# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 15: Keys Elsewhere

Read cold against `output/chapters/chapter_15.md` (integrated base; raw provenance `output/drafts/claude/chapter_15.round_01.md` consulted for revision deltas). Manifest declares one scene requiring coverage: scene 01, lines 2–117, 28 dialogue lines / 38 quoted utterances. The scene contains four distinct exchanges — the Nia call (the engine), the Asha text exchange, the group-thread texts (Priya/Mara), and the Theo text exchange — all tested below. The reading guide declares no exclusions for chat-format dialogue (§2 is silent on it), so all seven failure modes plus the cut-list were applied to the text-message exchanges, with the "speakable" test adapted to written register where noted. Calibration applied: plain-speech floor (§2), zero-tolerance dialogue diagnosis (§2/§6), Emily-Henry-at-60%-banter ceiling, and the chapter card's specific orders (Nia not villain/strawman, no "follow your heart," no brochure prose).

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SCENE 01 / June's apartment, Thursday night — Nia call + three text exchanges (lines 2–117):

- **1. VOICE CONVERGENCE: CLEAN** — Covered attributions and re-read the call and all three text exchanges. Nia speaks in funded-position blocks with consequence chains ("We're two grants and a city line item. If the city line item holds, the six months becomes a year and the year becomes a job," line 51); June speaks in clipped material prompts ("Define run," line 25; "Renewal?" line 49) and one diagnosis ("That's a spring or it's twenty years of grease where grease shouldn't be," line 35). Sentence mass, syntax, and function diverge on every volley. Strongest counter-candidate considered: both women are dry, and Nia's sign-off "Noon. Eat lunch after." (line 79) flirts with Odile's feed-people imperative economy — but it is one imperative, materially motivated (the deadline is at noon), and squarely inside Nia's card ("warm in practical terms"); it does not converge on June, whose dryness in this scene is deflective, not caretaking. Second counter-candidate: June's "Don't give it to Dario. He overtightens everything." against Asha's "He does." (lines 87–89) — two work-peers sharing one beat of shop shorthand; Asha's surrounding register (run-on, unpunctuated, "$32/hr, pays net-45... You in or do I give your slot to Dario," line 85) is audibly faster and looser than June's punctuated precision. No two speakers are interchangeable for more than a single line.

- **2. MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM: CLEAN** — The call is structurally interrogative (June is collecting terms), which is the danger case, so I checked volley weights across the whole exchange: June's prompts run one to eight words while Nia's answers run from one word ("Noon.") to ninety-plus (the Tuesday walkthrough, line 65); Nia volunteers unprompted material twice (the after-hours access, line 45; the deadline, lines 55–59); June twice breaks the Q/A frame — once by completing Nia's sentence ("There's a deadline," line 57) and once by drifting out of the conversation entirely so that Nia must retrieve her ("June." / "I'm here. I'm taking notes." lines 71–73). Strongest counter-candidate: the run at lines 49–53 ("Renewal?" → block answer → "You're being very fair...") is the closest to volley regularity, and it is broken on the third beat when June's line is an observation rather than a question and Nia answers a question June didn't ask ("Because I need you to say yes for real reasons or no for real reasons," line 55). Rule 7 floor also holds: the scene carries genuinely unremarkable lines ("Okay." line 23; "I'm here. I'm taking notes." line 73; "That's a hold." line 91).

- **3. MISSING INTERIORITY: CLEAN** — The focalizer's mind stays lit through the call and reacts rather than recaps: the handwriting tell ("Her handwriting had gotten neat. It did that when the room would not line up," line 29), the margin math done before she claims she can do it (line 43), the pen stalling at the end of the after-hours line (line 47), and the back-room composition in which "the version that kept returning put her at the press with a rag" (line 69). During the text exchanges: "June looked at it for a while" (line 87), the Asha's-name-as-unspent-tool paragraph (lines 95–97), the flyer-face reading (line 99). Strongest counter-candidate for a dark patch: lines 37–39, where Nia's W-2 block gets only "June looked at the two invoices on the table" plus a transcribed note — but that glance at the invoices *is* the reaction (the offer's solvency measured against her actual precarity), rendered through object per the style bible, so the reader is oriented.

- **4. QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS: CLEAN** — Checked every interrogative in the scene. June's questions all want answers and get them ("What's the gripper doing exactly... Sticking open or sticking shut?" line 31; "Can I ask the gripper question differently... Walk me through a Tuesday." line 63 — flagged to myself as the riskiest shape, but it is a literal request for information that Nia answers with a literal Tuesday). Asha's "You in or do I give your slot to Dario" (line 85) and "So that's a yes?" (line 89) are scheduling questions with stakes, not manufactured portent. Strongest counter-candidate: June's "There's a deadline." (line 57) — a statement doing a question's work — but it is anticipation of Nia's announced "It has a date on it," immediately confirmed in plain terms; nothing portentous is left hanging.

- **5. FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM: CLEAN** — Attribution is supplied at every speaker change that needs it ("Nia said," lines 15, 33; "June said," lines 63, 77; "she said," lines 31, 49) and dropped only inside established two-party alternation. The clipped closing volley ("December fourth," June said. "Noon." / "Noon. Eat lunch after." lines 77–79) is the strongest counter-candidate for performed starkness — it survives because the compression is earned by the scene (June has just been caught absent and is closing the call on the only fact she can hold) and is immediately undercut by Nia's lunch line rather than left to ring. The raw draft's starker constructions ("There was nothing in it to answer except everything," raw line 109) were removed in integration; the surviving "answered the part that was a fact" (line 103) is action, not posture.

- **6. JARGON-TRADING WITHOUT TRANSLATION: CLEAN** — This was the focused followability check, run hardest. The trade terms all arrive with their weights attached: the gripper bar gets a failure mode, a current workaround ("Marco's been opening it with a screwdriver," line 33), and June's cost translation ("Either way it's an afternoon," line 35); the funding structure gets its consequence chain in plain English (line 51); "net-45" is self-glossed inside Asha's own text ("Invoice Jan, see it in Mar," line 85). A cold reader can state the offer's full shape after one pass: full-time W-2 studio-operations job at a Tasker Street printshop, six months funded with uncertain renewal, keys day one, after-hours studio access in writing, rent in range, answer due Friday December 4 at noon — and can state why it tempts: it pays twice a month against the two invoices on her table, and the after-hours wall is the thing she quit wanting out loud. Strongest counter-candidate: Nia's equipment list at line 27 ("a Vandercook with a gripper bar that sticks on the return, an etching press with a bearing that knocks on the return") — two machine names a general reader can't picture — but the reader is never asked to weigh the machines themselves, only the fact that the job is fixing them, which June's next two lines establish; and the parallel "on the return" phrasing is defensible as the rehearsed pitch of the woman who "wrote the job description."

- **7. ATTRIBUTION OPACITY: CLEAN** — Two-party phone call with regular re-anchoring; every text is sender-labeled by the narration ("Asha." line 83; "Priya:" line 99; "Theo:" line 101). Strongest counter-candidate: the bare "June." at line 71 — a single word with no tag — but only Nia can be speaking on a two-party call in which June has just gone silent, and Nia's next speech confirms it. The triple-thread phone sequence (Asha / group thread / Theo) is kept legible by explicit thread separations ("It buzzed twice more anyway. The group thread." line 99; "One more buzz, separate thread." line 101).

- **FAKE-SHARP: CLEAN** — Ran every exchange against the cut-list. The three candidates I pressed hardest: (a) June's "The coat counts. Coats are people who left their position marked." (line 103) — the scene's most composed line and the strongest candidate in the chapter. It survives on three grounds: it is written text, not speech, where a composed sentence is in-fiction realistic; it has a diegetic destination rather than existing to be admired — Theo immediately files it ("That's going in the label notes," line 105), which is the reading guide's prescribed move of *doing* something with what was heard; and it is June's card-licensed sideways truth ("turns exposed questions into material ones"). It is not an exchange that exists mainly to deliver the aphorism — the exchange exists to pay off Theo's Ch14 count promise. (b) Nia's "I'm offering you work, June, not a rescue." (line 55) — a compact antithesis, but it is the card's own sample pattern ("I am offering you work, not absolution") in contracted, speakable form, and it answers June's fairness observation with substance. (c) Nia's "Both those things can be true and you can still say no" (line 75) — borderline aphorism shape, but "both things can be true" is live contemporary idiom, it is immediately grounded in program need ("If you say no, send me someone good. I still have a program to keep open." — the card sample verbatim), and it is the opposite of "follow your heart": it refuses to advise. No noun-question/portentous-answer pairs; no "in [abstraction]" lines; no zingers at exposed moments — June's lines when caught absent are flat ("I'm here. I'm taking notes."); the loaded silence before "June." is fully marked by the focalizer (we are inside the back-room vision she was composing, and what it costs is on the page at line 69). The raw draft's actual fake-sharp material ("I was starting to draft the text where I pretend I'm not checking in," raw line 21; "interviewing people who list 'passion' under skills," raw line 65; "the radiator ticking through its argument with itself," raw line 87; "A deadline that arrived shouting would have been easier to resent," raw line 67) was stripped in integration and has not leaked back.

- **INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION: CLEAN** — Tested rule 9 in both directions. Not over-stripped (see mode 3). For the over-explained direction, the candidate is lines 67–69: "Her pulse had gone straight past the part of the offer that was supposed to be for her and settled into the part that kept the room usable" — narration naming the trap after "Not the wall. The press." has already shown it. I judged it a single naming that adds new information (the for-her / for-everyone-else axis) rather than a second rendering of the same beat, on a chapter flagged `reflective`, and note the codex tic audit has already routed this exact passage to Thought Development pressure; it is not a dialogue-scene failure under rule 9. The raw draft's longer thesis run ("...and called the competence a personality," raw line 73) was cut in integration.

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FOCUSED CHECKS (per audit order):

- **Nia not strawman / not oracle:** Verified line by line. She discloses the downside unprompted (line 51), names money without shame (lines 37–41), refuses to counsel ("I'm not going to talk you into it and I'm not going to talk you out of it," line 75), never mentions June's psychology, Theo, or art-avoidance, and her one flattery beat is earned and practical ("This is why I called you and not the other names on my list," line 33 — triggered by June's instant fault-diagnosis question). Contractions throughout ("Pay's," "I'd rather," "can't hold"). No card violations found.
- **June not therapist:** She never explains her conflict aloud to anyone. Her one emotional leak on the call is corrected in-voice ("June heard herself and stopped. 'Hypothetically.'" line 35) — deflection visible *as* deflection per §2. Craft nouns hold ("ground," "matte," "overtightens"); no never-says violations.
- **Dialogue diagnosis (zero tolerance):** Swept every line of speech and every narration sentence adjacent to speech. Strongest candidates, all ruled non-violations: "You're being very fair about the part where it might evaporate" (line 53) targets Nia's *conduct* — her disclosure of renewal risk, substance not sentence — and elicits a substantive answer; "That's going in the label notes" (line 105) gives the line a use, it does not rate its quality; "answered the part that was a fact" (line 103) describes June's selection, not Theo's phrasing; "I know you're taking notes. I can hear the pen." (line 75) comments on audible behavior, not delivery. No character or narrator anywhere calls a line careful, rehearsed, measured, or characterizes rhythm/phrasing. Zero hits.
- **Texts as speakers, not exposition:** Asha's two texts are rate/date/lead-time shorthand with her card's exact texture and no inspirational talk; Priya's revised text ("Matte looks clean; photo holds at 8x10. Mara's crop works." line 99) is print-spec brisk per her card — the raw draft's off-card gush ("they look INCREDIBLE... like a movie poster," raw line 105) was correctly replaced; Theo's text is logistics carrying tenderness ("one occupied by a coat that I ruled counts," line 101) and pays off a standing promise rather than delivering new exposition. All four threads pass the blind-sender test.
- **Plain-speech floor (§2):** Met for both call principals — Nia: "I need you to say yes for real reasons or no for real reasons" (line 55, a want stated plainly); June: "I'm calling now. Officially. Tell me the official version." (line 21) and the gripper questions (facts and questions stated plainly, which the floor licenses). The scene is followable as text end to end; no exchange requires decoding.

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OVERALL: CLEAN
