# Chapter 04 Tension-Naming Conformance Audit

CARD: "friendly questions are more dangerous than interrogation"; "felt experience: warm panic"; "Mara asks 'how did you meet,' and Ruth watches the answer."

DELIVERS(warm social near-exposure) - scene 1 - enactment quoted: `"The booth filled by couple, which he should have predicted"` forces the false pair into a visible seating category before anyone accuses them; `"How did you two meet? And don't give me the edited version"` turns a friendly table question into cover-story pressure; `"Ruth unrolled her silverware and squared the fork on the napkin... She'd been watching the no discussion"` gives the watchfulness a physical behavior rather than a label. The tension holds through the origin story because the lie is made from true pieces: `"She kept coming Thursdays," Theo said, and heard it as it left him: a pattern, confirmed, by the man with no cover for knowing it.`

DELIVERS(Ruth's professional-impropriety suspicion) - scene 1 - enactment quoted: Ruth does not announce suspicion; she asks the institutional question `"The slot... Is it comped?"` and then narrows the ethical object with `"I didn't ask what she owed."` The chapter sustains the card's wrong-but-close pressure by making Theo understand the misread in operational terms: `"Ruth wasn't reading romance into anybody. She was reading an arrangement, and trying to locate the imbalance in it."`

Weakest stretch checked: the early diner logistics from `"Dee dealt five menus for eight people"` through `"Front left"` risks reading as table business rather than tension. It does not break the verdict because the table business creates the side-by-side seating and Ruth's first watched "no discussion" beat, which are the tension's mechanism.

Chapter verdict: DELIVERS(warm social near-exposure).

REVISION ORDERS: none.
