# Chapter 22 Dialogue Doctor — Round 3 (post-Positive-Prose verification)

Scope: full current chapter (`output/chapters/chapter_22.md`), re-swept cold — not a diff review of the Positive Prose round-1 repairs, though each listed repair is verified below. Manifest scenes: 01 (apartment, L2–23, zero quoted utterances), 02 (Sonia's booth, L27–153), 03 (sidewalk and walk home, L157–179). Line numbers cite the current file; the manifest spans (26–159, 162–185) predate the Positive Prose tightening and the scene identities are unchanged. Exclusions applied before flagging: the single "Oh," (L115) remains the §6-sanctioned once-at-the-confession instance, licensed by the chapter card ("one possible 'Oh.' only if earned"); the two text bubbles (L9–11) and June's quoted unsent drafts (L15) are message content, not utterances — failure modes 1–7 do not attach to them; the ordinary-talk allowance is not needed, both required scenes are peak-pressure.

## POSITIVE-PROSE REPAIR VERIFICATION (dialogue surface only)

1. **Apology breaks the harm sentence; June interrupts with "Don't."** — PRESENT, no new defect. Current text: "You were in that building making choices about the class. About me. About what we were pretending to be. I had the fact that would have changed what you could say yes to. I kept it." (L45). The triple parallel is fractured into fragments and lands on plain "I kept it." The banned therapy-conclusion ("The one that matters is that I don't get to decide anymore what you can handle knowing.") is gone; its replacement arrives as ordered — plain insight, then the polishing impulse confessed and cut off: "'I was deciding what you got to know,' he said. 'That's the one. I keep wanting to make it sound cleaner.' / 'Don't.'" (L67–69). Tested for new defects under mode 1 and the §2 rule — see scene 02, verdicts 1 and DIALOGUE-DIAGNOSIS.
2. **Seven-weeks speech contains the restart.** — PRESENT. "I made those choices with a piece missing. No. With you standing right there with it." (L57). The round-1-flagged narrator certificates ("She heard herself and kept going anyway…", "The word was out before she chose it.") are confirmed absent from the current file. The restart corrects toward accuracy, not eloquence — card-true self-interruption.
3. **Wanted-you admission fails to finish one sentence.** — PRESENT. "I didn't ask who was making it happen, because then I'd have to..." She stopped. (L79). The weather thesis is gone; the easel/jars catalog survives; the plain bookends ("I wanted you." / "That part's mine. You don't get to apologize for my part.") survive.
4. **Stay speech ends on the facts.** — PRESENT. "She made herself finish. 'I'm staying, Theo. It isn't for you.'" (L91). The map aphorism ("I picked New York with the map I had…") is confirmed absent. "She made herself finish" was tested against §2 zero tolerance and cleared — it narrates the effort of completing an utterance, an act, not the language, phrasing, rhythm, or delivery of any sentence.
5. **Payment volley uses action instead of five consecutive cappers.** — EXECUTED AS SHAPE, DEFECTIVE AS STAGED. The cappers "I can accept that.", "Look at you.", "I'm trying not to ruin it." are cut; two spoken lines now bracket a physical reply. But the physical reply does not parse: "He looked at the bills and moved the sugar caddy back where it had been." (L139) — "the bills" has no antecedent (June counts out cash only at L143), and the caddy move is ambiguous between yielding and un-pinning her claim. FAIL, filed under scene 02 mode 5.
6. **Fear-canvas and portrait paragraphs tightened.** — PRESENT, no dialogue defect introduced. "He had made the blank into a prize. It cost her a second to answer." (L105) replaces the known/not-known pair; "Week three. Started when the secret became worth keeping. Finished only after the catalogs came back." (L117) replaces the stem figure and the placing-things insight with the literal dates Theo's own line put on the table (L113). Both tested under rule 9 in the scene 02 block. Also swept from the same repair round: the sweater beat now stops at action ("put on the good sweater, telling herself it was the warm one.", L23); the failed drafts are on screen verbatim (L15); the sidewalk opens on a street fact and not-leaving as behavior ("a delivery bike leaned against Sonia's window grate, salt dried white on its tires, and neither of them turned toward the corner.", L157).

## SCENE 01 / apartment (L2–23) — note, not a required block

Zero quoted utterances; modes 1–7 do not attach. §2 zero-tolerance sweep of the repaired draft paragraph (L15), the one place narration touches language: "The first draft was *We should probably talk, yes*, which looked like a dentist's reminder. *Fine* was meaner than she felt." — cleared on the same grounds round 2 cleared the paragraph's earlier form, now stronger: the drafts are June's own unsent text, on screen verbatim, deleted before any exchange exists; no other party's language is rated and no delivered speech is captioned; "looked like" is her visual register applied to words she is looking at on a phone; and the perceptiveness resolves into the rule's required channel, action — "she held her thumb down until it disappeared" / "Then she wrote what she meant." (L15–17). The third-draft description ("an explanation of why he should not feel guilty before he'd even arrived") describes content, not delivery — the workshop diagnosis "managing his feelings about her feelings" is confirmed gone. "the exit installed before she'd even reached for the door" (L13) — unchanged, cleared both prior rounds: reads the second text's function and motive, not its phrasing.

## SCENE 02 / Sonia's booth (L27–153)

1. VOICE CONVERGENCE: CLEAN — full scene reread with attributions covered, including all repaired stretches. June compresses and sets terms ("Week what?" L49; "Leave the jar. I might want clean water. The stain stays." L149); Theo runs practical-to-emotional at length, facts and logistics first ("Boss was true. Odile is my aunt. My job runs through her. So does my apartment. So does that classroom." L45). Strongest counter-candidate, created by the repair: the fragment run in Theo's harm sentence — "About me. About what we were pretending to be." (L45) — is June-shaped compression in his mouth. Survives: the block's architecture stays his (nine sentences, fact-list opening, practical nouns, plain landing "I kept it."), and the fragments read as a sentence failing under load — the ordered break — not as her wit-rhythm; his card's under-pressure spec ("lists facts… then strips down to apology") predicts exactly this shape. Second candidate: June's "Don't." (L69) against Theo's "Okay." (L77) — position disambiguates: hers cuts off an impulse mid-confession; his accepts an instruction.

2. MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM: CLEAN — long confession blocks against one-word replies, then inverted (June's seven-week accounting at L57 against "Yes," he said, L59). The repairs shortened the back half's volleys without evening them out: the payment exchange is now line/action/line, and the six-things beat runs statement/grade/statement/cut-off (L63–69), no interrogative chain anywhere. Strongest counter-candidate remains "Week what?" / "Three." / "Three." (L49–53) — survives because June repeats the number as arithmetic and immediately expands into the scene's longest speech.

3. MISSING INTERIORITY: CLEAN — the tightening did not darken June's mind at any hinge: the observed catalog with "She filed that away without knowing yet what it was for" (L73); "He opened his mouth. She watched him nearly do it anyway, nearly tell her she'd had no way to know" (L81); "He had made the blank into a prize. It cost her a second to answer." (L105); the week-three arithmetic after "Oh," (L117). Strongest dark-stretch candidate: the payment run (L135–143) carries no interiority between June's two lines — bracketed by the sugar-caddy action and the receipt-in-notebook paragraph (L143), which carry her read; the stretch's defect is staging, not interiority, and is filed under mode 5.

4. QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS: CLEAN — strongest counter-candidate: "Can I ask what happens now?" (L83) — survives because Theo audits it mid-line and strips it to a real question ("Not as a pitch… No. I'm asking. Are you going?") and June answers with facts. "Did you paint my face?" (L119), "What?" (L111), and "And?" (L101) are genuine information-seeking and get factual answers.

5. FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM: FAIL — "He looked at the bills and moved the sugar caddy back where it had been." (L139; Theo's entire reply between June's "Just coffee means I buy the coffee." L137 and "Good," June said. "Keep doing the quiet version." L141, Sonia's booth). The Positive Prose repair correctly replaced three consecutive cappers with a physical reply, but the replacement strips the beat past followability: "the bills" has no antecedent — June counts out cash only at L143, two paragraphs later, and nothing on the page puts banknotes on the table or in his hand at L139 — and "moved the sugar caddy back where it had been" reads with equal weight as standing down (clearing the way for her to take the check she claimed) or as undoing her claim (she put the caddy ON the slip at L135 precisely to pin it). The reader cannot state what Theo did or conceded, yet June grades the act in the next line. This is the cut-list's loaded-silence failure inverted into action — the reply carries the volley's tactical weight and the page gives the reader no way to weigh it — and it fails the reading guide §8 followability test ("a cold reader can say what each party asked, learned, or refused") and §2's followable-as-text floor. The rest of the scene's clipped stretches survive as before: palms flat on the Formica "nowhere near her" (L113), the four-line portrait volley "Did you paint my face?" / "Not the part I didn't see." / "Tell me nothing else." / "Okay." (L119–125) — starkness is the content; June is demanding less information.

6. JARGON-TRADING WITHOUT TRANSLATION: CLEAN, at capacity — the noun cluster is verbatim-stable at the round-1 ceiling ("do not add nouns"): "I called Nia from the sidewalk, in front of a bodega with a cat in the window. I gave her Asha's name after asking Asha first. I'm taking Dana's room, and I sent Kessler the W-9." (L91). The bodega cat is an image, not a world-term. Scene 01 still pre-weights Tasker and Dana (L5); every noun arrives attached to a completed action; the sentence the list serves is plainer than ever now that the map aphorism is cut — "I'm staying, Theo. It isn't for you." The jar/umber exchange (L147–149) trades only objects already on the page.

7. ATTRIBUTION OPACITY: CLEAN — strongest counter-candidate, a paragraphing wrinkle at the stay-speech hinge: "'I said no to Tasker Friday morning.' He went still, cup halfway back to the table." (L89) — June's line shares a paragraph with Theo's reaction beat, which by convention invites misattribution. Survives: the preceding line is Theo's ("Freight elevator," he admitted, L87), so alternation defaults the new paragraph to June; content locks it (only June can refuse Tasker); and L91 re-anchors with "she said" four words in. Watch note for any future touch: do not let another speaker's beat open that paragraph. The payment run (L135–141) alternates strictly; the portrait-terms run (L127–133) anchors with "she said" / "he said" at both ends.

FAKE-SHARP: CLEAN — full cut-list sweep including all repair-introduced lines, work shown on the strongest candidates: "if we're dating things now" (L79) — a dry tag arriving at an exposed moment, but the payload ("I wanted you.") has already landed plain before it, the deflection is visible as deflection (her card's smoke-screen under pressure), and the sentence that follows fails to finish — the opposite of a composed run. "I had the fact that would have changed what you could say yes to. I kept it." (L45) — consent-adjacent abstraction, but first-person, situation-specific, self-indicting, delivered inside a fragment run and landing on two plain words; not a generalizable aphorism, and his card sanctions the shape ("I said boss because it was true. It just wasn't the whole truth."). "If you were going, I'd hope it went well. Since you're staying, I'm glad. I'm not making more of it than that." (L93) — tidy parallel conditionals, but the composure is the content: he is performing claim-size discipline out loud, June grades exactly that ("That's the right amount.", L95), and the chapter card's no-grand-gesture rule is what the symmetry enforces; speakable throughout. "No. With you standing right there with it." (L57) — the restart sharpens accuracy, not quotability, and is the ordered friction. Carried-over lines re-checked and standing on prior grounds: "I'd been walking past it for a month like it was going to file a complaint." (L99, self-aimed, immediately un-deflected by "I read it wrong."); "a square with my name on it" (L103, wrong reading confessed after a visible restart); "It isn't evidence of anything and it doesn't fix anything." (L113, anti-grand-gesture function); "It won't, though," she said, aggrieved (L153, compliment-as-grievance, her card's care move). The back half no longer runs hot: between "Just coffee means I buy the coffee." and "Keep doing the quiet version." sits an action beat, not a returned capper — the density problem Positive Prose flagged is resolved even though the beat itself fails on staging (mode 5).

DIALOGUE-DIAGNOSIS (reading guide §2, zero tolerance): CLEAN — fresh sweep with the repair-introduced material as priority candidates, work shown: "I keep wanting to make it sound cleaner." (Theo, L67) — the highest-risk new line; characterizes his own not-yet-spoken account. Cleared on the round-2-established carve-out (direct naming allowed when the naming is the event): the wrong being confessed IS narrative management ("I was deciding what you got to know"), and the polishing impulse is that wrong recurring live; he rates no delivered sentence and no one else's language, and June's "Don't." converts it to action, after which he produces the unpolished version (L71). Same clearance, unchanged, for "I called it taking care of you because that sounded better." (L71). "She made herself finish." (L91) — effort of completing an utterance, an act, not a characterization of the sentence. "He did not say anything, so she kept the canvas between them instead of softening it." (L107) — unchanged from round 2, still at the line, not over it; the round-2 watch note holds (no delivery clause was added). "beating her there" (L99) — narrates timing and anticipation, not language. Conduct-grade ceiling re-counted post-repair: exactly three ("Good." L65; "That's the right amount." L95; "Good… Keep doing the quiet version." L141) — the cut of "Look at you." / "I'm trying not to ruin it." removed candidates, added none.

INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION: CLEAN — the Positive Prose cuts were tested in both directions at every site. "He had made the blank into a prize." (L105) — tested as explaining-twice: cleared; "prize" names the category of his error in her register, a word the dialogue never speaks, and sets up her spoken correction ("It's a portrait, Theo."), so it orients rather than repeats. The cut of the placing-things insight did not darken the portrait reveal: L117 gives her mind as arithmetic and returns her to the object ("She looked at her cup on the old coffee ring."). The cut of the sweater tag (L23) leaves an action beat that still loads the L177 callback. Highest-risk stripped spot re-tested: after "You paint before the room fills up." (L107) the narration still gives Theo nothing to cushion "I painted," (L109) — correct; the cost stays in the dialogue.

REVISION ORDERS:

1. FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM / followability (§8, §2 floor) — "He looked at the bills and moved the sugar caddy back where it had been." (L139). Restage the payment beat so every object exists when touched and Theo's reply reads unambiguously as standing down. Direction: put June's cash on the table before his beat (move the counting-out action, or its first gesture, from L143 up ahead of L139), so "the bills" has an antecedent; then give Theo one action that can only be read as yielding — sliding the caddy back to its place and leaving the slip and bills to her, sitting back, putting his wallet away unopened (wallet/keys business is his card's stress vocabulary). Keep the beat action-only: the Positive Prose order that removed the spoken cappers stands, and no replacement capper, no attribution caption, and no narrator gloss on what the gesture "meant" may be added — June's "Good. Keep doing the quiet version." (L141) is the only reading of the act the page needs, and it must land on an act the reader has already parsed. L143's counting-out sentence must then be adjusted to avoid double-counting the cash.

## SCENE 03 / sidewalk (L157–179)

The repairs touched only the scene's opening narration (bike, salt, "neither of them turned toward the corner" — L157); every dialogue line is unchanged from the round-2-verified text. Re-verified cold rather than carried over.

1. VOICE CONVERGENCE: CLEAN — Theo over-explains recursively ("my plan was nothing. My whole plan was to do nothing and let it be your call.", L159); June answers in compressed imperatives ("Tuesday. Four. Bring nothing.", L171). Strongest counter-candidate: "I know the difference now," Theo said (L169) — short and June-adjacent, but the qualifying second half ("I learned it this morning, but I know it") is his careful-apology cadence, not hers.
2. MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM: CLEAN — no interrogatives; the kiss block breaks any volley pattern; the third Tuesday-setting adds a new term ("Bring nothing") over L107 and L145, overheard-speech consolidation, not composed repetition (Rule 7 cuts the other way).
3. MISSING INTERIORITY: CLEAN — densest interiority in the chapter: the memorized order ("black with three sugars, the single inefficient thing in his entire operation", L163) and "he tasted like too much sugar, which she had known he would and had not known she knew" (L165) — the single surviving known/not-known instance, per the Positive Prose order, anchored to the literal sugar fact.
4. QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS: CLEAN — no spoken questions; the old "its own kind of question" narration is confirmed cut, replaced by behavior (nobody turns toward the corner).
5. FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM: CLEAN — the one weighted silence (the kiss) is marked with its meaning: "His hands stayed in his pockets the whole time." (L165) — consent information; the cut-list's requirement that silence register what it carries is satisfied.
6. JARGON-TRADING: CLEAN — nothing traded; "Tuesday. Four." is a held fact from L107/L145.
7. ATTRIBUTION OPACITY: CLEAN — six spoken turns, four attributed, two locked by adjacency.

FAKE-SHARP: CLEAN — strongest counter-candidate: "That happened because the terms are set," she said. "Not instead of them." (L167) — quotable, but it is the protected direct register: a fact about her own action, structurally required by the earned-stay test, and Theo refuses to match its sharpness ("I learned it this morning, but I know it" admits recency instead of returning a beat). "It does. I stocked it in October." plus the wince (L173–175) — self-incrimination repaired in-scene by her laugh; warmth floor holds.

DIALOGUE-DIAGNOSIS (§2, zero tolerance): CLEAN — "Thank you for the nine o'clock… And the just coffee." (L159) thanks her for the terms' content, not their phrasing; "I know. You put it in the second text." (L161) is factual citation of what he sent; no narration about speech anywhere in the scene.

INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION: CLEAN — interiority reacts (the sugar she "had not known she knew") rather than explaining the kiss twice; the closing index card (`TUES = 4:00 / jar stays / I turn it or it doesn't turn`, L177) renders the terms as object, not summary.

OVERALL: BLOCKING (1 finding)

Resolution routing per audit contract: the finding is resolved via opposing-model rewrite of the L135–143 payment beat under Revision Order 1; self-repair by the drafting lane is not an accepted resolution. Everything else in the chapter — including all six Positive Prose repair sites and the material those repairs introduced — is verified clean above with counter-candidates shown.
