# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 07 (`output/chapters/chapter_07.md`)

Stance: cold read, skeptical professional editor. Manifest scope: scene 01 (lines 1–4, assignment-card epigraph, 0 dialogue lines) — not required. Scene 02 (lines 7–120, 29 dialogue lines, 40 quoted utterances) — required, audited below. Reading-guide exclusions consulted: none are declared for this chapter's form (standard spoken dialogue in one continuous class scene); the ordinary-talk calibration was applied to cohort logistics lines before flagging. Mechanical gate on the final text: 0 open findings; the raw draft's banned "it's load—" interruption was verified removed — no `load[ -]?bearing` string survives anywhere in the final chapter, and the replacement ("June, you're keeping it through November. The evidence is on the wall." + the clementine interception, line 100) does not reintroduce the banned construction.

SCENE 02 (studio, lines 7–120 — memory-portrait Tuesday, trade-sides critique, cleanup/rack):

- **1. Voice convergence — CLEAN** — covered attributions and read all seven speakers blind; strongest counter-candidate: Priya's "It's the eyebrow that hurts. Of everything you know about me, that survived." (line 90), which in isolation could pass for June's self-aimed dryness — it survives because its register is body-triage aimed outward at Ben's panel of *her*, consistent with her card's "practical diagnosis with humor," while June's dryness in this chapter is exclusively self-directed ("I've made a man. Beyond that I promise nothing.", line 34); Theo/Luis, the other designed-adjacent pair (logistics-care), stay separable: Theo explains himself when ashamed ("I couldn't get the paint to tuck," line 74), Luis never explains ("No," he agreed, and kept walking, line 106). The rhythmic sameness across cohort quips is real but is a composition problem, filed under FAKE-SHARP below, not lexical interchangeability.
- **2. Monotone Q/A rhythm — CLEAN** — checked all question-bearing exchanges; strongest counter-candidate: the kraft-paper exchange "How bad is it over there?" → "I've made a man… I promise nothing." → "I'm sorry in advance…" → "Leave them out. That's the assignment." (lines 32–38) — four alternating lines of similar weight — it survives because the fourth line breaks the volley by redirecting to the assignment rather than answering, and line lengths vary; elsewhere questions get non-symmetrical answers ("Did you eat?" → "I will," + narration undercut, lines 52–54) or imperatives ("Can we talk to them?" → "You may talk. You may not describe yourself.", lines 16–18).
- **3. Missing interiority — CLEAN** — June's mind is on during every exchange: the rubber-band reach and retraction (line 42), "She didn't need it. That was worse." (line 44), "June stood beside the evidence and waited for him to notice how much of it there was." (line 78); strongest counter-candidate: the "They're gray." / "I left in what I don't know." exchange (lines 84–86), where two lines pass with no interiority between them — it survives because the framing paragraphs (her standing beside the evidence; his look at the gray washes) orient the reader and the exchange is two beats long.
- **4. Questions-as-statements — CLEAN** — checked every question in the scene; all are genuine asks ("Can we talk to them?", "How bad is it over there?", "Did you eat?"); strongest counter-candidate: the italicized unasked questions "*Rack's communal.* *Is it dry?* *Are you keeping that?*" (line 114) — they survive because they are explicitly unspoken candidates, literal and speakable, not portent delivered as interrogative.
- **5. Fake-McCarthy minimalism — CLEAN** — attribution is maintained throughout; clipped lines are earned and tagged; strongest counter-candidate: "He didn't answer that." (line 84) after "It's the one I had." — a loaded short line plus silence — it survives the cut-list's unmarked-silence bullet because the focalizer marks the non-answer and the silence resolves immediately into his counter-offer of the missing datum ("They're gray. For the record."), and June registers the cost of his earlier silent look ("waited for him to notice how much of it there was," line 78).
- **6. Jargon-trading without translation — CLEAN** — gouache/gesso/values/plumb are translated in situ ("gouache lifts when you scrub," line 56; "dried two values too dark, so the head floated," line 56); strongest counter-candidate: Luis's "Gouache dries lighter. Your darks will be fine by nine." (line 102) — it survives because the line carries its own translation and June's reply ("The cheek won't.") shows the reader exactly what the term cannot fix.
- **7. Attribution opacity — CLEAN** — the high-risk condition (seven speakers, faces hidden behind kraft screens) was pressed; every over-screen line carries a tag ("Mara asked, from somewhere behind her kraft paper," line 16; "Priya's voice came over the screens," line 52); strongest counter-candidate: the two untagged closing lines of the kraft-paper exchange (lines 36–38) — they survive because only two speakers are alive in that exchange and the alternation is established by the two tagged lines before them.
- **FAKE-SHARP — FAIL** — "The paint has weight. You used all of it." (Luis) → "It's the eyebrow that hurts. Of everything you know about me, that survived." (Priya) → "That's my scarf. It looks better painted than it ever looked on me. June, you're keeping it through November. The evidence is on the wall." (Mara) (lines 88–100, Odile's critique walk) — three cohort speakers land the identical statement-plus-dry-rider shape inside one room-pass, two of them back-to-back in a single paragraph, interleaved with Odile's two licensed zingers ("The cheek is an apology. Scrape it."; "Leave the blank."). This violates the cut-list bullet "dialogue where every speaker has the same dry correction rhythm" and Rule 7 ("A conversation where every line lands perfectly is a written conversation"), and breaches the style bible's allocation — "Odile is the only character licensed for high-density memorable lines." Individually each line is card-defensible; collectively the stretch is a quip carousel, the exact sitcom rhythm the manifest risk note bars for Mara/Priya/Luis/Ben. The strongest survivor in the stretch, for calibration: Luis's "The paint has weight." is his verbatim voice-card example line and must stand.
- **INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION (Rule 9, both directions) — FAIL on direction 2 (explaining the beat twice / subtext caption)** — "She turned back to her own panel and smoothed the tape onto the back instead, because the question underneath those questions did not belong in a room this small." (line 114). The action already carries the refusal — three literal candidate questions, declined, hands given busywork — and the because-clause then diagnoses the unspoken questions as coded fronts for a deeper one. "The question underneath those questions" is precisely the caption register the book bans and is the surviving mutation of raw line 120 ("the question she actually had was not one she was prepared to hear herself ask"), which the Codex tic audit ordered cut with the instruction "keep questions/action literal." The order was only half-executed. Direction 1 (over-stripping) passes: counter-candidate "and June liked him enormously." (line 106) — bare, plain, reacting to the exchange rather than re-explaining it, within June's allowed plainness.
- **DIALOGUE-DIAGNOSIS (book zero-tolerance, reading guide §2/§6) — FAIL** — "Luis stood in front of it saying, 'The paint has weight. You used all of it,' in the tone of a man pleased with his wife's economy of nothing." (line 88). This is narration characterizing delivery — a tone caption — and §6 is explicit that any instance is a defect "in any speaker's mouth or in narration about speech," with no per-chapter allowance. "Economy of nothing" additionally performs as a workshopped flourish on top of the caption. Everything else in the chapter passes the zero-tolerance check: strongest counter-candidates considered and cleared — "before she could extend the ruling" (line 100) survives because "ruling" names the anticipated *content* of Mara's next clause, not her wording or delivery, and the comedy lives in the clementine action; "moved on without a word, which from Odile was a medal" (line 88) survives because it reads Odile's withheld critique of a *painting* through five weeks of lived calibration, not anyone's sentence; "Mara narrating the spellings to the room" (line 116) describes a literal activity. The memory-portrait exchange (lines 74–86) passes the plain-speech floor and followability test: each principal states plain facts ("I know the knot's wrong."; "They're gray."; "I know. It's the one I had."), a cold reader can say what each party learned and admitted without decoding, and neither speaker names or diagnoses the romantic subtext. Odile stays technical and unsentimental throughout — imperatives and work-targeted diagnoses, no oracle monologue; her longest speech is the five-tube logistics instruction (line 14).

REVISION ORDERS:

1. **Line 88 — dialogue diagnosis in narration (zero tolerance).** Cut the delivery caption from: "Luis stood in front of it saying, 'The paint has weight. You used all of it,' in the tone of a man pleased with his wife's economy of nothing." Keep Luis's line verbatim (it is his voice-card example line). Replace the caption with nothing, or with one physical beat in Luis's card register — placement, sightline, or stillness (e.g., he has not put his jars down; he steps back to check the panel level) — per his card: "adjusts placement, then states one direct fact." Do not substitute another characterization of how he sounds.
2. **Lines 88–100 — fake-sharp quip carousel in the critique walk.** Break the shared statement-plus-dry-rider rhythm: keep Luis's card line untouched; rewrite Priya's "It's the eyebrow that hurts. Of everything you know about me, that survived." into functional, incomplete, or plain teasing in her brisk clinical register (her card: direct questions, practical diagnosis — she can ask Ben something or state one flat observed fact about the eyebrow without the balanced epigram turn); trim Mara to one polished beat, not three — keep the scarf claim and the November ruling, cut either "It looks better painted than it ever looked on me" or "The evidence is on the wall," and preserve the clementine interception exactly as the device that ends her sentence. The stretch should leave Odile's two critiques as the only composed lines standing, per the style bible's license allocation.
3. **Line 114 — subtext caption on unspoken questions (Rule 9 direction 2; completes the Codex order on raw line 120).** In "She turned back to her own panel and smoothed the tape onto the back instead, because the question underneath those questions did not belong in a room this small." — cut the because-clause entirely or replace it with concrete avoidance behavior. The italicized candidate questions stay (they are literal and speakable); the sentence can end at "instead," because the next beats (writing THEO BRENNAN without a pause, racking her own panel face out) already answer what the unasked question was about. No re-captioning, no "what she was really asking" variants.

OVERALL: BLOCKING (3 findings)

Resolution path per audit contract: these orders route to the opposing model lane for rewrite; self-repair by the drafting lane is not an accepted resolution.
