All inputs are read; the current text is diffed paragraph-aligned against the raw draft, with every round-1 order and every Comedy Doctor disposition checked against quoted current text. The audit follows as my final answer.

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# Audit: Regression-to-the-Mean / Genericization — Chapter 08, Round 2 (repair verification)

Diffed: `output/drafts/claude/chapter_08.round_01.md` (pre) against the current `output/chapters/chapter_08.md` (post-repair). Cross-checked against: genericization round 1 (11 instances ordered), Comedy Doctor rounds 1–2 (5 orders accepted, 6 rejections adjudicated), Dialogue Doctor round 2 (CLEAN), counter-strip (NONE OVER-CUT), tic audit, adversarial register (CLEAN), and the gate on the current text (PASS, open=0, WATCH=65 — the one new WATCH since round 1 is the benign physical-action cadence at line 91, "ribbon, stopped, and put," already adjudicated by Comedy Doctor round 2). Stance: skeptical; the question this round is narrower than round 1 — after the accepted restorations and the reasoned rejections, does the current text still carry value-bearing regression that the Comedy Doctor's portable/overlay/legal-register rulings do not account for?

Snapshot note, so the record is clean: Dialogue Doctor round 2 quotes "with the satisfaction of a maitre d'" at line 37 and Comedy Doctor round 2 quotes "the row of bristle brushes" at line 5; the current text contains neither (the maître d' phrase is cut per Comedy Doctor order 5, and "graveyard" is restored per this audit's round-1 order 4). Those audits ran on intermediate snapshots. All verification below is against the current text only.

## Accepted-repair verification (round-1 orders 2, 3, 4, 9, 11)

All five executed, verbatim or improved:

1. **Order 4 — EXECUTED.** "the small graveyard of bristle brushes nobody had claimed in three weeks" (line 5). Side effect confirmed: the row/row duplication flagged in round 1 (instance 2a) is dissolved — "row" now appears figuratively only at line 113 ("one anonymous rectangle in a row of anonymous rectangles"), which stays as the protected-word repair.
2. **Order 2 — EXECUTED, improved placement.** "Those were the facts, and the facts all pointed binward." (line 13) now follows "nobody had thought he would require supervision," so "the facts" gathers the rack, the non-consent, and the unwritten rule in one antecedent. The echo-line merge it rides on ("she had neither seen it nor agreed to its existing") is intact.
3. **Order 3 — EXECUTED, preferred form.** "Mara declared the matter settled by the only authority she recognized. It was the second time tonight she had done that. Theo let the count stand." (line 99). The antecedent works: instance one is the line-51 announcement ("I've decided we're keeping Tuesdays"). The internal-coherence defect is repaired.
4. **Order 9 — EXECUTED in full.** "Four square inches of accurate and he could not explain to a single living person why he knew it that well" (line 11) — both the voice-marked compression and the original "knew it that well" are back; the intermediate's "knew that much" normalization is gone.
5. **Order 11 — EXECUTED.** "and that the only way to lose was to ask a follow-up question" (line 27), grafted onto the "posted notices" sentence; the "to know that X, and that Y" parallel parses, and the Theo/Odile protocol — six years of employment as one rule — is back on the page.

## Category verdicts

**1. Concrete details — HELD.** Round 1's three flags (drain, binward, count) are resolved: binward and the count are restored; the drain idiom stays cut as a reasoned disposition — Comedy Doctor round 1 found "clogged if you looked at it wrong" portable stock idiom ("any building, any book"), and the replacement is not a fade but a swap of one specific for a stronger one: "The sink was out. Acrylic-gouache went down in skins and chunks." (line 7) is medium-true paint physics where the drain line was transferable hyperbole, and the route-blocking work is still double-anchored by the SOLIDS card. The residual "he was not going to test her on plumbing" no longer carries the load the category word carried in round 1, because the specific now sits beside it. Riskiest remaining diff examined: "Priya needed the fries moved three inches toward Luis, who would not reach" → "Priya needed the fries close enough to Luis that he could take them without being offered them" (line 63) — a number was lost, but the replacement states the social mechanism the number only implied (Luis takes; Luis is not offered), which is character-bearing where "three inches" was merely measured. Not a fade. Also examined: "the danger was not that it was good" → "the danger was not quality" (line 9) — "quality" is a category noun, but the sentence is setup, and the danger's actual content arrives two paragraphs later as the stance and the four square inches; no value lost in place.

**2. Images and figuration — HELD.** Round 1's six flags resolve as: 2a (graveyard) and 2f (four square inches of accurate) restored; 2b, 2c, 2d, 2e stand as reasoned dispositions, each verified against current text. (2b) "like it had signed a lease" → "like it had moved in" (line 9): this was the closest call in the chapter and I pressed it hardest, because Comedy Doctor round 1 itself scored the lease figure funniness 2, portable-no, and acknowledged the lease-clock double-landing — then swept it anyway under the verdict-level legal-register thinning, and round 2 ratified the replacement explicitly ("a quiet cohabitation double-register that suits the book better than the cut lease figure"), with narration legal-clerical verified at exactly 1 ("become evidence," line 13). That is a register-budget ruling on a tradeoff the Comedy Doctor demonstrably saw, not an unexamined loss; the lie-acquiring-permanence work survives in "moved in" plus the line-109 variation "like it had been hired to," and the legal irony stays alive in June's dialogue-owned instances ("witness protection," line 89; "litigated," line 101). Restoring the lease figure would push narration legal-clerical back to 2 and reopen the capped register; no order issues. (2c) "waved like he was arriving by sea" → "waved him in" (line 33): blocked as portable narrator-overlay reopening the Ch05-capped maritime family; the entrance is carried by "We defended the booth," and the null gesture is the order's own fallback — criterion 6. (2d) "like a man delivering it to the police himself" → "the folder under his arm" (line 27): the either/or order kept "become evidence" as the single narration instance, so the setup the figure paid off still pays at line 13. (2e) "That was when the folder started costing interest." stays cut: the chapter card's "do not over-explain debt" outranks the tic audit's earlier allowance, and the midpoint anchor round 1 feared losing exists as the math triplet — "the math" (line 29), "the math stopped helping" (line 77), "The math still worked." (line 111) — which is structure, not gloss. Riskiest surviving figure examined for new smoothing: "newsprint concealed nothing from a woman who had run a studio for forty years" (line 17) lost the raw's gnomic present tense; the tense normalization costs a hair of aphoristic snap and buys consistency with the chapter's past-tense narration — not value-bearing.

**3. Character texture — HELD.** Round 1's 3b (the follow-up-question protocol) is restored verbatim. 3a stands as a reasoned disposition: "noted, filed, and declined to examine" → "he refused to follow the omission" (line 27) was simultaneously a legal-clerical inheritance hit and the gate's three-part-cadence hit, and the relational specificity the clerical triplet carried — Theo choosing not to look at what Odile's errand means — is now carried twice over, by "refused to follow the omission… that road had no end" and by the restored follow-up-question rule. Theo's archive-mind texture, round 1's ground for restoring "filed," is not starved: "everything in the building either labeled or about to be" (line 105), the label-slot system (line 107), "his own system was searchable" (line 113). Riskiest diff examined: the systematic contraction expansion across narration ("arms don't do" → "arms did not do," "couldn't" → "could not," "didn't" → "did not") — a formalization that slightly stiffens the deadpan, but it is uniform, register-consistent with Theo's steadier syntax, and removes no fact, motive, or contradiction; the unflattering material (he, not circumstance, breached the terms; the rescue stays unabsolved) is intact.

**4. Dialogue particularity — HELD.** Unchanged from round 1's pass, re-verified on current text: the cuts ("It was the way you said it," "That's more than I expected to get") execute the reading guide's zero-tolerance dialogue-diagnosis ban, which outranks any restoration claim; Theo's "That's the distribution, yes" → the ribbon-touch plus "It isn't on display. That's the only part I can defend." (line 91) is the Dialogue Doctor's verified voice-convergence repair and is more situation-specific, not less; Mara's announcement rewrite *gains* a specific ("Same booth if Dee lets us," line 55 — Dee is canon from Ch04). Riskiest diff examined: Ben's "allude to it with dignity" → "I was thinking paper calendar. Different disease. Same drawer." (line 61) — a lateral rewrite to a more speakable, more Ben-card line, at his self-deprecation cap; no interchangeable polish introduced.

**5. Inflation accompanying the fade — HELD.** The restorations added specifics with zero compensating significance language — checked each of the five repair sites for new stakes-raising; none. The chapter's quiet replacements remain quieter than what they replaced ("The folder stayed exactly where it was. Somehow it took up more room." vs. the raw's "there it was, the whole shape of the evening, arriving early"). The one shouting-adjacent survivor, "it was somehow the most expensive part of the night" (line 101), is raw-draft original, not revision-added, and the Comedy Doctor verified it lands as weight inside the licensed fiscal spine. No instance.

**6. Legitimate edits — HELD.** Every remaining cut traces to an explicit order or a binding ban: the three echo-line merges, the simile-as-adverb repair ("inspecting the crust as if it owed her a clean edge" — a gain; "edge" is June's owned word), "let himself in" → "He entered," the one-sentence-paragraph merges, "weather reports" → "posted notices" (book weather ban), "family" → "row" (protected word), the account/deposit and pickle-policy-gloss trims (tic orders 2/7 — the evidence survives in scene: the booth defense, the refill, the pickle spear, "I remembered"), "Trash kept secrets better than anything labeled" (workshopped epigram, Comedy Doctor order 1), and the six adjudicated rejections above. Escalation check against canon/threads: every later-load-bearing specific is intact in current text — S-PORTRAIT-01's newsprint/faced-to-wall chain (lines 5, 113, 115), canon 30's scarf knot/stance/blank wedge (lines 9, 11, 109), canon 31's racked portrait with the spelled-right name (line 89), the scarf's third week (line 101), Sonia's rubber band (line 63), the Wednesday trash clock (lines 7, 29, 111). No continuity hazard. Riskiest cleared edit: the "signed a lease" rejection (argued at category 2) — held as a reasoned register-budget disposition, not a regression.

## REVISION ORDERS

None. The five accepted restorations are verified executed; the six rejections are verified as reasoned dispositions whose replacement text carries the specificity load by other means; no order this audit could issue would restore value without reintroducing a portable figure, a narrator-overlay, or a second narration instance of the closed legal-clerical register.

OVERALL: HELD
