Audit written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_16.dialogue_doctor.md`. The full audit:

# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 16

Target: `output/chapters/chapter_16.md`
Stance: cold read, skeptical professional editor. Mechanical input: gate PASS open=0 WATCH=70.

Coverage note: `output/critiques/codex/dialogue_scene_manifest.md` has no chapter 16 row yet (table ends at chapter 15). The chapter contains no heading or horizontal-rule scene breaks, so under the manifest's segmentation rules it is a single scene, far above the 4-line threshold (~30 quoted utterances). Audited as SCENE 01. The manifest needs a chapter 16 row pointing at this file.

SCENE 01 (whole chapter — Week 6 studio, flyer arrival through lock-up, lines 2–111):

- 1 VOICE CONVERGENCE: `CLEAN — covered all attributions and pooled the speakers' lines: Mara multi-clause social tease ("Priya printed forty. They look good. The brush stayed in."), Sam spatial fix ("There. Now people see it first."), Luis two material verdicts, Odile imperative rules, June compressed self-implication, Theo practical-offer-drifting-emotional; strongest counter-candidate: Luis's "It's better than the assignment" against June's dry-correction register ("It's a clear assignment... I hate it. It's clear.") — both are dry verdicts, but Luis rates an object and exits ("and moved on") while June's verdict carries self-implication and a deflecting tag; covered, the lines don't swap speakers.`
- 2 MONOTONE Q/A: `CLEAN — checked all three multi-line exchanges for matched-weight volleys; strongest counter-candidate: "That's the camera." / "It's a phone." / "Phones are very advanced." (Theo/Mara, flyer beat) — three near-equal short lines, but the run stops at three, is comic by design, and is functionally asymmetric (deflection, correction, capitulation-by-absurdity); the supply-table close is the opposite of monotone — Theo's offers lengthen while June flattens to "Okay." twice.`
- 3 MISSING INTERIORITY: `CLEAN — Theo's mind stays on through every exchange: he loses his chair count at Mara's first line, puts his own flyer face-down, holds the withheld sentence behind "I logged them out, not due" ("He had a sentence ready behind that one... *Odile's my aunt*"), and prices the close ("He recognized the plan making itself useful and kept it anyway"); strongest counter-candidate for darkness: the Luis exchange (lines 61–65) where Theo only says "That was the assignment" — but it sits inside his tracked watching of June seeing the canvas ("her chin came down half an inch"), so the focalizer stays lit.`
- 4 QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS: `CLEAN — inventoried every question: "Okay?" (genuine, answered), "Do you want me to take the catalogs back?" (a real offer June really refuses); strongest counter-candidate: June's "You know that, right?" — a tag question that could manufacture portent, except the position is delivered openly in the statement before it ("Tonight was the most honest you've ever been in this room"), so the tag seeks confirmation rather than disguising a claim.`
- 5 FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM: `CLEAN — attribution is consistently marked and clipped lines are card-earned; strongest counter-candidate: June's twin "Okay." replies at the supply table — stripped to one word, but her card specifies compression when exposed, and Theo's interiority prices the silences (the ready three-word sentence, the deferred plan), so the starkness is earned rather than performed.`
- 6 JARGON-TRADING: `CLEAN — checked every craft term against reader equipment: underpainting is defined in-scene ("the moving boxes ghosted under the interval"), ground/six coats carries from the Ch14 joint-piece setup, "Varnish neither" is a material command with both referents drying in frame; strongest counter-candidate: Mara's "The brush stayed in" — opaque in isolation, but Ch13 ends with Mara asking for a shot "without the brush rag" and Ch14 confirms "The dropped brush was just visible at the bottom edge" of the chosen photo, so a reader of the book can weigh it.`
- 7 ATTRIBUTION OPACITY: `CLEAN — reread the two crowded passages (flyer arrival; critique circle) covering tags; strongest counter-candidate: the Luis/Theo/June run at lines 61–69, three speakers in close sequence — every line carries a tag or a named beat ("Luis said, and moved on"; "June didn't move on. She stepped close"), so no line floats.`
- FAKE-SHARP: `CLEAN — ran every exchange against the cut-list; strongest counter-candidate (and the chapter's highest-risk line): Odile's "Varnish neither. They're a pair now. Pairs hang together or they lie." (Odile to Theo, critique circle, line 81) — the closing clause is aphorism-shaped, but the exchange does not exist mainly to deliver it: it issues a four-part material verdict (process diagnosis "You started with furniture", source naming "you used something she gave the whole class", a curatorial order "Varnish neither", and an enforceable hanging instruction with a craft consequence — split a made pair and each canvas misreads, since Theo's underpainting only resolves against June's). It is speakable studio talk (painters say a picture "lies"), it is plot-functional (the pair must hang together in December), Odile's voice card licenses "best lines, fewest words" with example lines of exactly this shape ("Looking is the assignment."), and the premise's pre-reveal guardrail names "pair/couple drift" delivered through logistics as her sanctioned clue channel — the line reads innocently forward and pointedly backward without her indicating the human pair. The revised line also dropped the raw draft's interpretive clause ("and made it say what it was actually for"), which was the actual oracle risk. Second candidate: Theo's "In paint" — a loaded short line, but the silence after it is marked: June packs and leaves, and Theo registers what the delay changed ("the plan making itself useful"), satisfying the cut-list's silence-cost test.`
- INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION: `CLEAN — tested rule 9 both directions: the focalizer is present (see mode 3), and interiority reacts rather than explaining twice; strongest counter-candidate: the narration before June's "Tonight was the most honest you've ever been in this room" replays the painting ("it was the look from the painting, the one that had painted his hands accurately and left the blank ground in the light") — but the narration is about her way of seeing and the line is about his honesty, so they don't duplicate. Rules 4/7/8 checked: contractions default-on throughout (the gate's two "uncontracted casual dialogue" WATCH hits resolve to clause-final "where they are," which cannot contract); functional-line mass is high ("Okay," "Thanks," "Yes," "Nice save," "There's no due date"), satisfying rule 7's overheard-not-composed floor.`
- DIALOGUE-DIAGNOSIS (reading guide §2/§6, zero tolerance): `FAIL — dialogue diagnosis in narration — "He caught it. Ben said "Nice save" without turning around, and Theo said "Thanks" too fast." (Ben to Theo, mid-painting, line 51) — "too fast" rates the delivery of a spoken line against an implied norm. The reading guide's zero-tolerance rule bans rating "language, phrasing, rhythm, or delivery... Not once per chapter; not at all," and §6 extends it to "narration about speech"; the chapter packet repeats the ban verbatim ("No dialogue/narration comments on phrasing, rhythm, delivery, carefulness"). Provenance confirms the family: the raw draft's "said 'Thanks' in a voice he didn't fully recognize" (raw line 55) was repaired into a smaller delivery-rating instead of out of the category. Counter-candidates checked and passed: June's "It's a clear assignment" rates the task, not Odile's sentence; "tonight it had gotten very short — *Odile's my aunt* — three words, short enough to say while the tap kept running" measures the feasibility of an unspoken disclosure in Theo's logistical register, not the quality of delivered speech; "Nobody said the word *fear* once" records an absent word, not a rating.`

FOCUSED CHECKS (orchestrator-ordered, beyond the standard battery):
- Odile oracle risk: `CLEAN — see FAKE-SHARP; her on-page behavior stays material (palette knife turned tip-in, decanting jars, tapping the easel leg "not the canvas, never the canvas"), she explains nothing, and "Don't touch it again" praises by instruction, in card.`
- Fear-painting over-explanation: `CLEAN — June points at paint ("You made it mine. The roller. In the memory painting it was just a roller."), Theo points at her telling ("It was always yours. You told it that way. I just heard it late."), Luis points at technique ("You left the underpainting."); nobody names usefulness, erasure, or fear as thesis, and the decoding lives only in Theo's perception of the images, as the packet directs; strongest counter-candidate: June's "Tonight was the most honest you've ever been in this room" — it rates the person, not the paintings' meaning, and its answer ("In paint") confesses a limit, not the theme.`
- Theo knowledge quarantine: `CLEAN — no Tasker, Philadelphia, December 4, Asha, Dana, or Kessler anywhere in dialogue or interiority; June's only disclosure is "I'm not done with them."`
- Catalog protection: `CLEAN — the supply-table exchange stays on shelf space and due dates ("There's no due date. I logged them out, not due."); the slip remains "a paper slip tucked inside," contents unnamed; *Odile's my aunt* stays italic interiority, never spoken; no Eileen, no nephew, no acknowledgment page.`
- Cohort register: `CLEAN — the room reacts through stopped action, not commentary chorus: Mara starts a sentence and doesn't finish it, Priya's clementine peel quits "in the middle," Ben skips zone three of his own flyer route; nobody jokes at the paintings, and the one tease ("Theo. You're famous") lands before the assignment, where the warmth floor can carry it.`

Out-of-scope continuity note (not a dialogue finding; routing to the continuity lane): line 9 describes the flyer photo as "mid-kiss," but Ch14 line 5 establishes the chosen photo "had missed the kiss and caught the two seconds following it," with June's hand still on the jacket. One of the two descriptions must yield.

REVISION ORDERS:
1. (DIALOGUE-DIAGNOSIS, line 51) "He caught it. Ben said "Nice save" without turning around, and Theo said "Thanks" too fast." — Cut the delivery rating "too fast." Replace it with a concrete physical fact that carries the haste without rating the spoken word: Theo answers before the palette cup has stopped rocking, or with his hand still flat over the cup, or before he has looked up from the catch. Theo's card says his stress shows as performed competence with the seams showing — let the object work carry the misfire. Do not substitute another speech-quality adverb (quickly, flatly, evenly), and do not reintroduce the raw draft's "in a voice he didn't fully recognize."

OVERALL: BLOCKING (1 finding)
