# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 21 — Round 3 (current-text verification)

audit: dialogue_doctor | chapter: 21 | round: 3 | owner: claude | stance: skeptical cold re-read of the current text after the Positive Prose, Narrator-Publicist, Plain Translation, Thought Development, Characters-Wrong, and followability-tidy repairs
chapter text: `output/chapters/chapter_21.md`
prior clean Doctor: `output/critiques/claude/chapter_21.dialogue_doctor.md` (round 2, OVERALL: CLEAN — rendered against a text that has since changed at lines 39, 43–49, 51, 59, 75, 105–113)
sibling audits consulted: `chapter_21.characters_wrong.md` (WRONG-ENOUGH), `chapter_21.plain_translation_round2.md` (REGISTER-HOLDS — predates the characters_wrong repairs; its line citations for the boundary speech and the ending no longer match the current text and are re-adjudicated here on current wording)
manifest coverage (line ranges restated against current text): scene 01 (lines 2–65) required; scene 02 (69–77) and scene 03 (81–97) zero dialogue, not-required; scene 04 (101–113) not-required by count, re-audited by explicit round-3 order, continuing the rounds 1–2 exception.

Round-3 target sites, per order: (a) the new Odile speed-mispricing exchange (45–49); (b) the rebuilt boundary speech with the failed first pass and the split-tape box (59); (c) the sent hedge text (107); (d) the removed June reply / dark phone (111); plus full re-check of followability, plain-speech floor, zero-tolerance dialogue diagnosis, and voice-card fidelity on everything the repairs touched.

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## DELTA NOTES (what changed since the round-2 CLEAN, verified on the page before re-auditing)

1. Line 39 now reads "I put that page where you would find it. On purpose." — plainer and directly addressed, replacing round 2's "I put public paper where hands would find it on purpose." The material admission survives; the shaped "public paper / hands" phrasing is gone.
2. Round 2's "That is true. That is mine." no longer exists anywhere in the chapter; Odile's fault-owning is now carried by "I thought about it less than I should have," (43) and "Partly mine," (57). No orphaned accusation remains — 43 answers 41 directly.
3. The new exchange at 45–49 is present, with the dialogue tag on 45 that characters_wrong flagged as a followability tidy: "She sent the books back clean," Odile said. The round-2 garden path (untagged 45 after tagged 43) is closed.
4. Line 51's trailing clause ("because at least asking plainly was one honest act available to him this morning") is cut; the round-2 watch item on that narration shape is discharged by removal. What stands: "He knew what he was about to ask for, and he asked for it anyway."
5. The boundary speech (59) now opens on inventory, stalls at "I just-", restarts off the box ("He looked at the box by the door, the split tape."), and lands plainer than the round-2 version ("ask them yourself" replacing "out loud, with your own mouth").
6. Round 2's sanctioned decode "the lender owning the loan" is gone from the initials paragraph (65); the scene now ends on pure action. Cleaner than the ceiling round 2 permitted.
7. Scene 02's thesis sentence ("She had painted a man maintaining the perimeter...") — round 2's open routing note — is gone, replaced by the misread at 75. The routing note is closed by deletion.
8. Scene 04 is rebuilt: the typed-and-deleted fragment beat ("recognized the species") is gone; the hedge is now typed and SENT (107); June's reply ("Sunday. 9. Just coffee." / "Okay") is deleted whole; the phone "stayed dark" (111). Round 2's scene-04 verdicts on the reply, "and that was all," and the Sunday clause are moot — the text they cleared no longer exists.
9. Sweep for residue of every cut round 1–2 flagged, zero hits on current text: "load-bearing" (all forms), "keeping its own counsel," "recognized the species," "and that was all," "Sunday," "Okay," "deleted," "perimeter," "lender," "asking plainly," "syllable," "rhythm" (as speech-caption), "quotable."

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## SCENE 01 — stockroom confrontation, Theo / Odile (lines 2–65) — full re-check on current text

**1. VOICE CONVERGENCE:** CLEAN — read with attributions covered, lines 15–63. Theo still goes long and fact-stacks under shame ("You could have pulled them yourself. You haven't asked me to pull anything off that shelf in years... and I number the crates," 27) and breaks when the feeling outruns the list ("I told her-" He shut his mouth., 35; "I just-", 59); Odile still compresses and corrects ("I sent you for nine catalogs," 25; "It was partly your fault," 53). Strongest counter-candidate, and it is in the new material: "That isn't the same as forgiving us." (Theo, 47) — a seven-word dry correction, which is Odile's home register, delivered by Theo. It survives: the line is grief-fact from the person who paid June's bill (note "us" — he keeps himself inside the fault), it is his one compressed beat before he collapses straight back into his own register with the broken plea at 51 ("I need- ... I need you to tell me it wasn't my fault."), and no second Theo line in the scene shares the shape. One corrective beat under provocation is contrast working, not convergence.

**2. MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM:** CLEAN — turn-length map on current text: Odile report (15), short volley (17–25), Theo long (27), Odile four clipped facts (29), Theo short (31), monosyllable plus cup (33), Theo long breaking mid-list into the chapter's one real question (35), silence as three actions (37), Odile two sentences plus fragment (39), accusation (41), admission (43), Odile evidence (45), Theo contradiction (47), concession-that-holds-the-error (49), broken plea (51), five-word verdict (53), knife (55), dated facts plus soup (57), faltering boundary speech (59), five words (61), one word (63), initials (65). The new 45–49 insert is statement / counter-statement / concession — no question in it, so it cannot extend a Q/A volley; it also breaks what would otherwise be a run of short accusation-admission turns at 41–43 by changing subject (from the page to the books). Strongest counter-candidate: the opening volley (17–25), unchanged since round 2 — survives on the same grounds: beat five (27) breaks it, and the volley is her card-licensed corrective literalism, not two speakers sharing one rhythm.

**3. MISSING INTERIORITY:** CLEAN — the focalizer stays lit at the pressure points: the loan-sheet look with the untouched pen (37), "He knew what he was about to ask for, and he asked for it anyway." (51), the knife fold-in/fold-out (55), the box-and-split-tape look that restarts the stalled speech (59). Strongest counter-candidate: lines 45–49, three rapid turns with zero narration — the new insert is the longest dark stretch in the scene. It survives: the stretch is two beats of other people's positions before his mind comes back on at 51, and what his mind does with her mispricing is the plea itself — "It is faster than nothing" dangles the timeline his hope wants, and his very next utterance is the wrong ask her bait feeds. The reaction is dramatized in his dialogue rather than narrated, which is rule 9 satisfied, not evaded. Second counter-candidate: 61–63 ("You will be less convenient." / "Yes.") — survives as in round 2; the boundary speech has just priced the cost and the initials paragraph (65) resumes his witness immediately.

**4. QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS:** CLEAN — the scene contains one real question ("Did you want her to find it, or did you want me to finally say it, and she was just in the path?", 35), still pointedly unanswered, correct for the true-partial design. The new exchange contains no questions; Odile's "She sent the books back clean," (45) is evidence offered as evidence, and Theo answers it as a claim, not a riddle. Counter-candidate: "You signed for them." (17) — an accusation shaped as a statement, which is what it is; she answers its content ("I opened the door. There was nothing to sign.", 19). No portent-questions anywhere.

**5. FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM:** CLEAN — attribution and beats are present throughout the new material ("Odile said" on 43, 45, 49; the cup, the knife, the doorway). Strongest counter-candidate: "No," Odile said. "It is faster than nothing." (49) — a clipped concession-plus-five-word-line that could read as performed starkness. It survives because the starkness is earned and, crucially, wrong: the scene has spent thirty lines establishing what the clean return cost, Theo has just refused the equation on the page, and her compression here is the characters_wrong-required mispricing operating in her card's native economy ("declarative fragments that are complete in intent"), not a stripped-down profundity the text endorses. The narration does not ratify her; she exits still wrong.

**6. JARGON-TRADING:** CLEAN — headcap (3, 5), interleaving (3), loan sheet / returned column (11), "the '96" (27), condition reports (59): each translated by the action around it or by standing catalog plot. New material adds no world-terms: "She sent the books back clean" is plain English whose referent (the eight catalogs, their condition) the chapter opened by dramatizing. Counter-candidate: "headcap" — survives; the sentence shows thumbs checking a book's top edge for damage.

**7. ATTRIBUTION OPACITY:** CLEAN — this was the round-3 stress point, since the new insert creates back-to-back Odile paragraphs. Checked cold: 43 is tagged ("I thought about it less than I should have," Odile said.), 45 is tagged ("She sent the books back clean," Odile said.), so the paragraph break between two same-speaker turns cannot misassign — the tag lands four words into 45. Line 47 is untagged, but it follows a tagged Odile line and precedes "No," Odile said. (49); strict alternation gives it to Theo and the 49 tag confirms it — under any other parse Odile's "No" would contradict her own sentence. The round-2/characters_wrong garden path is closed. Counter-candidates: the double "Odile said" at 43/45 — slightly heavy, but heaviness is the opposite of opacity and the paragraph break carries the topic shift (from the page to the books); the unattributed "Yes." (63) — survives, only Theo can be accepting the inconvenience he just purchased.

**FAKE-SHARP:** CLEAN — full cut-list pass on current text. The one new candidate that demanded real work: "It is faster than nothing." (49). Against the bullets: (a) does the exchange exist mainly to deliver it? No — the exchange exists to put Odile's forgiveness-speed error on the page live (the characters_wrong Order 4 function), and the line is the error, stated; the exchange's payload is Theo's refusal standing unanswered, not her button. (b) Quotable-but-not-speakable? It is speakable — five plain words a person says while holding a coffee. (c) Zinger where she should be quiet or conceding? She IS conceding ("No,") and the second clause is her hope refusing to concede — the text frames it as mispricing (Theo's contradiction stands; nobody validates her; her next moves are soup and initials, not vindication). A shaped line the scene positions as wrong is character error, not fake-sharp. Odile shaped-line density accounting, since round 1 failed the scene at five: current inventory is "I sent you for nine catalogs." (25 — correction), "Anyone with a library card could have read it to you." (29 — insult-as-diagnosis aimed at the person), "It is faster than nothing." (49 — the framed error), "Eat before you decide anything else about yourself." (57 — card-sample template), "You will be less convenient." (61 — pricing). Five lines, but the round-1 failure was five lines of which two were manufactured epigrams ("tired before you got brave," "side of the ledger") delivered as wisdom; the current five are each either licensed card moves or accuracy the scene contests, spread across ~50 lines that also contain her flat functional turns ("I opened the door. There was nothing to sign.", 19; "They came Thursday night," 15; "I thought about it less than I should have," 43). Rule 7 is satisfied by the flat lines existing; rule 8 by the errors staying errors. Verdict CLEAN, with a hard ceiling: the chapter is at Odile's shaped-line capacity. Any future touch that adds one more shaped Odile line, or upgrades a flat one, fails this criterion.

**INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION (rule 9, both directions):** CLEAN — over-explaining: the two round-2 ceiling items are now simply gone ("asking plainly was one honest act" cut from 51; "the lender owning the loan" cut from 65); nothing in the scene decodes a line after it lands, and the new exchange gets zero narration gloss — the reader is trusted to price "It is faster than nothing" against what the chapter has shown. Over-stripping: 37, 51, 55, 59 keep his mind on the page; the cuts removed explanation, not presence. Strongest counter-candidate: "He knew what he was about to ask for, and he asked for it anyway." (51) — now clause-bare; survives as orientation before a shameful ask, reacting rather than explaining, and the amputation of its old justifying tail makes it stronger, not darker.

**STANDING BANS / CHAPTER-SPECIFIC CHECKS (scene 01):**
- **DIALOGUE DIAGNOSIS (guide §2 zero tolerance; §6 any instance, any scope):** CLEAN — full re-scan of every clause touching speech. Considered and survived: "That's not an answer." (31 — refuses the content-status of a deflection, in dialogue, which §2 requires be visible as deflection; does not rate her language, rhythm, or delivery); "and drank her coffee" (33 — action); "He shut his mouth." (35 — action); "That isn't the same as forgiving us." (47 — rates the meaning of an act, returning books, not anyone's phrasing); "He knew what he was about to ask for, and he asked for it anyway." (51 — rates the act of asking, not the sentence). Nothing calls any utterance careful, rehearsed, partial, or shaped. Zero instances.
- **ORACLE MONOLOGUE / FINAL-REVEAL LEAK / REREAD INTEGRITY (Odile true-partial):** CLEAN — the new exchange was checked hardest, since it is post-repair text: "She sent the books back clean" / "It is faster than nothing" asserts only the catalogs' condition and a timeline hope; nothing discloses or implies fake-couple knowledge or knew-from-night-one, and nothing claims ignorance. "I put that page where you would find it. On purpose." (39) is admission of placement and intent, bounding nothing — consistent on reread with her having conducted everything. Theo's either/or question (35) still goes unanswered. The card's dialogue risk ("Odile never claims ignorance; she deflects materially") holds: her deflections are material objects ("There was nothing to sign.", 19; "nine catalogs," 25).
- **MENTOR-SPEECH MASS (card: one sentence, sometimes two; no speechifying):** CLEAN — 39 is two sentences plus the two-word fragment "On purpose.", which her card licenses ("declarative fragments that are complete in intent"); the new turns are one to two sentences each (43, 45, 49). Counter-candidate: 29 at four clipped sentences, unchanged and re-affirmed at the mass limit per round 2 — it must not grow; 57's turn is split by the cup action into two short clusters of fragments, adjudicated in round 2 and unchanged. Nothing speechifies.
- **THERAPY-SPEAK:** CLEAN — strongest candidate: "I thought about it less than I should have," (43) — self-assessment cadence; survives because it assigns a fact about her attention, in her fragment register, with no feelings-management vocabulary, and it is the setup the mispricing at 49 then undercuts — the chapter does not let her self-awareness be the last word.
- **PLAIN-SPEECH FLOOR (§2) / FOLLOWABILITY (§8):** CLEAN — Theo plain: "I need you to tell me it wasn't my fault." (51), "I'm done being the route." (59). Odile plain: "It was partly your fault." (53), "I stopped waiting." (57). The new exchange passes the cold-reader test as text: Odile asserted the books came back undamaged and offered it as hope on a schedule; Theo refused the equation of clean returns with forgiveness; Odile conceded the word and kept the schedule. No decoding required.
- **CONTRACTIONS (rules 4–5):** CLEAN — Odile's full forms remain card-licensed cutting precision ("It has been public for thirty years," 29; "It is faster than nothing.", 49; "There is soup upstairs.", 57; "You will be less convenient.", 61) — the cutting-precisely register her card specifies; 47 ("That isn't the same as forgiving us.") is Theo's line, contracted. Theo default-contracts throughout the new and old material ("You haven't asked me," 27; "That's not an answer.", 31; "That isn't the same," 47; "it wasn't my fault," 51; "I'm done being the route," "You don't get to send me," 59).
- **BOUNDARY SPEECH vs VOICE CARD (round-3 target):** CLEAN — 59 executes Theo's card in order: logistics on-ramp ("The keys stay with me. The freight, the condition reports, the loan sheet."), the stall exactly where his card stalls ("I can do the job. I want it. I just-" — qualifies when guilty), the physical restart off the object ("He looked at the box by the door, the split tape."), then forced-plain ("I'm done being the route. If you want a person moved somewhere, ask them yourself. You don't get to send me with a box again."). "Ask them yourself" is plainer than the previous draft's "out loud, with your own mouth" — friction over polish, rule 8 satisfied. Counter-candidate for fake-sharp inside the speech: "I'm done being the route." — shaped, but it is the paid-off return of line 3's "none of the route was him," sanctioned since round 1, speakable, and the speech around it is deliberately unfluent.

**REVISION ORDERS (scene 01):** none — no FAIL verdicts.

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## SCENE 02 (lines 69–77) and SCENE 03 (lines 81–97)

No dialogue on current text; manifest: not-required. Not audited for failure modes 1–7. Round 2's one open routing note — the thesis sentence at old line 71 — is CLOSED: the characters_wrong Order 1 repair deleted it, and the replacement misread ("a clean square waiting until he finished the jars and keys and came to it... a kinder reading than he trusted," 75) contains no dialogue and no narration about speech. Scene 03's only speech-adjacent clause, "he had known better than to call it a study out loud" (81), reports a withheld naming, not a rating of anyone's language — checked and cleared. The box-shortcut beat at 95 ("not have to start with his own sentence") names the burden of having to speak at all, not any sentence's form — cleared.

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## SCENE 04 — text messages to June, no reply (lines 101–113; manifest: not-required; re-audited by round-3 order)

Form note: documentary text-message form (Ch18/Ch20 precedent), now ONE-SIDED — two sent bubbles, no reply. Exclusions applied and named: mode 1 (voice convergence) has one speaker on the page and June's absence is the content, not a defect; mode 2 (monotone Q/A) cannot occur with no answer; mode 5's compression is the native register of SMS; mode 7 has one sender. These exclusions are form-driven, not waivers — modes 3, 4, 6, FAKE-SHARP, and INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION are tested in full.

**1. VOICE CONVERGENCE:** CLEAN by exclusion (single speaker). Checked instead that the two bubbles are internally voice-true: "Can we talk? Sonia's. You pick the day and time and I'll be there." (105) — practical scaffolding first, control ceded in concrete terms (day, time, place), his card's logistics-forward ask; "If you'd rather not, I understand." (107) — his qualify-reflex verbatim ("qualifies when guilty"). Both are his and could be nobody else's in this cast.

**2. MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM:** CLEAN by exclusion — one ask, one hedge, no reply; there is no rhythm to flatten. The dark phone (111) is the anti-volley.

**3. MISSING INTERIORITY:** CLEAN — he is present before ("the reflex was fully formed" reprise paid off from 13: he dries his hands, rubs the paint from under the thumbnail, 103), during ("He read it over once. Then his thumbs started the next part on their own... The second bubble appeared under the first before he could take it back.", 107), and after ("The wait was terrible in an ordinary way: he wanted to move something and had nothing in reach worth moving. His head kept reaching for preparation: the study against the brick, what he'd say first, contingencies for each of her possible openings. Each time he set it down like the drill.", 109). Strongest counter-candidate for a dark stretch: the shutdown litany (111) — survives; it is his mind doing exactly what the scene requires (routine instead of management), and "looked back once" at the study keeps him legible to the end.

**4. QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS:** CLEAN — "Can we talk?" (105) is a real question awaiting a real answer the chapter refuses to supply; the hedge (107) is a conditional statement doing statement work. No portent.

**5. FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM:** CLEAN — the clipped bubbles are form-true (named exclusion), and the surrounding narration is beat-marked, not stripped. Strongest counter-candidate: "The phone stayed dark while he seated the last brush in the jar, bristles up." (111) — a loaded quiet; survives because it is precisely NOT unmarked silence: the cut-list bullet requires the focalizer to register nothing, and here the wait's cost has just been itemized at 109 (what he wants to move, what his head reaches for, what he sets down), the dark phone carries both his bubbles including the un-retractable hedge, and the chapter's last look ("both hands empty," 113) prices it. The silence is the scene's subject, witnessed, not a stark pose.

**6. JARGON-TRADING:** CLEAN — "Sonia's" is the established diner commons; nothing untranslated.

**7. ATTRIBUTION OPACITY:** CLEAN by exclusion (one sender; both bubbles italicized and sequenced — "The second bubble appeared under the first").

**FAKE-SHARP:** CLEAN — neither bubble is quotable-shaped: the ask is scheduling, the hedge is a hedge. Cut-list pass on the narration: no aphorism ("The wait was terrible in an ordinary way" is plain self-report, unchanged since round 2's clearance); no zinger — the scene's register is a man being ordinary and afraid, which is what the cut-list protects. Strongest counter-candidate: "Each time he set it down like the drill." (109) — a shaped simile; survives because it is bound to the chapter's own object (the drill set down at 77/71), states practice without claiming victory, and dies out of context.

**INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION (rule 9, both directions):** CLEAN — over-explaining: the hedge gets exactly one sentence of consequence ("The second bubble appeared under the first before he could take it back.") and zero decoding; nothing tells the reader the hedge was managing, wrong, or costly — the dark phone does that. The old consent-logic sermon and reply-rating remain absent (swept: zero hits for "recognized," "deleted," "syllable," "door opened," "forgiveness"). Over-stripping: with June's reply removed, the risk flips to a dark ending — checked: 109 and 111–113 keep his want, his reflex, and his restraint all on the page. Neither direction fails.

**STANDING BANS / SPECIFIC CHECKS (scene 04):**
- **DIALOGUE DIAGNOSIS:** CLEAN — no narration characterizes either message's form, rhythm, or delivery. Considered and survived: "his thumbs started the next part on their own" (107 — attributes the typing to reflex, an act-description that orients; it does not call the sentence anything); "the reflex was fully formed" (13, same family, same clearance); "He read it over once." (107 — action). This act-not-sentence distinction is at its limit; no future touch should add a third thumbs/reflex composition beat.
- **CARD CONFORMANCE ("Theo asks June plainly and briefly"; scene-design setback "he must wait without managing"):** CLEAN — the ask (105) is plain and brief; the hedge (107) is the characters_wrong-licensed reflex loss, and the card's setback is now actually staged: no reply arrives, the wait is not resolved, and the narration countersigns no victory (contrast the deleted "he was not going to spend them building anything"). The Doctor does not order removal of designed, costed character error; the hedge stays.
- **HIDDEN COERCION:** CLEAN — the study stays faced to the wall and unmentioned in the messages (97, 111); no urgency ("You pick the day and time"); no guilt-freight in either bubble; no painting mention. Counter-candidate: "I'll be there" — a promise, not pressure; survives.
- **FELT-EXPERIENCE NAMING:** CLEAN — no door language, no "forgiveness," no restatement of the card's "a door opening without forgiveness yet" anywhere in the scene; the chapter's literal half-open door lives in scene 03's paint (85, 93), where it was paid for.

**REVISION ORDERS (scene 04):** none — no FAIL verdicts.

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## OVERALL: CLEAN

All four round-3 target sites verified on the current text with per-criterion evidence: the speed-mispricing exchange (45–49) reads as Odile's framed error in her card economy, tagged past the old garden path, followable cold, and leak-free; the rebuilt boundary speech (59) executes Theo's card sequence — inventory, stall, object restart, forced-plain — with friction kept; the sent hedge (107) is voice-true licensed wrongness costed by the un-retractable second bubble; the removed reply leaves a one-sided scene 04 whose exclusions are named and whose silence is witnessed, not posed. Zero-tolerance dialogue-diagnosis sweep: zero instances chapter-wide. Plain-speech floor and followability hold in both dialogue scenes. Two round-2 open items are closed by later repairs (the scene-02 thesis sentence, deleted; the "asking plainly" narration tail, deleted).

Ceilings for any future touch, none blocking now: Odile's shaped-line inventory is at capacity (25, 29, 49, 57, 61) — no additions, no upgrades of flat lines, and 29 remains at her four-sentence mass limit; the act-not-sentence clearance family ("reflex fully formed," "thumbs started the next part on their own") takes no third instance; scene 04's one-sided silence takes no caption; June's reply wording, when it lands in Ch22, re-enters Doctor jurisdiction there.
