# Chapter 21 Synthesis Memo

## Draft Provenance

- Claude draft: `output/drafts/claude/chapter_21.round_01.md`
- Integrated chapter: `output/chapters/chapter_21.md`
- No Codex parallel draft; Codex role was integration, critique, audit repair, and continuity control.

## What Was Kept

- Returned-catalog opening and non-Theo route.
- Loan-sheet accounting and Odile's `O.M.` initials.
- Theo's no-more-route boundary with Odile.
- June's Week 6 fear canvas as the bridge from usefulness to making.
- Hidden Week 3 study finished through door angle, hair edge, and scarf knot.
- Faced-to-wall label-out consent state.
- Plain Sonia's text request.

## What Codex Modified

- Initial integration repaired raw mechanical blockers: em-dash density, comma-then constructions, `let himself` allowance phrases, false-profound negation, echo-line poetics, and the hallucinated catalog-return attribution.
- Claude-tic repair batch cut portrait thesis captions, a `mattered` sentence, and over-elegant consent metaphors.
- Dialogue Doctor repair batch cut speech-diagnosis narration, reduced Odile quote density, removed the false `whole of what I did` claim, fixed the text-message sentence count, and stripped over-explained consent logic.
- Comedy Doctor repair cut two fake-comic/theatrical lines from the mirror/opening and soup passages.
- Positive Prose, Narrator-Publicist, Plain Translation, and Thought Development repairs stripped thesis captions, publicist logic, de-quotablized lines, and underdeveloped thought jumps while preserving object pressure.
- Characters-Wrong repairs made Odile wrong about forgiveness speed, made Theo's boundary more awkward/logistical, made his fear-canvas reading explicitly fallible, and moved June's reply out of Ch21. The final text ends on Theo's ask plus hedge, the phone dark, the study faced to the wall, and both hands empty.

## Final Audit Disposition

- Codex core/risk audits completed and currently clean: consequence, opening hook, ending quality, surprise, unresolved threads, continuity, voice-cover-names, editor scored check, shared vocabulary, convenient invention, adversarial register, counter-strip, earned test, mentor scene, set-piece intensity, specificity, interchangeability, snapshot conformance, chat variety, performance, NPC goals 21, and meanwhile 21.
- Claude Dialogue Doctor canonical `output/critiques/claude/chapter_21.dialogue_doctor.md`: `OVERALL: CLEAN` after current-text rerun.
- Claude Comedy Doctor canonical `output/critiques/claude/chapter_21.comedy_doctor.md`: `CLEAR`.
- Claude Positive Prose canonical `output/critiques/claude/chapter_21.positive_prose.md`: `INHABITED`.
- Claude Narrator-Publicist canonical `output/critiques/claude/chapter_21.narrator_publicist.md`: `CRITICAL-DISTANCE-HELD`.
- Claude Plain Translation canonical `output/critiques/claude/chapter_21.plain_translation.md`: `REGISTER-HOLDS`.
- Claude Thought Development canonical `output/critiques/claude/chapter_21.thought_development.md`: `OVERALL: DEVELOPED`.
- Claude Characters-Wrong canonical `output/critiques/claude/chapter_21.characters_wrong.md`: `WRONG-ENOUGH`.
- No audit finding was rejected. All blocking orders were either repaired directly or superseded by later current-text verification.

## Final Verification

- Required snapshots exist through `before_final_gate` and `after_final_gate`; latest final snapshot is `output/revision_snapshots/chapter_21/chapter_21.0034.20260704T161402Z.after_final_gate.md`.
- Final per-chapter gate: `output/critiques/codex/mechanical/chapter_21_final_quality_gate.md` passed open=0 allowlisted=0 WATCH=53.
- Full manuscript gate after Ch21: `output/critiques/codex/mechanical/full_gate_after_chapter_21.md` passed open=0 allowlisted=0 WATCH=1200.
- Dialogue manifest passed with missing_doctor_files=0; prose variability audit passed.
- Trackers updated so Ch22 owns June's reply (`Sunday. 9. Just coffee.`) and the diner conversation.
