# Regression-to-the-Mean / Genericization Audit — Chapter 20, "No Advice / Keys Here"

Diffed: `output/drafts/claude/chapter_20.round_01.md` (pre-revision) against `output/chapters/chapter_20.md` (post-revision). No revision orders were supplied; candidates were checked against the chapter packet, the reading guide, the voice cards, the continuity/thread ledgers, and the mechanical gate (21 WATCH, 0 open findings). The pattern of this revision is consistent: it made several genuinely necessary fixes (continuity numbers, a banned entity route, four dialogue-diagnosis violations, one slogan paragraph, one banned tic) — and alongside them it shaved uninstructed particularity off every secondary character and off June's decision logic. That second movement is the regression signature: passages nobody ordered touched came back smoother and more interchangeable.

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## 1. Concrete details — REGRESSED (2 instances)

**Instance 1.1 — the 10:52 timestamp loses its on-page source (internal-reference hazard).**
- Pre (draft, Nia call close): `"It's 10:52," Nia said. "Go do your worse offer," and hung up first, the way busy people do`
- Post (chapter_20.md:139): `"Good. Have her email before one. I have payroll at eleven."`
- The revised chapter still contains June's text at line 147: `*Done. Said no at 10:52.*` In the draft, Nia speaks the timestamp; in the revision the call is placed at 10:40 and no one ever establishes 10:52. The surviving specific now dangles — a reader who checks gets nothing, and the "worse offer" sendoff (which paid Nia's own `"That's a worse offer"`) is gone with it. The added payroll/before-one specifics are good and should be kept; they did not require deleting the timestamp exchange.

**Instance 1.2 — the closing trade unnamed.**
- Pre (draft final paragraph): `put the study up on her own wall, one nail, level enough, in the apartment she was leaving for a colder room with better light. Fifty-nine days until the armory.`
- Post (chapter_20.md:161): `put the study up on her own wall, one nail, level enough. Thirty-one days until Kessler's armory load-in.`
- The day-count correction is right (Dec 4 → Jan 4 is 31 days; the draft's 59 was an error) and `Kessler's armory load-in` is more specific than `the armory` — keep both. But `the apartment she was leaving for a colder room with better light` was the entire decision compressed into one object-borne clause, in June's register, at the exact closing gesture. Cutting it makes the final action barer than the book's smallness standard wants.

Legitimate cuts examined and cleared under criterion 6: `Marchetti called back` → `the Chelsea office` (draft error — Marchetti is Odile's gallery; December crating through it would route June's New York scaffolding through Theo/Odile, violating S-NY-01 and the continuity block, which records "Chelsea office"); `forty minutes before eleven` → `a quarter before eleven` (draft said 10:20 after a 10:40 arrival); the added `VANDERCOOK` crossed-out notebook line; the added `The To field was still empty`; the added `typed January 31 twice, once in the sentence and once in the subject line`; the dust-strip rectangle where the box stood.

## 2. Images and figuration — REGRESSED (2 instances)

**Instance 2.1 — the painting-distance simile.**
- Pre (draft, math paragraph): `She kept waiting for the arithmetic to change its mind, the way you kept stepping back from a painting hoping distance would fix a drawing problem, when the problem was in the drawing.`
- Post (chapter_20.md:13): `She'd done it four times and it came out the same every time: the left page won.`
- This was the chapter's one figuration that did exactly what the packet licenses ("a comparison... must clarify June's painterly or material choice"): it names why re-running the math is futile in craft terms. It was replaced by nothing. The trailing repetition (`The left page won on every line`) was fair to cut; the simile was not.

**Instance 2.2 — the provisional stairwell.**
- Pre (draft, arrival): `Sam first, in the orange scarf that made everyone else on the stairwell look provisional`
- Post (chapter_20.md:23): `Sam first, in the orange scarf`
- An odd, June-eyed, non-portable image reduced to a generic garment tag. Uninstructed; no cap or ban touches it.

Counter-candidates examined and cleared: `Corners like a surgeon` → `She'll eyeball a run and put a level on it anyway` is the revision working in the correct direction — a stock simile replaced by trade-true behavior. The two `honest light` passages (including `You couldn't flatter a canvas in it and you couldn't lie to one either`) were legitimately cut: the draft used "honest" four times, and the reading guide caps deliberate light-images at one per chapter; the revised chapter already spends its allowance well (`gray-green at the rim if the light came from the left`, `flat gray light across ten feet of empty wall`).

## 3. Character texture — REGRESSED (3 instances)

**Instance 3.1 — June's daylight test cut (escalated: continuity hazard).**
- Pre (draft, Friday morning): `She ran the test one more time, because it deserved to be run in daylight with coffee, not at 2 a.m. where every proof passes or fails on mood. If she stayed and he never spoke to her again — if Tuesdays ended, if the studio became a place she'd used to go — was the back room in Ridgewood still worth the coat? She put it against the wall and looked at it the way she'd look at a ground: for holes, for thin patches, for places where wanting had been scumbled over need. It held. Not comfortably. It held the way the $340 room held heat, which was barely, which was enough to work in.`
- Post (chapter_20.md:99): `She put the right page beside it: $490, JAN 2--KEYS, ten feet of wall, FEB blank. The $340 room barely held heat.`
- The adjacent paragraph (`She was not staying for anyone... the version of herself she hadn't met yet`) was a legitimate kill — the packet bans "choosing herself" slogans, and that paragraph was one. But the fix over-reached and took the test itself: the one beat where June separates the stay decision from Theo in explicit material terms. This is load-bearing three ways: the packet names it the chapter's irreversible change ("June separates city/art desire from romance"); the reading guide's earned-stay gate requires the choice legible as for-herself-first; and `output/continuity.md` (ch20 block, line 898) records "runs the test that Ridgewood must remain worth it even if Theo never speaks to her again" as committed canon — the chapter no longer contains the beat its own ledger describes. It also took the chapter's best figuration (`wanting had been scumbled over need` — a craft-exact verb) and the heat-rhyme (`held the way the $340 room held heat... enough to work in`). Without it the Friday sequence is arithmetic followed by a phone call: correct, self-owned, and closer to a generic pros/cons decision scene than the draft was.

**Instance 3.2 — Ruth's motive unnamed.**
- Pre (draft, kitchen): `"Some of it was manners. The rest was easier for me. That's the whole confession."`
- Post (chapter_20.md:41): `"Not all of it was."`
- `Not all of it was` is admirably compressed, but it deletes the payload: *easier for me* is the unflattering self-fact — Ruth admitting her silence served her own comfort, which is what her Ch11 access-history arc (forms, affidavits, the withdrawn benefits claim) makes specific to her. The thread ledger records the paid beat as "Ruth names that some previous silence was manners and some was easier" (S-RUTH-01); the revised line no longer says the second half. The reader can infer several fillers for "not all of it" — suspicion, judgment, tact — and generic inference is exactly the fade.

**Instance 3.3 — Nia's kindness undefended.**
- Pre (draft, call close): `"For the record," Nia said, "the wall was real. I wasn't dressing a job in a studio."`
- Post: absent (chapter_20.md:131–139).
- The packet's explicit risk line is "Do not make Philadelphia a strawman. Nia is right enough that June's no costs something." This line was Nia's dimension: she cares whether June believes the studio clause was genuine, separate from losing the hire. Cutting it moves her one step toward a functional door June walks past. (The revised call earns partial credit elsewhere — see criterion 6 — but this loss is real and cheap to restore.)

Counter-candidate shown as required: the core refusal was **improved**, not regressed — `"But it pays me properly to be the best version of the wrong me... Nothing would go wrong."` (draft) became the Vandercook exchange (`"The part I keep wanting is the Vandercook"... "They'd call the key number. It would be my phone."`, chapter_20.md:113–121). The draft's version was rhetorically shaped abstraction; the revision pays the Ch15-planted press-vs-wall trap ("June is drawn toward `true up the Vandercook` more than toward the wall" — continuity, ch15 block) with named equipment and a failure mechanism. That is the single best edit in the pass.

## 4. Dialogue particularity — REGRESSED (4 instances)

**Instance 4.1 — Asha's close flattened to dispatch.**
- Pre (draft): `"I have to go be a door again. Send Nia my number when you send the name. And June — " the shout came again, and she talked over it — "the room's not pretty. I'm not selling you pretty. I'm selling you cheap enough to forgive." / "That's the listing of my dreams," June said`
- Post (chapter_20.md:87–89): `"Send Nia my number." / "Okay," June said`
- Lost: the door callback to her own opening line (`I'm holding a door with my whole body` — scene-grown, kept in both versions and now paying nothing); `cheap enough to forgive`, which is Asha's voice-card anchor line nearly verbatim; and June's self-aimed joke. The revised exchange is interchangeable phone-logistics — precisely the "Asha as functional plot door" failure the packet warns against ("Asha is not a magical solution; she is practical... specific about rates/timing"). The narration gloss `which from Asha was affection` deserved its cut; the dialogue did not. (`hung up before the word was finished` survives and is fine.)

**Instance 4.2 — the crating line over-shaved by a required fix.**
- Pre (draft): `"Take whatever Marchetti gives you. Even the stupid crating. Especially the stupid crating — it's indoors."`
- Post (chapter_20.md:87): `"Take the crating if you get it."`
- The Marchetti→Chelsea substitution was mandatory (see 1, criterion-6 list). But the entity swap did not require deleting `Especially the stupid crating — it's indoors`, which is a working installer's actual winter logic and pure Asha. The fix and the flattening are separable.

**Instance 4.3 — Sam's hand-truck joke.**
- Pre (draft): `"If the answer involves moving anything heavier than this, you have our number. That's not an opinion. That's a hand truck."`
- Post (chapter_20.md:51): `"And a hand truck if you need it."`
- The draft line is the chapter's thesis in Sam's mouth — advice refused, converted into equipment — and it is the care-without-advice beat done as character humor rather than as staging. The revised fragment keeps the noun and loses the person. (Secondary, same speaker: `"What's the freight?"` → `"How heavy?"`, chapter_20.md:29 — a flavored idiom traded for the most statistically likely question available.) Note: the "not X. That's Y" shape is on the mid-draft *ask* list, not the ban list; in dialogue, as a deliberate joke, it commits rather than hedges.

**Instance 4.4 — Ruth's offer of time; Nia's column exchange.**
- Pre (draft): `"This is a two-minute visit unless you'd like it to be longer."` → Post (chapter_20.md:25): `"Two minutes."` The conditional was not decoration: it put the visit's length in June's hands, which is the whole Ruth/Sam contract this chapter pays. `"We know how to deliver a box"` → `"All right"` (chapter_20.md:33) is defensible under Ruth's one-sharp-line cap (her confession is the spend), but `All right` is the single most generic replacement available.
- Pre (draft): `"That's a worse offer on every line I have a column for." / "It is. The line it wins on doesn't fit in a column."` → Post (chapter_20.md:127–128): `"That's a worse offer," Nia said. / "It is," June said.` The draft exchange is followable as text (passes the plain-speech floor), voice-true for a program director who runs payroll, and it concedes the incommensurable without romanticizing it. Also cut: `"Buy a ticket like a civilian."` The revision keeps the generic halves and discards the marked ones throughout this call.

Legitimate dialogue edits cleared under criterion 6 (shown as required): `"I'd offer coffee but I'd be lying about the milk"` → `"There's coffee. There hasn't been milk since Sunday."` (plainer *and* more specific); `"This morning it was both... By tonight it'll be the first one"` → `"I did want to feel less bad."` (plain-speech floor, allowed plainness); `"Not a favor. A clause."` cut (fragment-for-emphasis / not-X-but-Y tic); `A beat` cut (banned outright); and four dialogue-diagnosis repairs — `"That's an honest answer, so fine"`, `the voice she used for load-ins`, `it wasn't a lawyer's point; it was a builder defending a beam`, `June heard herself and kept going anyway, plainly` — all correctly excised under the zero-tolerance rule, the last replaced by the better `cardboard edge pressed a line into her thumb`.

## 5. Inflation accompanying the fade — HELD

I checked every addition for significance language compensating the losses above. There is none: this revision fades without shouting — it thins, it does not inflate. Riskiest candidates examined: `"I know. That's why this is hard."` (chapter_20.md:117) — a new plain naming, but it is the sanctioned allowed-plainness register, attached to a named object (the clause), not an abstraction; and `She stepped in once, looking for where the corner failed. The corner stayed.` (chapter_20.md:159) — new emphasis rendered as verification behavior, more specific than the draft's `did not entirely believe now`, not less. No stakes were restated bigger anywhere. The failure mode of this pass is one-sided: pure fade.

## 6. Legitimate edits are not regression — HELD (screen applied; credits enumerated)

Every flagged instance above was checked against the packet, reading guide, caps, and ledgers before flagging; nothing on the list executes an identifiable order. Conversely, the following removals were claimed by defect-repair and are **not** flagged: the Marchetti→Chelsea-office reroute (continuity + S-NY-01 thesis); 59→31 days; 10:20→10:45; the four dialogue-diagnosis cuts; `A beat`; the `She was not staying for anyone` slogan paragraph (cut correct, blast radius not — see 3.1); the `honest light` pair (motif cap + repeated descriptor); the Vandercook substitution (an anti-generic improvement); the notebook `FEB = coat` moved from Thursday to Friday (the blank staying blank until she has committed is a better structure, and the continuity block is order-neutral); interiority-gloss trims (`which she chose to find efficient rather than telling`, `which made it very restful to look at`, `keep each other company as a record of a thing that was over`, `heavier than a box that size had any business being` → the more technical `dense with coated paper`). The mechanical gate on the post-revision text is clean (0 open findings) and none of the restoration orders below reintroduces a BANNED pattern.

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## Focused extra checks

- **Earned-stay scene:** not genericized in language — the surviving beats are all book-specific (Vandercook, key number, Dana's wall, Kessler dates) — but the earned-stay *proof* beat was cut (3.1), and that is the one loss with thesis and continuity weight.
- **Ruth/Sam care:** still routed through their access-history shape (the box errand, the car, no advice requested or given), but 3.2, 4.3, and 4.4 shave exactly the lines that made the care theirs rather than generic found-family support.
- **Nia and Asha as real alternatives:** both drift toward functional doors — Nia via 3.3 and 4.4, Asha via 4.1 and 4.2. Neither has crossed; the restorations below pull them back.
- **Study-on-wall ending:** HELD as specific — the leaving-side study, the kitchen-doorway step-back as `the distance she'd have at Dana's between the window and the wall`, one nail, and the corrected 31-day clock all survive. Only the `colder room with better light` clause (1.2) needs restoring.

## REVISION ORDERS

1. **(3.1)** Restore the daylight-test paragraph, material version only: reinstate `If she stayed and he never spoke to her again — if Tuesdays ended, if the studio became a place she'd used to go — was the back room in Ridgewood still worth the coat?` through `It held... which was barely, which was enough to work in`, including the ground-inspection sentence with `scumbled over need`. Do **not** restore the `She was not staying for anyone` paragraph. This also re-aligns the chapter with the continuity.md ch20 block, which currently describes a beat the text no longer contains.
2. **(3.2)** Restore Ruth's motive clause: `"Some of it was manners. The rest was easier for me."` (the `That's the whole confession` tag may stay cut). Re-aligns with the S-RUTH-01 ledger entry.
3. **(3.3)** Restore Nia's `"For the record, the wall was real. I wasn't dressing a job in a studio."` before `"And June, when it opens, come see it."`
4. **(2.1)** Restore the stepping-back simile to the math paragraph (verbatim acceptable; `The left page won on every line` stays cut).
5. **(2.2)** Restore `the orange scarf that made everyone else on the stairwell look provisional`.
6. **(4.1)** Restore Asha's close: `"I have to go be a door again"`, the `"not selling you pretty... cheap enough to forgive"` run, and June's `"That's the listing of my dreams."` Keep `hung up before the word was finished`; keep the gloss `which from Asha was affection` cut.
7. **(4.2)** Re-attach the winter logic to the corrected entity: `"Take the crating if you get it. Even the stupid crating — it's indoors."` The Chelsea-office fix stands.
8. **(4.3)** Restore Sam: `"That's not an opinion. That's a hand truck."` (optionally re-anchored to the retained `"And a hand truck if you need it"`); restore `"What's the freight?"` for `"How heavy?"`.
9. **(4.4a)** Restore Ruth's conditional: `"Two minutes unless you'd like it to be longer."` `"All right"` may stand under her sharp-line cap, but prefer restoring `"We know how to deliver a box."` if the cap is judged spent by the confession alone — the confession is disclosure, not editorial sharpness.
10. **(4.4b)** Restore the column exchange (`"...on every line I have a column for." / "The line it wins on doesn't fit in a column."`) and `"Buy a ticket like a civilian."`
11. **(1.1)** Restore a spoken source for the timestamp: `"It's 10:52," Nia said. "Go do your worse offer."` This integrates cleanly before or after the retained `"Have her email before one. I have payroll at eleven."` and un-orphans `Said no at 10:52` at line 147.
12. **(1.2)** Restore the closing clause `in the apartment she was leaving for a colder room with better light`, keeping the corrected `Thirty-one days until Kessler's armory load-in.`

No compensating-inflation strips required (category 5 held).

**OVERALL: REGRESSED (12)**
