Audit written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_12.dialogue_doctor.md`. Full audit text follows.

# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 12

id: dialogue_doctor | owner: claude | tier: core
target: `output/chapters/chapter_12.md`
inputs: chapter text; raw draft `output/drafts/claude/chapter_12.round_01.md`; codex initial assessment + claude-tic audit; chapter packet; `output/style_and_voice.md` voice cards (Theo, June); `premise/READING_GUIDE.md` + `premise/patterns/reading_guide_bans.tsv`; mechanical gate report (open=0).

Manifest note: `output/critiques/codex/dialogue_scene_manifest.md` has no chapter_12 row (it was last regenerated through chapter 11). The chapter contains no heading or horizontal-rule scene break after the title, so under the manifest's segmentation rules it is a single scene; it carries ~45 quoted utterances, far above the 4-line threshold — Doctor coverage required. Audited below as SCENE 01. The manifest should be regenerated to add the row.

Calibration applied: the reading guide declares no failure-mode exclusions for non-standard forms, so the two-message text exchange (line 15) was read under ordinary rules. Book-specific calibration honored: reading guide §2 zero-tolerance dialogue-diagnosis rule (any speaker, and narration about speech); plain-speech floor; `load-bearing` ban (zero hits — checked); packet bans on self-delivery captions, sentence-as-object captions, and stating "feelings are real"; Ch11 retirement of the forms/labels joke family as a language engine.

## SCENE 01 — Marchetti Rooms front desk, Monday evening (lines 15–109)

- **1. VOICE CONVERGENCE: CLEAN** — read with attributions covered. Strongest counter-candidate: the Dom beat — "Dom's shop is very committed to forms." / "Dom has several forms." (June then Theo, lines 29–31) — one matched dry-joke trade, the closest the registers come. It survives because the functions differ (June's is deflection while she settles the tote; Theo's is host-reflex correction) and everywhere else mass and syntax diverge per the cards: June compact with craft nouns, Theo practical-to-emotional and longer. Second candidate: Theo's echo confirmations "The wall and the twenty minutes of dead salmon." (line 93) and "Now I have it" (line 97) borrow June's compression, but they are custody receipts — repeating her exact terms back is the scene's transfer mechanism, not register bleed. Caution for the tics tracker, not a finding: the Dom trade inherits the retired Ch11 forms-joke family; one beat, not the chapter's engine, so the packet's "language engine" threshold is not met.

- **2. MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM: CLEAN** — the scene is structurally two interviews, so this was the mode most likely to fail. Counter-candidate: June's intake run "What's out the window?" / "How many clothespins?" / "What was it on the back of? The worksheet, or--" (lines 43–51). It survives because question/answer masses are sharply asymmetric (her questions are 3–8 words; his answers run long and vary), the questions are painter-intake with on-page consequence (she writes *chicken thighs* on his card stock mid-run, line 55), and the mirrored Theo run (lines 81–87) is differentiated by the interiority block at lines 77–79, which marks his technical questions as the permitted substitute for the three forbidden repair questions — the symmetry is dramatized, not defaulted into.

- **3. MISSING INTERIORITY: CLEAN** — counter-candidate: Theo goes near-dark across June's two long turns (lines 67–75; his only contributions are "The deinstall." and "Prime first because--"). It survives because lines 77–79 immediately register cost and tactics ("He had four questions and three of them were repairs… He picked up the middle pen instead"), and earlier beats (not picking up any of the three pens at line 39; lining up the already-even pens at line 57) keep the focalizer's lived relationship to the exchange continuously legible. Rule 9, first direction, satisfied.

- **4. QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS: CLEAN** — candidates checked: "The deinstall." (Theo, line 69) and "You were on the frame errand." (Theo, line 27). Both are information-confirmations the other speaker treats as information — June continues into process detail; June answers with Ruth logistics. "How many coats do I tell you it took?" (line 85) is a genuine spec question for a painting he must execute tomorrow. No portent manufacture found.

- **5. FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM: CLEAN** — counter-candidates: "Decorator's White. Benjamin Moore. Flat." (line 83) and the closing volley "The wall and the salmon." / "There. Now you have it." (line 95). Stripped, but it is spec-giving starkness the scene has earned — Theo is literally taking painting instructions in block capitals — and action beats ("She sat back. The strap of the tote was still around her ankle") keep attribution and body in the frame. Not performed starkness.

- **6. JARGON-TRADING WITHOUT TRANSLATION: CLEAN** — checked the full process vocabulary: gallery white, ghosting, stain-blocking primer, paint-backs, cut-in, sash brush. "Ready means gallery white, patched, no ghosting, next person walks into nothing" (line 71) translates the contract term in the same breath; ghosting is translated by consequence ("three days later there's a peach shadow at four in the afternoon," line 75); "paint-backs" is weighed by the adjacent "I knew how… I'd done paint-backs for other people all year." Residual untranslated items (cut-in, sash brush) carry no stake a reader must independently weigh; they are texture satisfying the reading guide's smallness test.

- **7. ATTRIBUTION OPACITY: CLEAN** — counter-candidate: the untagged run at lines 81–87 ("What white, exactly?" through "Budget for three"). Survives because role separates the voices (Theo asks, June specs) and "She watched him write" re-anchors mid-run. The opening volley (lines 21–37) is trackable throughout via alternation plus object business.

- **FAKE-SHARP: CLEAN** — all four flagged lines run against the cut-list:
  - "I want you to have that one" (line 61): speakable, object-bound — "that one" is the card whose contents were just specified down to the clothespin count — and inside Theo's packet-sanctioned plainness ledger ("I used to draw all the time," "I want you to have that one"). Not an aphorism. The defect here is the caption *before* it, flagged under DIALOGUE-DIAGNOSIS below.
  - "Don't make me noble about it" (line 91): an instruction to her painter, instantly grounded in anti-noble concretes ("I was on a ladder half the time and I had primer in my hair and I billed zero hours"), self-aimed per June's card.
  - "Paint the wall. The wall's the thing." (line 91): the borderline case — "the wall's the thing" carries a quotable Hamlet shimmer. It survives because it is an executable subject constraint closing a concrete instruction ("No standing figure gazing upon the white wall"), and it is not a curtain line: Theo answers with the salmon and she amends ("The wall and the salmon."). Functional, then spoken past.
  - Final card note "GREEN FIRST. THE WHITE HAS TO COVER SOMETHING." (line 109): written, not spoken; process-true (the Ch13 painting must reenact the layer order June herself specified — green field at line 67, primer-then-white at lines 71–75); it completes her formula rather than stamping a theme. Residual risk sits in the narration before it ("the right order was the whole memory"), which pre-translates the note — within tolerance because it motivates the intrusive act of writing on her card and stays in paint-order terms; Plain Translation owns the remaining thesis-watch per the codex assessment.

- **INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION (rule 9, tested both directions): FAIL** — second direction: interiority explaining the exchange twice and naming the transposed thesis. "…and understood that Tuesday was going to be the harder kind of acting, the kind where the material is true and you have to deliver it like it is not" (Theo interiority, line 97). The paragraph has already dramatized exactly this: Mara will ask, he will have to say *fine*, Ruth will watch them "being a couple who exchanged memories on a Monday night," and "Three weeks ago the performance had been a schedule." The clause restates that showing as taxonomy; it is the packet's forbidden "feelings are real" statement transposed into performance vocabulary ("the material is true"); and "deliver it" is delivery-language applied to his own future speech, brushing the zero-tolerance rule. Supporting evidence of drift: the revision stiffened the raw draft's "like it isn't" to "like it is not," off Theo's default-contract interiority register. Counter-candidate that survives: the train-beat clause "the right order was the whole memory" (line 109), retained as ruled under FAKE-SHARP above.

- **DIALOGUE-DIAGNOSIS (reading guide §2, zero tolerance; packet self-delivery-caption ban): FAIL ×2** —
  1. "He heard himself say *there were a lot of these* and kept going before it could become a speech." (narration, line 53). Narration about speech: it captions the prospective shape of his own utterance ("a speech") instead of letting the swerve perform the avoidance — and the swerve is already on the page ("Chicken thighs on the other side. Eighty-nine cents a pound."). The packet is explicit that the lost-artist pull must be felt "from what he avoids and what he includes," not named; this names it.
  2. "There was no useful way to say it, and the plain way was sitting right there." (narration, line 61). A pre-delivery self-caption rating the coming line's manner ("plain," "useful way to say it") — the packet's banned self-delivery-caption family, aimed at the chapter's most important plain line, which it undercuts by labeling before the reader can hear it land unlabeled.
  - Cleared candidate, shown per stance: "I've spent two days trying to figure out how to say that without making it an announcement with a correction attached" (Theo, line 23) — characterizes a hypothetical *social act* (an announcement, a correction), the same family as June's "don't make it a thing" (line 15); it names a speech-act category, not wording, rhythm, carefulness, or sentence shape, and the comedy is Theo-card logistics flailing. Not flagged.
  - Cleared candidate: "The quotation marks felt necessary. He did not examine why." (line 89) — rates written punctuation on his note card, not anyone's speech; "He did not examine why" is refusal-to-conclude-adjacent and belongs to the tic/Plain Translation lane, noted there.
  - June sweep: zero instances — she never rates Theo's words; her sharpest responses act on content ("Don't find out before tomorrow," line 59; writing *chicken thighs*, line 55), which is exactly how the guide wants perceptiveness shown.

- **PLAIN-SPEECH FLOOR / TAG-FREE DISTINGUISHABILITY (focused check): PASS** — Theo's direct plain lines: "I don't want it friendlier." and "I want you to have that one." (line 61); "I used to draw all the time." (line 57). June's: "I did it myself. Nobody made me." (line 71); "I mean it." (line 91); "There. Now you have it." (line 95). Blind test on the longest stretch (lines 67–75): June's turns carry her card markers without tags — craft nouns (cadmium, ghosting, cut-in), the self-aimed "which was my own genius decision," the self-correction "It never fully runs clear; you just decide a point at which it's clear." Her process-dense account stays spoken and responsive, not essay: it is split into four turns, each prompted or interrupted (Theo's "The deinstall.", "Prime first because--", the two spec questions), it runs in spoken present-tense reenactment ("So I'm in there on a Tuesday morning"), and it ends in instructions to a specific listener with a pen.

## REVISION ORDERS

Routed per audit contract to the opposing-model lane (codex rewrite); self-repair by the drafting lane is not an accepted resolution.

1. **Line 53 — dialogue diagnosis, narration about speech.** Cut the full sentence "He heard himself say *there were a lot of these* and kept going before it could become a speech." The dialogue already performs the swerve: "…The circulars were better because the paper was bigger." → "Chicken thighs on the other side." If a beat is wanted between them, use a Theo-card tension action (straightens the card stock, checks the half-down gate) — no self-listening, no naming "speech," no replacement caption.

2. **Line 61 — self-delivery caption.** Cut "There was no useful way to say it, and the plain way was sitting right there." Let "I don't want it friendlier." and "I want you to have that one." stand adjacent, optionally separated by one physical custody action per Theo's card (practical offer before emotional statement — e.g., he slides the card across the desk to her). Do not replace with any sentence that rates the line's manner.

3. **Line 97 — interiority explaining twice / transposed "feelings are real."** Cut "and understood that Tuesday was going to be the harder kind of acting, the kind where the material is true and you have to deliver it like it is not." Close the movement on the concrete look — "…He looked at PARTNER on Odile's card, propped there against the tape dispenser." — or end one sentence earlier on "He had been good at schedules." Do not restate the performance/true distinction in new words; the Mara/*fine*/Ruth projection and the schedule sentence already carry it. Any retained interior clause keeps Theo's default-contract register.

OVERALL: BLOCKING (3 findings)
