All inputs are read. The diff between `output/drafts/claude/chapter_16.round_01.md` and `output/chapters/chapter_16.md` is substantial — roughly two dozen changed passages — so the audit below works through every one. Here is the full audit text in the Required verdict format:

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# Genericization / Regression-to-the-Mean Audit — Chapter 16

**Pre-revision:** `output/drafts/claude/chapter_16.round_01.md`
**Post-revision:** `output/chapters/chapter_16.md`
**Stance:** Skeptical diff, paragraph-aligned, both versions read in full. Every changed passage was tested two-sided (less specific? more exaggerated?) and checked against the chapter packet's Voice and Tic Guardrails, the Mid-Draft Flagging Protocol, READING_GUIDE §2/§6, and the thread ledger before ruling. Gate report: 0 open findings, 73 WATCH (non-blocking).

## Category 1 — Concrete details: HELD

Riskiest diffs examined:

- Pre: `"Priya had left the second clementine on June's bag like a tip."` / `"shouldered her bag with the clementine still riding on the flap"` → Post: both beats cut. This is the closest the revision comes to deleting a named object. Ruled legitimate: the owned care move survives intact and earlier in both versions (`"Priya read hers and quietly moved the clementines to June's station"`), the second and third occurrences were the same move repeated, and READING_GUIDE §5 forbids hammering care moves. No information is lost; the clementines still travel Priya→June once, cleanly.
- Pre: `"mid-kiss"` → Post: `"just after the kiss."` This *removed* a vivid particular, but the pre-revision particular was a continuity error: Ch14 canon fixes the flyer photo as the **post**-kiss photo Mara sent to the group thread. Criterion 6: continuity fix, not regression.
- Every load-bearing specific for later chapters was verified present in the post-revision text: the nine gray-spined catalogs signed out `"in his handwriting, no return date"` with the paper slip (S-CATALOG-01, armed for Ch17); the umber cuff mark from Marchetti Rooms; the fourteen-chair count; the twelve-by-sixteen ground `"at six coats"`; the forty flyers on 80lb matte in Priya's type; Odile's `"Varnish neither. They're a pair now"` keeping both fear canvases alive as object evidence for Ch18/21/24 (S-FEAR-01). No continuity hazard created.

The revision also *added* concrete details with no draft antecedent: `"the knuckle scar and the flat nail on his left thumb and the way his wrists went straight when he lifted weight"`; `"His hand shook enough to show in the outlet screws"`; `"checked the front bolt twice, and put Odile's keys in his pocket."` Net particularity went up, not down.

## Category 2 — Images and figuration: HELD

Three image deletions were stress-tested:

- Pre: `"picture hooks left in like the building's baby teeth"` → Post: `"picture hooks left in for someone else to pull, fill, sand, and paint flat."` The simile was the draft's most charming line — and it sat inside the painting that is *designed* to be competent-and-inadequate. The replacement is trade-procedural make-ready labor, which is exactly what June's true fear is made of; it plants the correction before Theo sees it. Differently specific and thematically tighter, not smoothed.
- Pre: `"the way you carry something out of a hospital"` (Mara, exiting) → Post: `"careful at the corners."` The hospital simile is the more *portable* image — it could appear in any novel — and hospital material is owned by Ruth/Sam in this book (the Ch11 gallbladder/six-hour-wait story); reassigning its resonance to Mara blurs owned texture. `"Careful at the corners"` is art-handling-true. The revision moved toward this book, not away from it.
- Pre: `"a paper slip in it like a fuse he had measured and cut and laid himself, all care, every inch of it care"` → Post: `"one of them still had a paper slip tucked inside."` The fuse is portable thriller imagery, and `"all care, every inch of it care"` is the template's "shouting louder" half — incantatory inflation. The post-revision danger is carried instead by the concrete plan (see Category 5). Legitimate de-inflation, and the paper/receipt/label-stays-literal guardrail in the packet explicitly covers it.

Also cut: `"the wall's last argument"`, `"the room turned itself inside out"`, `"The painting liked him"` — all object-as-agent figures, a family the packet ordered reduced (`"no object-as-agent paper/receipt/label figures"`; Voice Check 15). The strange images that are scene-grown — `"drowned salmon"`, the roller `"loaded, mid-job, nobody walking away from it"`, the bulb over the blank ground — all survive verbatim.

## Category 3 — Character texture: HELD

Riskiest diffs examined:

- Pre: `"understood, with the specific nausea of a man who keeps very good records, that she had handed him the real one already and he had filed it under anecdote"` → Post: `"Theo stood in front of his boxes. The real wall had been waiting in the wrong pile."` The clerk-texture is preserved in compressed object form (`"the wrong pile"` is still filing); what was removed is the named-emotion flourish, per the reading guide's interiority discipline (feelings through object before naming). Not a flattening — Theo is not made more likable by the cut; the wrong pile is, if anything, colder.
- Pre: `"Every object in it had been touched by somebody who loved his job."` → Post: `"Every object in it had been handled."` This loses an interpretive irony, but the packet's prohibition list is explicit: `"Do not over-explain the fear paintings. Let image + blocking carry the meaning."` The irony still lands through blocking — the brightest light on the only unhandled thing.
- Pre: Ruth `"studying Ben's painting of Priya with terrible accuracy"` → Post: `"standing in front of Ben's painting of Priya."` The cut executes the packet order `"If Ruth appears, she remains partial and object-bound"` — "terrible accuracy" was drifting her toward all-seeing clocker.
- The post-revision close *darkens* Theo rather than ennobling him: `"He recognized the plan making itself useful and kept it anyway"` keeps the packet's required note (`"He can know he is failing and still delay"` / not noble through self-condemnation). No generic likability was added anywhere.

## Category 4 — Dialogue particularity: HELD

Every cut dialogue line maps to a specific binding rule, which is the criterion-6 test:

- Pre: `"You both look like you mean it."` → Post: `"The brush stayed in."` The replacement is *more* book-specific: it points at the loaded umber brush Theo held clear of Mara's scarf during the Ch13 kiss — a detail only this cohort could tease about.
- Pre: `"Phones are very advanced."` → Post: `Theo looked down at the address block and found no correction to make.` The riskiest dialogue loss in the chapter — a voice-marked deflection joke. But the replacement is deflection-as-proofreading, which is Theo's own register (checks, labels, corrections), and the guideline that perceptiveness shows in what a character *does* favors it. Lateral-to-better, not interchangeable polish.
- Pre: `"Now it does the work."` → Post: `"Now people see it first."` Executes the keep-paper-literal guardrail (flyer-as-agent removed).
- Pre: `"which from Luis was a review"` / `"which from Luis was a paragraph"` → Post: both cut. These are narration characterizing a character's speech quantity — direct hits on READING_GUIDE §2's zero-tolerance dialogue-diagnosis rule (`"in any speaker's mouth or in narration about speech"`). Mandatory cuts. Likewise `"her voice even, like a person reading a manifest"`, `"Quietly."`, `"in a voice he didn't fully recognize"`, and `"like a building inspector"` — all delivery-captioning, all replaced with action (`"Her finger hovered above the roller"`, `"with his palm still flat over the cup"`).
- Pre: `"'In paint,' she agreed"` → Post: June doesn't echo. Executes the packet's explicit ban on `"paired echo confirmations as beat-closers"` — and leaves Theo's `"In paint"` standing alone as an unratified admission, which is sharper.
- Pre: Odile: `"Your partner isn't a model tonight, your partner is a subject you can't look at."` → Post: `"Easels turned away from partners."` The draft line was a not-X-but-Y contrast (structure banned by the packet) drifting toward oracle; the replacement is rule/material/logistics, which is Odile's mandated pressure mode. Her best line — `"Varnish neither. They're a pair now. Pairs hang together or they lie."` — survives verbatim.

## Category 5 — Inflation accompanying the fade: HELD (inverted)

I searched specifically for significance language added where particulars thinned. There is none; the revision ran the opposite direction. Removed inflation: `"unmistakably and to anyone with eyes"`, `"The room glowed with attention"`, `"all care, every inch of it care"`, `"surfacing one last time as a bruise"`, `"even that felt like an exhibit now"`, and the draft's polished aphoristic closer `"he locked up Odile's room the way he locked up everything that wasn't his"` — the exact pattern the packet's Mid-Draft Flagging Protocol names (`"polished aphoristic closer"`). Its replacement is pure object: `"checked the front bolt twice, and put Odile's keys in his pocket"` — Theo holding someone else's keys, the theme without the speech. The draft also had two deliberate light-images (June's bulb + the exhibit door-light); the revision cut the second, honoring the one-light-image motif cap.

## Category 6 — Legitimate edits: VERIFIED

Each candidate loss above was checked against the packet and reading guide before ruling. Summary of the mapping: dialogue-diagnosis cuts → READING_GUIDE §2 zero-tolerance; object-as-agent cuts → packet "spent families" list; echo-closer cut → packet ban; not-X-but-Y cuts (`"offered as a story and not as a wound"`, Odile's model/subject line) → packet ban; aphoristic closer and second light-image → Mid-Draft Flagging Protocol and motif caps; over-explanation cuts in the painting descriptions (`"a man setting a room he would never stand in as himself"` — which also quoted Theo's voice-card operation snapshot nearly verbatim, a bible leak) → packet prohibition #"Do not over-explain the fear paintings"; `"mid-kiss"` → continuity correction; clementine deduplication → §5 care-move discipline. No uninstructed smoothing was found — every removal traces to a standing order, and the compensating material is consistently more particular, not more important-sounding.

## Focused extra checks

1. **Generic fear-scene risk:** Not generic. The assignment mechanics are Odile-specific (the tip-out palette knife turned tip-in; `"Leave the wrong where I can find it"`; decanting medium into eight jars `"as if the evening were about jars"`). Every major beat runs on this book's stock: the umber cuff from Marchetti Rooms, the Ch12 erased-wall canon (green/orange interval, dead salmon, Decorator's White, outlet plate, roller in tray), the Ch10-seeded blank station.
2. **Theo's wrong-first painting:** Intentionally generic and corrected, by design and on the page — `"The painting could hang in any hallway. That was the problem"`, then `"He had painted leaving, not June's fear"`, with the boxes left ghosting as underpainting per Odile's rule and named by Luis (`"You left the underpainting"`). The draft's more explicit gloss (`"the fear belonging to every tenant in New York"`) was trimmed, but intent remains marked, not accidental.
3. **June's painting of Theo:** Built from this book's actual objects — fourteen chairs count-visible, a wall label squared by its bottom corners, an easel's back leg, lidded jars, coiled cords, the twelve-by-sixteen ground (the size chosen in Ch14) primed and bare, the one hanging bulb. No universal usefulness symbolism; the meaning is carried entirely by blocking.
4. **Final delay/care/catalog danger:** Specific. Nine gray-spined catalogs, his own handwriting, the blank return date, the paper slip, the plan to `"say it while his hands were busy"`, and `"He recognized the plan making itself useful and kept it anyway."` The danger is this book's danger — care as the arming mechanism for Ch17 — not generic procrastination.

## REVISION ORDERS

None. No instance met the bar for value-bearing specificity lost or compensating inflation added; all candidate losses are defended above as ordered or continuity-driven edits, and the revision's net movement is toward rarer, more book-specific material.

**OVERALL: HELD**
