# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 21 (Phase 8 Batch 3)

Scope: two substantial dialogue scenes. **Scene A** = stockroom confrontation (l.15–65). **Scene B** = the Batch 3 upstairs insert (l.77–91), triggered by Eileen's text (l.71). The solo passages (l.95–139) carry no dialogue; Theo's l.131/133 texts to June are unanswered monologue, in-voice (practical ask + guilty hedge, deliberate per the Ch22 setup), so they are out of scope for the nine criteria.

## Scene A — Stockroom (l.15–65)

1. **Voice convergence** — CLEAN - Theo runs long, inventorying, practical-to-emotional ("You know where everything in this building is better than I do, and I number the crates," l.27); Odile stays clipped and uncushioned (l.29, l.53). Strongest counter-candidate: "did you want me to finally say it, and she was just in the path?" (l.35) - reads Odile-cutting, but survives as Theo because it's a three-clause self-implicating question that over-reaches, not her single clean verdict.

2. **Monotone Q/A rhythm** — CLEAN - The l.41–53 trade is statement/rebuttal, not Q/A, and is broken by physical beats (l.37 cup/loan-sheet, l.55 the knife) and the l.51 "I need—" stall. Strongest counter-candidate: the four flat declaratives l.43–49 - survives because content escalates (books → fault → "tell me it wasn't my fault") rather than idling, though see #7 for the seam inside it.

3. **Missing interiority** — CLEAN - Theo POV carries body-under-stress interiority on-card. Strongest counter-candidate: "It was partly your fault." (l.53) lands with no narrated reaction - survives because l.55 (hands folding the utility blade in and out, then set down) *is* the reaction, shown not stated.

4. **Questions-as-statements** — CLEAN - One real question in the scene (l.35); the rest declaratives. Strongest counter-candidate: l.35's compound either/or - survives as a genuine question because it's met with deflection (l.37 she sets the cup down, changes subject at l.39), not self-answered as a veiled assertion.

5. **Fake-McCarthy minimalism** — CLEAN - Odile's terse lines alternate with Theo's long inventory speeches, so no uniform portentous sparseness. Strongest counter-candidate: "You will be less convenient," / "Yes." (l.61/63) - survives because it caps a long grounded Theo speech (l.59); the terseness is Odile's licensed diagnosis + Theo's plain assent, not affected flatness.

6. **Jargon-trading without translation** — CLEAN - Art/logistics terms are narration or self-translated in dialogue. Strongest counter-candidate: "The freight, the condition reports, the loan sheet." (l.59) - survives because each is pre-established (freight door l.1, loan sheet explained l.11) and reads as a duty-list; Theo glosses "the '96" himself ("Your sister's name. Mine," l.27).

7. **Attribution opacity** — FAIL - mechanical repair seam / split turn - `"I thought about it less than I should have," Odile said. // "She sent the books back clean," Odile said.` (l.43/45) - two consecutive same-speaker paragraphs, identically re-tagged, with no intervening beat or line. It reads as an inserted line whose tag was duplicated, and because it breaks the Theo/Odile alternation that the surrounding untagged lines (l.41, l.47) rely on, it briefly destabilizes who resumes at l.47. Fix by merging, adding an Odile beat between them, or dropping the second tag.

8. **FAKE-SHARP** — CLEAN - Odile is licensed for high-density lines and the worst zingers were already cut (tics l.359); what remains does dramatic work. Strongest counter-candidate: "It has been public for thirty years, Theo. Anyone with a library card could have read it to you." (l.29) - survives because it's evasion-in-character (deflecting his weaponization charge by claiming the page was never hidden), not decorative wit. Theo's "I'm done being the route." (l.59) was scrutinized hardest against the no-polished-thesis guardrail - survives because "route" is his native logistics word, the line is interrupted ("I just—") and concrete-flanked ("send me with a box again"), so it isn't delivered as a fluent aphorism — but it plants the construction Scene B over-polishes (B#8).

9. **INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION** — CLEAN - No captions telling us the scene's meaning; feeling stays in objects (pen, cup, knife, loan-sheet columns). Strongest counter-candidate: "It was accurate on purpose, from her end, and he made himself write it accurately from his." (l.11) - survives because it's welded to the physical act of writing the returned-column, not free-floating theme.

## Scene B — Upstairs insert (l.77–91)

1. **Voice convergence** — FAIL - Theo drifts into Odile's clipped, point-scoring register - `"She hates telephones." // "So do you."` (l.79/81) - "So do you" is a two-word riposte that turns her excuse back on her; that economical-cutting move is Odile's native mode, not Theo's (card: warm, over-explains, qualifies when guilty, practical-to-emotional). Across the scene he's uniformly terse and epigrammatic ("So do you," "Sunday or later," "If you want Eileen, ask Eileen," "You used it anyway"), so his voice converges toward hers. Strongest surviving Theo line: "My mother found the heating-oil receipts. If you want them, call her." (l.77) - still recognizably him (states the fact, hands off the instruction), though even it runs clipped.

2. **Monotone Q/A rhythm** — CLEAN - Dialogue is all-declarative and exchanges are separated by beats (l.83 "Odile did not smile"; l.87 the gutter/finger business). Strongest counter-candidate: the tight "She hates telephones." / "So do you." volley (l.79/81) - survives as rhythm because it's immediately broken by l.83 and Theo's next turn (l.85) runs three sentences, varying line-mass.

3. **Missing interiority** — CLEAN - The lean dialogue is bracketed by Theo's on-card mental-inventory interiority. Strongest counter-candidate: the exchange l.77–91 runs with almost no interior narration - survives because l.73 ("three for the sink, five for the table, the forty he'd covered on her gas") and l.93 ("the sink, the gas check, his mother's table") frame it in his logistics-mind, so the leanness reads as controlled, not absent.

4. **Questions-as-statements** — CLEAN - Spoken dialogue contains zero questions. Strongest counter-candidate: Eileen's texted "Sunday still?" and "Did the gas check clear?" (l.71) - survive because they're literal logistics questions in an SMS, not rhetorical statements dressed as questions.

5. **Fake-McCarthy minimalism** — CLEAN (scrutinized) - Concrete detail and warm interiority (l.73, l.93) keep the clipped patch from reading hollow. Strongest counter-candidate: "Sunday or later." (l.85) - survives, but barely: it's the chapter's most compression-brittle fragment, curt to near-opacity (the reader must reconstruct "settle it on Eileen's timeline, not now, not through me"). It reads closest to a trimmed repair seam; if any insert line should be re-loosened for naturalness, it's this one.

6. **Jargon-trading without translation** — CLEAN - Dialogue uses only plain domestic terms (heating-oil receipts, family papers, gas check). Strongest counter-candidate: "the gutter" (l.75/87) - survives because it's narration and physically self-defining (she presses the catalog's centre fold flat), not a term traded opaquely between speakers.

7. **Attribution opacity** — CLEAN - Tags are well-placed (l.77 "he said," l.85 "he said," l.89 "she said," l.91 "Theo said"); only l.79/81 are untagged. Strongest counter-candidate: the untagged "She hates telephones." / "So do you." pair - survives because it's bracketed by a tagged Theo line (l.77) and the l.83 Odile beat, and content disambiguates; the seam problem is Scene A's, not here.

8. **FAKE-SHARP** — FAIL - manufactured epigram - "If you want Eileen, ask Eileen." (l.85) - a chiasmus built for the button: Theo says "my mother"/"her" at l.77, then switches to the first name "Eileen" precisely so the X-ask-X figure will close. It's the second outing of his "If you want [X], ask [directly]" construction in one chapter (after l.59 "If you want a person moved somewhere, ask them yourself"), so a one-off boundary line has hardened into a Theo formula — and this instance, unlike l.59, arrives fluent and un-grounded, i.e. as delivered wit. With "So do you" (l.81), the insert hands Theo two point-scoring buttons he isn't licensed for (card: "never says … polished aphorisms about care"). Strongest counter-candidate: "No. You used it anyway." (l.91) - survives because it's plain rebuttal (concede "No," refuse the excuse), not a crafted zinger.

9. **INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION** — CLEAN (scrutinized) - No portrait-style caption over-explains the beat. Strongest counter-candidate: "Odile had made even that a route." (l.73) - survives because "route" is the established motif and it's a four-word landing, not a paragraph of thesis — but flag it: the "route" claim is stated three times in ~20 lines (narration l.73; Odile "Sunday dinner was never my route," l.89; Theo "You used it anyway," l.91), and l.73 over-claims ("made even that a route") what the dialogue then negotiates more precisely (she didn't build it, she used it). The narration pre-digests what the exchange dramatizes; trim l.73 toward the Eileen-text's own weight and let l.89/91 carry it.

## Calibration dispositions
- **Odile villain/oracle:** WITHIN BOUNDS. She admits fault ("It was partly your fault," l.53; "I thought about it less than I should have," l.43); her care move is plain feeding ("There is soup upstairs. Barley," l.57). "You will be less convenient" (l.61) is logistics-diagnosis, not prophecy. No oracle monologue.
- **Theo route-thesis:** SURVIVES at l.59 (interrupted, concrete-flanked), but the construction recurs and over-polishes at l.85 — see B#8.
- **"If you want Eileen, ask Eileen":** TOO CLEAN — FAIL (B#8).
- **"Sunday or later":** SURVIVES but brittle — the one fragment still reading as mechanical compression (B#5).
- **Eileen-text authenticity (l.71):** MOSTLY REAL, ONE SOFT SPOT. The sink, gas check, the $40 gas Theo quietly covers, and Sunday predating June read as genuine outside life, and Eileen's own "she can ring me herself" gives her a spine, not prop-status. But "the heating-oil receipts O wanted" is an under-motivated MacGuffin — we're never told why Odile wants them, and their only visible function is to re-instantiate a routable errand. Partly redeemed (it exposes Odile's phone-avoidance of her sister), but the "why" is blank; watch it doesn't read as an audit patch.

OVERALL: BLOCKING (3 findings) — Scene A attribution seam (l.43/45); Scene B voice convergence (l.81 "So do you"); Scene B fake-sharp (l.85 "If you want Eileen, ask Eileen"). The two Scene B findings share one root — Theo is written too quotable in the new insert — and collapse to a single repair: de-sharpen his upstairs lines back to warm/grounded. The seam is an independent, lighter fix.
