# Synthesis Memo - Chapter 10

## Source Drafts

- Claude prose draft: `output/drafts/claude/chapter_10.round_01.md`
- Codex parallel draft: none.
- Accepted base: Claude round 01, revised by Codex under mechanical, dialogue, comedy, and five-chapter voice-check pressure.

## What The Chapter Now Does

Chapter 10 stages Week 4's hands assignment as tenderness through work, not erotic shorthand. June's love-action is painting; Theo cannot find a loved action outside maintenance, so his hour becomes a series of useful interruptions. June paints the truth of that absence: his hands fixing the third easel, with his own station blank behind them. The chapter leaves Theo wounded and more visible, but not repaired.

## Audit And Repair Trail

- Mechanical raw gate: failed with three open hits in the Claude draft. Codex repaired the echo-line/false-profundity issues before integration.
- Mechanical final Chapter 10 gate: PASS, open=0, allowlisted=0, WATCH=62.
- Claude-tic audit found the draft structurally strong but carrying several Claude defaults: overbalanced explanation, a few captioning lines, and a risk of making the hands motif too pretty. Repairs cut or grounded those moments.
- Dialogue Doctor round 1 found blockers in a broken referent, over-sharp Theo/June lines, Odile silence-as-comment, and Mara's social-shape caption. Codex repaired each; round 2 returned `OVERALL: CLEAN` and was promoted to the canonical path.
- Comedy Doctor ran three rounds. Accepted repairs thinned the wing-nut joke tail, a stock Priya phrase, the baguette simile, and Odile's excess quotability. Round 3 returned `CLEAR` and was promoted to the canonical path.
- The periodic Voice Check for Chapters 06-10 found eight cross-chapter voice-drift patterns, including dialogue diagnosis, evaluative `, which` captions, refusal-to-conclude habits, Theo coin density, and the Ch10 wet-paint/generic-you gloss. Codex repaired Chapters 06, 07, 08, and 10. Voice Check round 2 returned `OVERALL: VOICE-HOLDS`.

## Final Kept / Modified / Replaced

- Kept from Claude: the Week 4 assignment engine, Theo's pre-class repair sequence, June's painting action, the spill/clip/easel/orange interventions, June's final panel of Theo's useful hands and blank station, and Theo's after-class failed attempt to make work.
- Modified by Codex: Odile's line density, Mara/Priya plainness, the June/Theo sink exchange, cross-chapter voice templates, and several narrator captions that over-explained Theo's wound.
- Replaced: portable comedy images, dialogue-form diagnoses, false-profound negation, and repairable voice-drift phrases across the preceding span.

## Final Disposition

Accepted. Chapter 10 is mechanically clean, the final dialogue/comedy/voice audits are clean against current text, and the consequences are tracked: Theo's art-making problem is newly visible, S-FEAR-01 has an on-page useful-hands/blank-station precursor, and the sanctioned hands motif is now spent until a later card explicitly reopens it.
