# Chapter 04 Adversarial Register Audit

CODEX-ON-CLAUDE:

- CLEAR - em-dash rhythm crutch checked; nearest miss: `"The fall hang."` replaces a raw interrupted dash and does not use punctuation for emotion.
- CLEAR - shimmer/poetic drift checked; nearest miss: `"the couple by the window had reached the stage of pie"` is Theo's service-room comic observation, not atmospheric prettifying.
- CLEAR - default-elegant noun phrases checked; nearest miss: `"There was no procedure for it being easy"` is Theo's logistics idiom attached to a live cover-story turn, not free-floating wisdom.
- CLEAR - theme-explanation gloss checked; nearest miss: `"Ruth wasn't reading romance into anybody. She was reading an arrangement"` is required focal orientation so Ruth's misread lands as professional-impropriety concern, not romance-clocking.
- CLEAR - recursive negation/self-aware meta-clause checked; nearest miss: `"which defended nothing and wasn't asked to"` is comic focal judgment, not "if that was the word" hedging.
- CLEAR - physical-reaction default checked; nearest miss: `"he turned the mugs so the handles faced out"` externalizes Theo's stress through his established room-management habit rather than heartbeat/throat shorthand.
- CLEAR - book-specific dialogue-diagnosis ban checked after repair; nearest miss: `"You're still at work"` names Theo's behavior mode rather than his language, and functions as June's boundary, not a narrator caption about phrasing.

CLAUDE-ON-CODEX: NO-CODEX-MATERIAL. No Codex parallel draft contributed prose. Codex edits were narrow audit-directed substitutions documented in the dialogue and comedy repair memos; the dialogue substitutions received Claude round-2 verification, and the comedy substitutions are under active Claude verification.

COMP-DRIFT:

- CLEAR - Beth O'Leary. Strongest counter-candidate: the found-family table warmth in `"The booth filled by couple"` and `"Sonia's turned out to keep [a rubber band] in a drawer with the birthday candles"`; this is premise-coded gallery/diner logistics rather than O'Leary-style high-concept intercut warmth.
- CLEAR - Emily Henry. Strongest counter-candidate: `"I have fries coming. Expand."` It has spark, but the exchange permits plain answers and awkward corrections instead of sustained banter escalation.
- CLEAR - *Days at the Morisaki Bookshop* / *Before the Coffee Gets Cold*. Strongest counter-candidate: the unhurried small routine of orders, pie, and coats; the chapter remains Lower East Side studio/diner-specific through Sonia's, charcoal, class lists, labels, and Ruth's ethical file.

GENRE-CLICHE-CHECK: PREMISE-CODED. The chapter's romance pressure is not default fake-dating banter or jealous misread; it is a public cover story made from gallery label facts (`"Thursdays. 43 labels, one flipped. The pencil. Line eight."`) and an ethical misread about institutional power (`"Is it comped?"`). The concrete register is book-specific: a 4B pencil, a wall-height standard, a rolled charcoal drawing kept out of water rings, Sonia's booth math, and Ruth pocketing a napkin map. The weakest genre-default candidate is June's `"We're not at the gallery"` exit line; it survives because it is built from the chapter's label-correction mechanism and Theo's established work-mode, not generic romantic correction.

Chapter verdict: CLEAN.

REVISION ORDERS: none.
