rehearsed"): FIXED.** Line 83 now reads: "'Let's hear the case for,' Priya said." The §2-banned word is gone; the replacement invites the case without rating Ben's delivery, in Priya's brisk register. Relocation check: I swept the full text for diagnosis vocabulary (rehearsed, careful, lawyerly, measured, tone, cadence, rhythm, phrasing, wording, delivery, "the way she said") — the only hit is "Whoever had toned the regilding" (line 3), a literal gilding-craft verb, not speech. The caption was not moved into narration. The memo's bonus repair also verified: line 23's "before she finished reading the second sentence of the ask" is now "before she reached the part about timing," removing the diagnosis-adjacent counting-sentences construction.

**ORDER 5 — Narration about Ruth's question timing: FIXED.** Line 129 now ends: "Then she stood still a moment, looking at June over the top of the bundles." The clause "in the particular way she had of stopping before a question instead of after one" is cut clean; the physical beat stands alone, no replacement commentary on how Ruth asks things, no substitute portent-loader before the PARK question. The question itself ("Dom's second line. If the ticket had said PARK, who picks up for you?") remains the genuine, answerable question round 1 cleared.

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## FULL-CHAPTER RE-SWEEPS

SCENE 01 (manifest scene 01, Aiello Frame & Glass → street door of Marchetti Rooms → empty studio; speakers June, Dom, Ruth, Sam, Ben, Priya):

- **DIALOGUE DIAGNOSIS (zero tolerance): CLEAN** — re-swept every spoken line and every line of narration about speech. Strongest counter-candidate: "Occupant was an ugly word for a person carrying groceries up four flights." (line 99, June's interiority — a line the repair itself added). It survives: it characterizes the bureaucratic category term the broker's email imposed, not any speaker's language, phrasing, rhythm, or delivery — the same content-not-speech class as Sam's own translation of "occupant" two lines earlier, and the exact register June's card licenses ("uses… ugly, exact"). Her perceptiveness is shown by what she does with the word (groceries, four flights — a person, not a status), which is what §2 demands. Second counter-candidate: "It's a good label." (line 111, Priya) — rates the reminder artifact "don't push" as a plan, couple-shorthand de-escalation, not Ben's speech; consistent with round 1's clearance. Also re-checked and clean: "Abbreviate" (instruction about a form box), "The rest is formatting" (rates his own email document, arrives after "And I'm scared we lose it"), "she'd meant her answer as a dodge, and Ruth had matched it with twenty years of her own" (line 149 — self-intent plus content, the deflection-made-visible the plain-speech floor requires). No instance found, spoken or narrated.
- **FAKE-SHARP: CLEAN** — ran every exchange against the cut-list. Strongest counter-candidate: "Quiet cost us six hours." / "It did." … "I'm saying the other version has its own waiting room." (lines 65–67) — survives as the order's explicitly sanctioned single sharp turn, anchored to the literal six hours and the literal waiting room, with Ruth's setup ("the other box cost me a year of wedding questions from people who never once asked if we were happy") carried over from the pre-repair text as part of that one turn, not added. Re-confirmed survivors from round 1, unchanged in the current text: June's "It doesn't lie at noon and it doesn't quit at three" (solicited, immediately self-deflated — "That's not a vote. I'm cargo."); Priya's "five hundred a month makes being scared look responsible" (followed by the direct want: "I want to sign it on a day I'd sign it anyway"); Ben's "The rest is formatting" (card-documented fear-joke, after the plain fear line, not instead of it); the "Cargo's allowed an opinion about light" / "Cargo just gave it" volley (inside the 60%-banter calibration, deflection visible as deflection). Cap-ceiling check from round 1's warning: the repair added no new flat two-beat correction caps — "You should be" is plain assent and "Let's hear the case for" is a plain prompt; the chapter remains at four caps (Dom's dollar, Ben's tabs, June's cargo exit, Priya's label), at but not over its ceiling. Narration candidate considered: "That was the difference between a repair and a disguise." (line 3) — aphorism-shaped but interior craft cognition in June's optical register, outside the dialogue cut-list's scope and not delivered by any speaker.

Spot-check that the repairs broke nothing previously CLEAN: voice convergence (covered attributions on the new lines 61–63 and 81–99 — Sam still owns objects/space via the stool thumb-rub, Ruth still minimal-exact, the inserted June beats are silent interiority adding no convergent dialogue), monotone Q/A (the form volley and lease exchange rhythms are untouched), questions-as-statements (PARK question unchanged and still genuine), fake-McCarthy (transactional runs unchanged), jargon (Sam's "occupant" translation intact, now reinforced by June's weighing of the term), attribution (the unattributed "Quiet cost us six hours" still resolves to Sam via line 53). All hold. Mechanical gate concurs: open=0, the new "I am" full forms logged WATCH only under Rule 4 emphasis.

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REVISION ORDERS: none.

OVERALL: CLEAN
