The audit is written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_17.dialogue_doctor.md` (the coverage path the manifest listed as missing). The full audit follows.

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# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 17 (`output/chapters/chapter_17.md`)

Stance: skeptical professional editor, cold read. Manifest entry: chapter_17 scene 01, lines 2–123, 31 dialogue lines / 46 quoted utterances, Doctor required. The substantial dialogue is the back-stair confrontation (lines 41–119); the apartment discovery (lines 3–37) is dialogue-free interiority and is audited where it frames the exchange.

Provenance note (work shown): the revision from `output/drafts/claude/chapter_17.round_01.md` already removed three diagnosis/meta hits present in the raw draft — "in the voice of an employee explaining shift work" (raw line 43, register taxonomy), "And then, with everything practical stripped off it" (raw line 93, narration classifying his speech mode), and "That's the whole grievance. It fits in one sentence. I've checked." (raw line 79, June rating her own sentence). The reviser swept for this class of defect and missed three instances, cited below. The Codex parallel draft's dialogue-diagnosis hits flagged in `chapter_17.codex_tic_audit.md` ("correct and inert," "a better shirt," "perform pain," "The words were plain") do not appear in the base. Mechanical gate: 0 open findings; the 14 dialogue em-dashes at line 51 are WATCH-tier interruption marks, non-blocking.

## SCENE 01 (lines 2–123; back-stair confrontation, June/Theo, service stair of Marchetti Rooms):

- **1 VOICE CONVERGENCE: CLEAN** — read with attributions covered: June is imperative, short, visually denominated ("Stop." / "Say it anyway." / "Tuesday looks like a room with one less chair in use"); Theo is inventory-shaped, practical-to-emotional, then stripped plain ("she pays me, there's a payroll service, I clock in" → "I was scared you'd stop coming. That's the actual reason."). Every line passed a blind sort. Strongest counter-candidate: "I didn't hope anything that organized" (Theo, line 63) — a dry correction in June's native register; it survives because it is a single borrowed beat bracketed by his own idiom on both sides ("I carried them because you needed title language and they had it") and its content — admitting his denial was disorganized — is his confession, not her wit.
- **2 MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM: CLEAN** — checked turn length and weight across the exchange: imperatives, a cut-off ("That's not—", line 73), a 70-word offer spiral against one-line refusals, a mid-length grievance speech. Strongest counter-candidate: the interrogation volley at lines 57–67 (three June questions, three Theo answers). It survives because answer mass varies from three words ("Since the first night") to sixty, June twice breaks the volley with imperatives, and the volley is procedure-shaped on purpose — it extends her measurement-checking interiority from line 21, so the rhythm is characterization, not default.
- **3 MISSING INTERIORITY: CLEAN** — June's mind stays lit through the exchange: "she let him, because neither of them was going to stand on this stair and name the kiss" (69); "Then the facts came, the way she'd known they would" (77); "she heard him not following" (121). Strongest counter-candidate for a dark patch: the silence after "Saying *I know* isn't giving it back." (95–97), marked only by passing headlights. It survives cut-list bullet 7 because the next beat shows what the silence changed — Theo retreats to logistics ("The piece," he said) — so the cost is legible through action, not unregistered.
- **4 QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS: CLEAN** — June's questions seek and obtain facts she then uses ("Did you know this page was in the box you packed for me?", 57). Strongest counter-candidate: "How long has *boss* been the word?" (67) — portent-shaped. It survives because it is answered factually ("Since the first night") and the answer becomes the spine of her grievance; it is interrogation, not a position in a question costume. The packet sanctions this exact territory (Theo's card: "I said boss because it was true").
- **5 FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM: CLEAN** — clipped lines are earned at the confession's first spill, and consequences are carried physically (the latch at 51, the box at the rail, keys in pockets). Strongest counter-candidate: "'Stop.' / He stopped." (53–55) — a stripped echo pair. It survives because the echo is informational (command obeyed mid-confession), the door-latch beat in the same exchange supplies the marked consequence, and attribution never blurs.
- **6 JARGON-TRADING WITHOUT TRANSLATION: CLEAN** — checked every world-term: colophon, plates, back matter, wall text, payroll service — each grounded in scene or in June's established trade, and the acknowledgment text itself is quoted in full (19) so the reader weighs the evidence directly. Strongest counter-candidate: "payroll-true" (29) — a coinage; survives as June's compression of facts the scene has already itemized ("she pays me, there's a payroll service, I clock in," 51).
- **7 ATTRIBUTION OPACITY: CLEAN** — two speakers, strict alternation, re-anchored every three to four turns by object work (box, door, keys, steps). Covered-attribution read-through lost no line. Strongest counter-candidate: the unattributed run at 93–95 ("I know." / "Saying *I know* isn't giving it back."). Survives because the italic echo pins both speakers.
- **FAKE-SHARP: FAIL** — "You can stand where you grew up," she said. "I'll be fine. I've been a stranger here the whole time. Strangers know the way out." (June, line 119, refusing the walk to the train) — the exchange exists to refuse an escort and is capped with a compact, categorical aphorism (cut-list bullet 1), a zinger arriving at the moment the character should be tired and ordinary (cut-list bullet 5). "Strangers know the way out" generalizes her specific wound into a maxim about a class of people — quotable, not speakable, and against her card's under-pressure spec (shorter syntax, *more visual specificity*) and the chapter packet's order that the grievance stay June-specific. Near-misses tested and surviving: "Saying *I know* isn't giving it back." (95) — survives because "giving it back" extends her own concrete frame from 91 ("You did my math for me and kept the answer") and performs the refusal rather than decorating it; "Write it in the book — you'll want the record straight, you're staff." (111) — survives because it is anchored to the established logbook entry (29) and turns the wound's own vocabulary, not an invented epigram.
- **INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION: CLEAN** as over-stripping — the focalizer is present throughout (see mode 3). But rule 9's other direction — interiority that grades the exchange instead of reacting to it — fails three times; those are carried as Focused Check findings 1–3 below so they convert to orders.

## FOCUSED CHECKS

- **Zero-tolerance dialogue diagnosis: FAIL — 3 instances.**
  1. "She heard her own voice come out level and was distantly grateful to it." (narration, line 85) — narration rating the delivery of her own line ("level"), plus the banned "characters watching themselves feel things" move (reading guide §6). The perception belongs in her body or nowhere.
  2. "He flinched at the word, which was the first honest thing his face had done since the door closed, and she found she took no pleasure in it, which was its own information." (narration, line 103) — the first appositive keeps a sincerity ledger of his entire in-scene performance (everything his face did during his lines is retroactively graded dishonest — delivery-rating by other means); the second appositive is June filing her own feeling as data, the dry-diagnosis tic her card explicitly caps ("not every observation becomes a dry diagnosis") and a second watching-herself-feel move within twenty lines. The flinch alone carries the beat — the Codex-tic audit cited exactly that clause as the correct rendering.
  3. "That was probably true, and it changed nothing, and she filed it where true useless things went." (narration, line 65) — interiority grading Theo's answer as an object ("true useless things") instead of reacting to it, in a filing figure the packet rules out ("Ch16 clerical/custody figures are at cap; avoid adding more filing/custody metaphors in June narration"). The first two clauses are legitimate cognition; the filing-cabinet flourish is polish.
  - Counter-candidates checked and surviving: "How long has *boss* been the word?" (67 — targets the lie's duration, not the phrasing; packet-sanctioned territory); "*She's my boss* was payroll-true" (29 — tests the fact, not the phrasing, the shape the Codex-tic audit names as the permitted register); "Then the facts came, the way she'd known they would" (77 — classifies the content he offers, not his delivery, and sets up her "task" diagnosis); "You're trying to get a task… you want a list, you want errands" (85 — diagnoses behavior and motive, never language).
- **Grievance followable as asymmetry/safety net: PASS.** The grievance is stated twice, concretely, in June's mouth: "I knew that if she caught us, I was a stranger who'd conned her way into a class with a lie… What I didn't know was that if she caught us, you'd be her nephew who pulled a stunt. You'd have helped her stack the chairs after." (71) and the one-sentence form the packet requires: "Every Tuesday I stood in her room knowing she could throw me out, and you stood in it knowing she couldn't." (75). A cold reader can state without decoding: June asked whether he knew the page was in the box and how long the lie ran; Theo admitted mother/aunt, first-night knowledge, and deliberate weekly withholding because he feared she'd stop coming; June refused his tasks, his repair, his escort, and Tuesday. Not generic "you lied" — the safety net is the named injury.
- **June visually exact, not legalistic/aphoristic: PASS except the FAKE-SHARP finding.** Her hardest hits are pictures: "You'd have helped her stack the chairs after" (71); "Tuesday looks like a room with one less chair in use… Don't set one for me." (107 — tested against the spent Ch16 chair-count-comedy family; survives as a fact-shaped refusal answering Theo's own question, not a count-joke). The one aphorism is ordered out (Order 4); nothing in her dialogue is legalistic.
- **Theo: logistics first, then plain shame; no grand speech, no public-confession plan: PASS.** Sequence verified: forced facts (51), rationalization timeline (69), logistics spiral ("I can fix the part that's fixable… I'll move the pair into storage tonight… I'll redo the labels myself," 79), refusal (85), then stripped shame: "I was scared you'd stop coming. That's the actual reason." (89). The Odile-telling plan is private, next-morning, task-shaped, and refused — not a public confession. Closest approach to a romance speech: "because I wanted you in that room" (89) — plain want, no sweeping claim. Strongest counter-candidate considered: "telling you would've been a confession instead of a fact. By the fourth it was a problem with a history." (69) — two clean antitheses in a row, more workshopped than ashamed (rule 8 territory); it survives, narrowly, because the week-indexed staging is his card's risk-calculation tic made audible and the speech exits through friction, not polish ("There wasn't a week where it got smaller. I watched it not get smaller." — repetitive, unquotable, true). Flagged for the tics tracker, not ordered.
- **No reveal of Odile's knowledge/design; no Tasker/Philadelphia decision: PASS.** June's inference is parked, not stated: "She thought, briefly, about the fact that Odile had named the shelf… decided the pile could wait." (33) — permitted inference, no one says Odile knew. "Ask your aunt" (101) transfers logistics and reveals nothing of design. Tasker/Dec 4 appears only as parked private pressure ("Nia's thread in it and the fourth of December in the thread… Neither was tonight's problem," 3); Theo learns none of it; no city is decided; the chapter ends on action (123), not a maxim.

## REVISION ORDERS

Resolution is by opposing-model rewrite (Codex lane); self-repair by the drafting model is not accepted.

1. Line 85 — "She heard her own voice come out level and was distantly grateful to it." — **dialogue diagnosis (delivery-rating of her own line) + watching-herself-feel.** Cut the sentence entire. Either let "You're trying to get a task." open the speech bare, or replace with one physical anchor per June's card (under pressure: visual exactness, object work — e.g., her eyes on his pocketed keys, the catalog squared against her forearm). No narration about her voice, tone, or steadiness.
2. Line 103 — "which was the first honest thing his face had done since the door closed, and she found she took no pleasure in it, which was its own information" — **sincerity-ledger of his in-scene performance + self-data appositive.** Keep "He flinched at the word." Delete both "which was" appositives. If a June reaction is needed to bridge to his next line, one plain sentence under her allowed-plainness clause ("She took no pleasure in it.") — naming as the event, no appended analysis, no grading of what his face did earlier.
3. Line 65 — "That was probably true, and it changed nothing, and she filed it where true useless things went." — **capped clerical/filing figure in June narration + interiority grading the line instead of reacting.** Keep the cognition, lose the cabinet: "That was probably true, and it changed nothing." then proceed directly to the physical action already present ("She closed the catalog around the slip."). No filing, sorting, or custody metaphor.
4. Line 119 — "Strangers know the way out." — **fake-sharp: compact aphorism capping a refusal, zinger where she should be tired and ordinary.** End the speech at the concrete fact: "You can stand where you grew up. I'll be fine. I've been a stranger here the whole time." If a final beat is wanted, make it a visually exact fact of leaving (her card: exits, visual nouns — the rail, the bottom step, the lot). Do not substitute another epigram.

**OVERALL: BLOCKING (4 findings)**
