All inputs are read; the diff is worked through paragraph-aligned. The audit follows as my final answer, in the template's Required verdict format.

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# Audit: Regression-to-the-Mean / Genericization — Chapter 08

Diffed: `output/drafts/claude/chapter_08.round_01.md` (pre, 2,791 words) against `output/chapters/chapter_08.md` (post, 2,666 words). Orders checked: initial draft assessment, claude-tic audit, counter-strip. Gate on post: PASS open=0, WATCH=64. Note at the outset: the counter-strip sampled ten changes, nearly all of them the *ordered* repairs, and returned NONE OVER-CUT. This audit's findings fall almost entirely in passages the revision was not ordered to touch — uninstructed smoothing, the signature of regression — which is exactly the population the counter-strip did not sample.

Rare-detail checklist from the special focus, verified present in post: SOLIDS card (line 7, wording intact: "SOLIDS GO IN THE BIN"), red folder with ribbon tie (23, 39, 89), SONIA envelope in tilted capitals (23, 25, 39), pickle spear already removed (45), napkin pleat ("folded the corner of her napkin once, exact, a small pleat," 75), glassine (113), flat file with label slots and blank slot (107, 113), exhibition mats (113), retired backing boards (113), painted-side-to-the-wall storage (113, 115) — consistent with canon fact 30, S-PORTRAIT-01, and continuity line 17 ("remains faced to the wall unless June consents"). No protected detail was lost outright. The losses are in the tissue around them.

**1. Concrete details — REGRESSED (3 instances)**

1a. Pre (line 7): "the drain up here clogged if you looked at it wrong; there was a card taped above the faucet…" → Post (line 7): "There was a card taped above the faucet… and he was not going to test her on plumbing." The ordered repair here was the em-dash construction ("The sink was out — acrylic-gouache"), executed correctly as "The sink was out. Acrylic-gouache went down in skins and chunks." The drain-clog fact was not part of that order. A particular physical fact about this studio became the category word "plumbing" — the textbook direction of regression.

1b. Pre (line 15): "Those were the facts, and the facts all pointed binward." → Post (line 13): deleted. The ordered repair was the "She hadn't seen it. She hadn't agreed" echo-line, executed as "she had neither seen it nor agreed to its existing" — legitimate. The sentence after it was not in the order, and it is the draft's signature coinage; the initial draft assessment itself quoted "The facts all pointed binward" (raw line 15) as evidence that the chapter engine works. The repair deleted the very line the acceptance verdict was built on.

1c. Pre (line 99): "Mara declared the matter settled by the only authority she recognized, which Theo noted was the second time tonight she'd done that, and let the count stand." → Post (line 99): "Mara declared the matter settled by the only authority she recognized. Theo let the count stand." The trim deleted the count ("the second time tonight") but kept the reference to it: "let the count stand" now has no antecedent. This is both a lost specific and an internal-coherence defect.

**2. Images and figuration — REGRESSED (6 instances)**

2a. Pre (line 5): "the small graveyard of bristle brushes nobody had claimed in three weeks" → Post (line 5): "the row of bristle brushes nobody had claimed in three weeks." No order touches this. A scene-grown image became the most statistically likely container noun, and "row of bristle brushes" now duplicates "row of anonymous rectangles" (post line 113) — the protected-word repair's replacement word — within the same chapter.

2b. Pre (line 11): "sitting at the base of June's chin like it had signed a lease" → Post (line 9): "sitting at the base of June's chin like it had moved in." Uninstructed. "Signed a lease" is book-specific — June's lease is the novel's clock (canon fact 2) — and the borrowed scarf colonizing the fake relationship *on a lease* is a reread-bearing irony. "Moved in" could appear in any novel.

2c. Pre (line 37): "Mara saw him through the glass and waved like he was arriving by sea." → Post (line 33): "Mara saw him through the glass and waved him in." Uninstructed. A Mara-particular comic image (consistent with her presiding/hosting register) replaced by the null gesture.

2d. Pre (line 31): "went down with the evidence under his arm like a man delivering it to the police himself" → Post (line 27): "went down with the folder under his arm." Uninstructed. The raw gate's single simile-as-adverb finding was at raw line 67 (the grilled-cheese line), not here. The cut loses both the dark joke and the word "evidence," which pre line 15 had set up ("It would read as evidence") — the figure was doing chapter-engine work, not decoration.

2e. Pre (line 77): "That was when the folder started costing interest." → Post: deleted; post line 77 opens flat on "Mara was planning Tuesdays into December…" The tic audit explicitly ruled on this phrase: "It is allowed because the chapter card's debt engine is literalized through table obligations" (tic 3, CLEAR). The orders authorized reducing account/deposit *density*, not eliminating the one sanctioned debt-literalizing transition in a chapter titled "Social Debt." With the deposit/account paragraph also (legitimately) trimmed, the title's conceit now hangs on "expiration date in writing" and the final "owing everyone" with no midpoint anchor, and the turn into the alley-arithmetic paragraph lost its marker.

2f. Pre (line 13): "Four square inches of accurate and he could not explain to a single living person why he knew it that well" → Post (line 11): "Four square inches were accurate, and he could not explain to a single living person why he knew that much." Minor, but uninstructed: "four square inches of accurate" is a voice-marked compression at the chapter's central object (the stance); the post version is the grammatical normalization any model would produce.

Examined and not flagged: pre line 19 "checked it the way a captain checks a manifest" → post line 15 "She checked it" — the strongest counter-candidate I considered keeping as a flag. Ruled not value-bearing: the captain/manifest comparison is near-stock, and the load-carrying specific ("straightened one panel a centimeter") survived intact.

**3. Character texture — REGRESSED (2 instances)**

3a. Pre (line 31): "which he noted, filed, and declined to examine" → Post (line 27): "and he refused to follow the omission." Uninstructed. "Filed" is Theo's archive mind operating on his own thoughts — the labels/files/locks medium his POV is built from (voice card: "interiority rhythm: inventory… reaches for keys, lists tasks, straightens labels"). The replacement is psychologically generic. The three-part cadence is a WATCH tier, non-blocking, and defensible on Theo's card.

3b. Pre (line 31): "and that the only way to lose was to ask a follow-up question" → Post: deleted. Uninstructed. This is a specific, learned protocol of the Theo–Odile relationship — six years of employment compressed into one rule — and it quietly serves the reread test (Odile's errands as conducted manipulation, never to be interrogated). Tic 5's order was to cut "weather/report shimmer," which the "posted notices" substitution accomplished; the follow-up-question clause was not shimmer.

Examined and not flagged: pre line 7 "He had a plan, in the way that he always had a plan, which was that the plan assembled itself before he agreed to it" → post "He had a plan because plans assembled themselves before he admitted wanting one." The contradiction survives and "admitted wanting one" is sharper than "agreed to it"; no loss.

**4. Dialogue particularity — HELD**

Riskiest diffs examined: (i) Mara's "It was the way you said it" (pre 43) removed — the tic audit had cleared it, but the reading guide §2 zero-tolerance rule bans characters rating one another's delivery "in any speaker's mouth," and the guide outranks the tic audit's clearance; legitimate under criterion 6. (ii) June's "That's more than I expected to get" (pre 99) removed, leaving "Huh" plus a fry — defensible under the same ban (it captions the disclosure level of Theo's answer rather than acting on it), and her turning back into the table's traffic still shows what she does with what she heard. (iii) Ben's "I was going to allude to it with dignity" → "I was thinking paper calendar. Different disease. Same drawer." — a lateral rewrite, not a genericization; the post line is on Ben's card (self-mocking planning disease). (iv) Theo's "That's the distribution, yes" → "He touched the folder's ribbon, stopped, and put his hand back on the table. 'It isn't on display. That's the only part I can defend.'" — trades dryness for guilt-plainness, which is Theo's documented stress pattern ("qualifies when guilty, then forces himself plain"), and is situation-specific, not interchangeable. (v) Mara's announcement rewrite loses "I'm informing you rather than consulting you, because consulting goes badly with this group" but gains "Same booth if Dee lets us" — Dee being the canonical waitress (continuity line 146), an *added* specific. Net: no flattening into interchangeable dialogue.

**5. Inflation accompanying the fade — HELD**

I checked every passage where specificity was removed for compensating significance language. The candidates: "The folder stayed exactly where it was. Somehow it took up more room." (post 49, replacing the pickle-policy/accounts gloss) and "the red folder sat beside him as if it had been invited too" (post 77, replacing the deposit/account metaphor). Both are *quieter* than what they replaced ("there it was, the whole shape of the evening, arriving early"; "Every ordinary kindness… was a deposit into an account… opened under a false name"). No stakes were restated as bigger, no emotions as deeper. The "Somehow" is an unearned-mystery adverb but it is deflation, not shouting. The chapter's fade ran in one direction only — which is why categories 1–3 flag it as loss rather than this category flagging it as inflation.

**6. Legitimate edits — HELD (verified against orders and reading guide)**

Each ordered repair checked and confirmed in-scope: the three echo-line fixes ("She hadn't / She hadn't" → "neither seen it nor agreed," "She looked / She looked" → "Her eyes moved from the bag to the taped bundle," "It would not read / It would read" → "stop being a class exercise and become evidence"); the simile-as-adverb fix ("with the air of someone conducting an inspection" → "inspecting the crust as if it owed her a clean edge," which is a *gain* — "edge" is June's word); "let himself in" → "He entered"; the one-sentence-paragraph merges; "weather reports" → "posted notices" (flatter, but an executed counter-strip order); the account/deposit density trim including "the whole shape of the evening… pickle policy on file… opened accounts in both their names" (ordered by tics 2 and 7 against raw lines 49–51, and the shown evidence — booth defense, pickle spear, refill — survives in scene). Riskiest cleared diff: "one anonymous rectangle in a family of anonymous rectangles" → "row of anonymous rectangles" — pure protected-word cap repair ("family" is reveal-adjacent), legitimate per the special-focus instruction, though it is the collision partner for instance 2a. Also cleared: "Trash kept secrets better than anything labeled" deleted — a second philosopher-aphorism in a chapter whose one sanctioned recognition is the bin/honesty hinge (tic 6: "keep one central recognition… avoid repeating the thesis").

Escalation check: none of the eleven flagged losses is bound in the canon sheet or thread ledger; no continuity hazard to ch 17/18/23/27 payoffs. Instance 2b ("signed a lease") is thematically tethered to canon fact 2 (June's lease as the book's clock) and carries reread value, which raises its priority within this chapter but does not block later chapters.

## REVISION ORDERS

1. Restore the drain fact at post line 7: "Acrylic-gouache went down in skins and chunks, and the drain up here clogged if you looked at it wrong." Delete "on plumbing" from the Odile sentence or keep it — the card and the refusal both stand either way.
2. Restore at post line 13, after "Nobody had written no unauthorized portraits, but only because nobody had thought he would require supervision": "Those were the facts, and the facts all pointed binward." The echo-line merge stays.
3. At post line 99, either restore the antecedent — "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." — or delete "Theo let the count stand." Restoration preferred; the counting is Theo's inventory habit in miniature.
4. Restore "the small graveyard of bristle brushes" at post line 5. This also removes the row/row duplication with line 113; "row of anonymous rectangles" at 113 stays as the protected-word repair.
5. Restore "like it had signed a lease" at post line 9 in place of "like it had moved in."
6. Restore "waved like he was arriving by sea" at post line 33.
7. Restore at post line 27: "went down with the evidence under his arm like a man delivering it to the police himself."
8. Restore "That was when the folder started costing interest." as the opening beat of post line 77, per the tic audit's explicit allowance of the phrase; the rest of the account-density trim stands. If restored, "as if it had been invited too" may be cut to keep figure density level.
9. Restore "Four square inches of accurate and he could not explain…" at post line 11 (low severity; restore unless the integration pass can defend the normalization).
10. Restore "which he noted, filed, and declined to examine" at post line 27 in place of "and he refused to follow the omission." Defend the three-part-cadence WATCH on Theo's voice card (mental inventories).
11. Restore at post line 27, after "occasionally placed with suspicious accuracy": "and that the only way to lose was to ask a follow-up question."

No category-5 strip orders: no compensating inflation was added.

OVERALL: REGRESSED (11)
