# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 19 (Final Verification, Post-Repair)

id: dialogue_doctor | owner: claude | chapter: 19 | source text: `output/chapters/chapter_19.md` (current, post dialogue-repair and plain-translation rounds)
Manifest coverage: one scene requiring Doctor coverage — scene 01, lines 2–83, 20 dialogue lines / 25 quoted utterances.
Stance: cold read, skeptical. Repair memos consulted for context only; every verdict below is proven against the current text.

Speakers present with lines: Theo (focalizer), Odile, Mara, Luis, Priya, Ben, Sam. Ruth appears but speaks no quoted line (her one exchange with Odile is reported unheard, by effect — "said one quiet thing to Ruth that made Ruth take a rag to a corner" — which satisfies her one-sharp-line cap by staying at zero and does not caption the speech).

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SCENE 01 / studio, Week Seven class night (lines 2–83):

- **1. Voice convergence: CLEAN** — Covered attributions and read the full exchange set blind. Strongest counter-candidate: Luis's "Nobody's going to ask what." against Mara's "Everyone counted, Theo. The second we walked in. Everyone." — both are corrections of the same deflection, arriving back to back, which is the closest the scene comes to a shared dry-correction rhythm (cut-list bullet 4). It survives because the rhythms are not interchangeable: Luis is clipped, subjectless, and walks away mid-task ("He ran his jars under the tap and went back to his station"); Mara names Theo, repeats herself for warmth-urgency, and stays to put down a cup she doesn't explain. Elsewhere the registers are cleanly separated: Priya's body-and-food directive ("There's dal in the green tub. Eat at break, not after."), Ben's nervous self-interrupting spiral ("Odd weeks I get the left, Priya gets-- I can print one for--"), Odile's bare imperatives ("Brushes"), Sam's two-word logistics ("Got it"). No two speakers converge.

- **2. Monotone Q/A rhythm: CLEAN** — The only question run is Priya's: "Is June coming?" / "No. Not tonight." / "Is she sick?" / "No." Two volleys of similar length is the counter-candidate. It survives because the weight is asymmetric — Theo's second answer shrinks rather than matches, refusing elaboration — and Priya breaks the pattern herself by pivoting to a statement ("There's dal in the green tub.") and disengaging ("She did not look at him again."). Rule 7 protects this as overheard-plain check-in, not volley structure. No other exchange alternates Q/A at all.

- **3. Missing interiority: CLEAN** — Checked the two pressure exchanges. During the Luis/Mara confrontation the focalizer's registration arrives through his own broken speech and through what he does with what he heard: Mara's cold cup is received and weighed ("It was going cold and she gave it to him anyway"), and Luis's verdict is enacted in the very next paragraph ("He committed the stool to his side of the line, whole"). After Odile's "From here," the interiority is fully lit: "Sitting here he could reach her whole side without straining. He put his brush on the rag and kept his hand on his knee." Strongest counter-candidate: the beat after "You can't leave it half," where Luis exits and Theo says nothing — a loaded short line followed by silence (cut-list bullet 7). It survives because the silence is not unmarked: the focalizer registers what it changed by acting on it (committing the stool, painting both jars, "He did not have another version of it"), which is registration through behavior, the mode this book's guide prescribes.

- **4. Questions-as-statements: CLEAN** — Checked every interrogative. Priya's two questions are genuine information-seeking and get answered as text. No speaker delivers a position dressed as a question; the positions in this scene ("Everyone counted," "You can't leave it half") are stated as statements. Strongest counter-candidate: none exists in interrogative form; the nearest portent-carrier is Luis's declarative "Nobody's going to ask what.", assessed under FAKE-SHARP below.

- **5. Fake-McCarthy minimalism: CLEAN** — The scene is full of clipped lines ("Glare," "Brushes," "From here," "Got it"), so I tested whether the starkness is performed or earned. It survives on two grounds: attribution is never stripped (every clipped line carries a said-tag or an adjacent action beat naming the speaker), and each clipped line is licensed by its owner's card — Luis's modal mass is "one short sentence" and "Glare" is a literal sightline diagnosis; Odile's card explicitly allows "Again," "No," "Eat"-class lines to carry scene work; Sam's "Got it" accompanies the physical act of holding a rack slot open. Strongest counter-candidate: "From here," she said. — two words at the scene's emotional hinge. It survives because the words are the caption of a completed physical act (she has already carried the stool around the table and set it square); the starkness is Odile moving people and objects rather than explaining, which is her card's stress behavior, not a prose posture.

- **6. Jargon-trading without translation: CLEAN** — Craft terms in dialogue are minimal: "blocked in" (Luis) is the only technical verb spoken, and the narration has already shown the act ("started blocking in the room on his half") before the word arrives, so the reader can weigh it. "Rotation," "dal," "brushes," "glare" are ordinary words. Strongest counter-candidate: "You blocked in her stool" — it survives because block-in has been dramatized on the page two paragraphs earlier; no reader needs the term glossed to feel the accusation.

- **7. Attribution opacity: CLEAN** — Stress-tested the three-way exchange (Theo/Luis/Mara, lines 45–59), the only place a reader could lose the thread. Every turn is anchored: "Luis crossed behind Theo… 'You blocked in her stool,' he said"; "Mara was there before he finished it, a cup in her hand"; "'You can't leave it half,' Luis said." Strongest counter-candidate: Theo's unattributed "It's the room." — it survives because it sits alone between two fully attributed Luis lines and only Theo can own it.

- **FAKE-SHARP: CLEAN** — Ran all 20 lines against the cut-list, with particular pressure on four flagged items:
  - Luis, "You can't leave it half." — Tested for the aphorism shape that got its predecessor ("Move it or paint it") cut. It survives: the line is grammatically incomplete without the scene in front of it ("half" of *what* is only answerable by the pencil-line ground), which makes it speakable friction rather than portable art advice (Rule 8). It is character-owned: Luis's card is "adjusts placement, then states one direct fact," and the text has him set jars in the sink and look at the one stool before he says it. It does not travel; it is not quotable out of the room.
  - Mara, "Everyone counted, Teo — "Everyone counted, Theo. The second we walked in. Everyone." — Tested for zinger-at-the-wrong-moment and for diagnosis. It survives both: it reports a fact about the room (everyone tallied the stools and jars the moment they entered — the text seeded this with Mara checking hooks and changing hands at the sight of one stool), not a characterization of Theo's language, so the zero-tolerance diagnosis rule is not touched. The repetition of "Everyone" is spoken emphasis under urgency, and her card's against-type directness is earned by the two deflections she has already watched fail.
  - Luis, "Nobody's going to ask what." — the scene's strongest fake-sharp candidate (noun-deflection / dry-corrective shape). It survives on the followability test: Theo said "It's the room"; Luis's answer states plainly that the *what* is not the question anyone has — the deflection is made visible as deflection, which is exactly what the plain-speech floor demands, and the elliptical grammar is delayed-punch Luis, contracted, speakable.
  - Odile, "From here." and "Same time next week." — Tested for oracle-coding. Both survive as pure logistics: "From here" captions a stool she has physically moved; "Same time next week" is a teacher leaving a class that meets weekly. Each will re-read pointedly after the reveal without either winking forward — consistent with the reread test and her pre-reveal guardrail (no elastic-rule commentary; clues stay material: she moved a stool, she moved nothing at the two jars).
  - Aphorism density overall: well over half the lines are functional or incomplete ("I over-bought coffee," Ben's aborted rotation speech, "Glare," "Got it," "Brushes," the Priya volley), satisfying the global voice rule for ordinary scenes; no exchange exists to deliver a quotable.

- **INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION: CLEAN** — Tested rule 9 in both directions. Not over-stripped: the focalizer's relationship to every exchange is available (the un-flush seventh stool, the two jars he "filled… before he could decide otherwise," the cold cup received, the label written with her name first). Not double-explaining: Theo's over-explanation lives in his *dialogue* ("I set the station up because the piece needs two eventually, and the jars, I thought if the water was already there-- I can move the stool. In the painting. I can move it.") and the narration does not paraphrase it afterward — the next interiority beat ("He painted.") moves forward instead of re-narrating the shame. Strongest counter-candidate: "understood while he was doing it that he was underpainting a room that was waiting" — a direct naming, but it names through craft process at the moment the naming *is* the event, which the reading guide's interiority discipline permits; it explains the painting, not the preceding dialogue. The over-explanation stays legible without becoming polished confession: the syntax is broken across three false starts and never resolves into an apology shape; his card's "goes very plain when he finally stops hiding" is correctly *withheld* here — he hasn't stopped hiding yet.

**Voice-card line check (per speaker, current text):** Theo — "It's a good rotation" (host reflex), spiral under shame, no forbidden aphorisms about care: conforms. Odile — imperatives only, no oracle, contraction-neutral bare forms: conforms. Mara — smoothing entry ("I over-bought coffee… Somebody has to take two."), no therapy language: conforms. Luis — three short concrete lines, no feelings vocabulary: conforms. Priya — food/condition management, direct questions: conforms. Ben — nervous word-count spike, self-cut, "Sorry.": conforms. Sam — makes physical room, plain "Got it": conforms. Ruth — silent; no card violation possible. Contractions (Rule 4): every dialogue line uses natural contracted forms ("Nobody's," "can't," "isn't," "There's"); no stiff full forms found.

**Reading-guide exclusions applied:** ordinary-talk calibration (class-night routine) — I declined to flag Ben's rotation fragment and the Priya dal exchange as flat or monotone; the guide protects functional, unquotable texture in exactly these scenes. No chat-format exclusions apply.

REVISION ORDERS: none. Zero FAIL verdicts; nothing to route to the opposing lane.

OVERALL: CLEAN
