# Voice Check — Chapters 16–20, Round 3 (narrow verification of Round 2 orders) (`voice_check_20` R3)

**Stance:** skeptical professional editor per `voice_check_protocol.md`. Third-round scope: current text only, Chapters 16–20, centered on the two Round 2 orders and any damage the repairs could have introduced. Resolved Round 1 findings are not re-litigated; they were spot-confirmed as still absent where the repairs touched adjacent text.

**Calibration paragraph (step 1).** Same pinned calibration as Rounds 1–2, re-verified against committed text: the Ch13 flyer-photo/kiss sequence and the Ch14 opening. Rhythm signature: hard frequent stops landing on a concrete object; procedure relieved every few sentences by task-residue interiority; diction cool, contract-heavy, craft-nouned, zero hedged abstraction. Competence is not the standard; this is.

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## Round 2 order verification: 2/2 executed in current text.

**Order 1 — Ch19 paired-echo beat-closer: RESOLVED.** Current final paragraph reads: "He emptied his wash jars into the sink, rinsed them, and dried one with a paper towel. He carried it to the rack. He turned off the lights, locked the door, and left the jar upside down below the stain he had not been able to lift and was no longer sure he wanted to." The order is executed to the letter: penultimate sentence cut at "He carried it to the rack," the placement clause moved whole into the closer, "upside down... below the stain" now occurs exactly once in the chapter, the lock stays demoted mid-sentence, the jar stays terminal, and the self-audit relative clause that relieves the He-chain survives in final position. The Ch16 differentiation holds (keys pocketed vs. jar below stain). Damage check on the trim: the excised "on the shelf at the right end of their ground" placement detail is not missed — "below the stain" locates the jar against the chapter's own established object (the stain is planted mid-chapter: "The stain stayed, small and visible," and re-seen from June's side of the table: "a stain the size of a thumb"). The closing chain is now four He-openers, but with strong length variation (long / medium / three-beat / long-with-clause); the short "He carried it to the rack." reads as a deliberate held beat before the closer, matching the Ch14 sample's stop pattern rather than fighting it.

**Order 2 — Ch18 surplus angle-of-someone instance: RESOLVED.** Current text reads: "The second study went faster: the studio's chairs from behind, after class, where people had left them." — the order's own sanctioned recast, verbatim. The recognitional figure is now exactly the designed two-instance cross-POV rhyme: Ch18 "one chair, hers, pulled out from the table at the angle of someone who had just stood up" / Ch19 "stool turned out from the table at the angle of someone coming right back." No dilution remains. Damage check: "where people had left them" introduces no new echo — the nearest "left" uses ("the room as one person left it," "the leaving side of *After Class*") are paragraphs away and thematic, not phrasal; the following sentence ("She didn't count them. She painted the backs, the shadows under the seats") carries the observation in the sample's plain temperature as the order intended.

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## 1. Rhythm mismatches
CLEAN — both repair zones re-checked against the calibration sample. The Ch18 study sequence keeps June's optical procedure ("the floor scuffed pale where the same legs dragged every week"); the Ch19 close keeps Theo's task-chain-failing-into-feeling shape. Strongest counter-candidate: the new four-He closing chain (quoted above) — considered as monotone risk and cleared: length varies sentence to sentence and the terminal relative clause is the chain's designed relief, per the Round 1 order that built it.

## 2. Banned phrases
CLEAN — both repaired lines contain no banned-list entries; the reading-guide catalog and tics.md standing orders were spot-re-verified across all five chapters since only two lines changed: "load-bearing" 0 hits; breath/flip/flutter/pooling/electricity 0; "something shifted"/"the air changed" 0 (all `shifted` instances literal strap/tray/table); smirk/chuckle/"a beat"/standalone "Oh." 0; dialogue diagnosis (zero tolerance) 0 — the repairs touched no dialogue. Paired-echo confirmation family (the standing order the Round 2 finding fell under): back to 0 in the span.

## 3. AI-sounding constructions
CLEAN — the single Round 2 instance (the Ch19 verbatim restatement) is dead; the image is placed once, in final position. Strongest counter-candidate: "He carried it to the rack." followed by the compound closer — a short-beat-before-cadence shape LLMs overuse as portent; survives because the three-beat is literal task completion in a chapter built from task completion, not an emphasis pause.

## 4. Anachronistic language
CLEAN — neither repair introduced vocabulary; "where people had left them" is register-neutral. Standing counter-candidate "cadmium-adjacent" (Ch18) unchanged and still survives as literal pigment talk.

## 5. Repetitive metaphors
CLEAN at the order level. Updated counts: angle-of-someone figure **2** (the sanctioned Ch18/Ch19 rhyme, down from 3 — the order's intent achieved); "upside down below the stain" **1** (down from 2). Watch-tier families carried forward unchanged and unblocking: thumb-as-measure 3 (Ch19 ×2, Ch20 ×1 — a third thumb-sized mark in Ch21+ converts to a finding); face-down/face-up object family ~9 with the Ch20 face-up inversion as arc payoff — rest the family in Ch21. Neither was worsened by the repairs.

## 6. Sentence length problems
CLEAN — the Ch19 terminal chain re-measured post-trim (see ask 1); the trim shortened the third sentence but the distribution stays varied and the closer's subordinate clause breaks the run. All five chapters still end on an object-action closer; with Ch16 (keys), Ch18 (spackle), Ch19 (jar), Ch20 (study on wall) now fully differentiated, this remains house cadence. Watch only.

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**VOICE SCORE: 9/10** — Both Round 2 orders are executed exactly as written, with no repair-created damage: the banned-family echo at Ch19's most exposed position is gone, the image lands once, and the angle-of-someone figure is back to its designed two-instance rhyme. All fourteen Round 1 resolutions spot-checked at the repair-adjacent text remain in place. The withheld point is accumulation risk, not present defect: two watch-tier families (thumb-measure, face-down inversion) sit at the edge of their useful density and must rest in Ch21, and the uniform object-action chapter closer is one chapter away from predictability.

**POLISHED-BUT-DEAD ZONES: NONE** — nearest call unchanged and re-verified in current text: "She sat with the two columns for a long time." (Ch18) — hedged duration, generic posture — still rescued two sentences later by the beat no other book owns (typing "Also, is there decent ventilation?", selecting it, deleting it).

**REVISION ORDERS:** NONE.

**OVERALL: VOICE-HOLDS**
