# Regression-to-the-Mean / Genericization Audit — Chapter 20, "No Advice / Keys Here" — Round 2 (post-restoration)

Diffed: `output/drafts/claude/chapter_20.round_01.md` (pre-revision provenance) against `output/chapters/chapter_20.md` (current, after the round-1 restoration batch). The revision orders in force for this batch were the twelve round-1 restoration orders in `chapter_20.genericization.md`, adjudicated against the standing doctor orders (Dialogue Doctor round 2 orders 1–7; Comedy Doctor round 2 orders R1–R16 and the canonical comedy tracker; Positive Prose rounds 4–6). Mechanical gate on the current text: 0 open findings, 23 WATCH (non-blocking). Method: all twelve round-1 orders verified against the current text first; then a full paragraph-aligned re-diff of draft against current for new losses the batch itself introduced — restoration passes can regress too, by trading one audit's restoration against another audit's cut and quietly over-cutting the remainder.

Summary of the round-1 disposition before the category verdicts: **11 of 12 orders are executed or justifiably adapted; the 12th (order 6, Asha's close) is partially executed with the withheld parts each traceable to a numbered Dialogue Doctor order.** No round-1 order remains unresolved without a genuine conflicting order behind it. The batch introduced **one** new uninstructed loss (the Ridgewood radiator), flagged under category 4.

---

## 1. Concrete details — HELD

Round-1 orders 11 and 12 land here; both are resolved.

- **Order 11 (spoken 10:52 source): executed.** Current line 139: `"It's 10:52," Nia said. "Have her email before one. I have payroll at eleven."` June's text at line 147 (`Said no at 10:52`) is no longer an orphan — the timestamp now has an on-page speaker, and the retained payroll/before-one specifics stand. The withheld half of the order (`"Go do your worse offer"`) is justified: Dialogue Doctor round 2 flagged the call's close for topper accumulation and capped Nia at one polished construction per call, and the timestamp — not the sendoff — was the load-bearing specific.
- **Order 12 (closing clause): adapted, not restored, and the adaptation carries the load.** Current line 161: `put the study up on her own wall, one nail, level enough. Twenty-nine days until Dana's key. Thirty-one days until Kessler's armory load-in.` The draft's apposition (`in the apartment she was leaving for a colder room with better light`) stays retired under the aphorism/doublet kill orders (Comedy round 2 R16's one-doublet narration budget; the PP audits' portable-summary family), and the added Dana-key count — verified arithmetic, Dec 4 → Jan 2 = 29 days, → Jan 4 = 31 — replaces a summarizing epigram with two named future obligations. That is specificity gained, not lost.

Riskiest remaining diffs examined: the Chelsea-office reroute holds everywhere (terms at line 11, June's counter-plan at line 85, the back-of-hand note at line 161 — `ask Chelsea office re: December crating`), keeping S-NY-01's not-through-Theo/Odile thesis intact; draft's `The word possible doing more work than $2,643` became `she left the word without an underline` (line 11) — a told gloss converted to notation behavior, more specific, and the comedy tracker already cleared the shape as literal. Every dollar figure, rate, date, and clock reading in the draft survives or was corrected on documented continuity grounds. Nothing in this category became less specific.

## 2. Images and figuration — HELD

Both round-1 orders in this category are executed.

- **Order 4 (stepping-back simile): restored**, repositioned to open the math paragraph — line 13: `She had kept stepping back from paintings as if distance might fix a drawing problem, when the problem was in the drawing.` The draft's explicit tether (`waiting for the arithmetic to change its mind`) is gone, but the figure sits directly against `She'd done it four times and it came out the same every time: the left page won`, and the juxtaposition carries the tenor without the gloss. The trailing `The left page won on every line` stays cut, per round 1, which also breaks one leg of the "every line" echo scaffold Dialogue Doctor flagged.
- **Order 5 (provisional stairwell): restored verbatim** — line 23: `Sam first, in the orange scarf that made everyone else on the stairwell look provisional`.

Riskiest diffs examined and cleared: draft's `the specific boom of a gate coming down` → `the boom of a gate coming down` (line 61) — the lost word is a told intensifier; the boom, the pallet jack, and the off-phone shout all survive. Draft's `trestle table foreshortened and honest` → `foreshortened hard, the near edge left steep` (line 159) — more painterly, and it retires the draft's fourth "honest," consistent with the round-1-cleared honest-light motif-cap cuts. Draft's `squared up like evidence` → `Her eyes stopped on FRI DEC 4 / NOON. June did not turn the receipt over` (line 39) — a watched stock simile (Comedy R6) replaced by a more specific act of reading and a counter-move. No scene-grown image was smoothed into a stock one this round.

## 3. Character texture — HELD

All three round-1 orders in this category are executed, each in the adapted form the conflicting audits required.

- **Order 1 (June's daylight test): restored, material version, and the continuity hazard is closed.** Current line 99: `If Tuesdays ended, if Theo never called, if the studio became a place she'd used to go, the numbers did not improve. She looked at them the way she'd look at a ground: holes, thin patches, places where wanting had been scumbled over need. The $340 room barely held heat. She left the page where it was.` The beat the continuity ledger describes ("runs the test that Ridgewood must remain worth it even if Theo never speaks to her again," continuity.md ch20 block) is on the page again; `scumbled over need` is back; the verdict is rendered as action (`She left the page where it was`) rather than the blocked stamps. The three shapes round 1 itself ordered withheld stay withheld: the `She was not staying for anyone` slogan paragraph (packet anti-tic: no "choosing herself" slogans), `worth the coat` (Comedy R10: third coat instance = coin), `It was enough to work in` (PP round 4: portable künstlerroman thesis).
- **Order 2 (Ruth's motive): restored, cap-compliant.** Line 41: `"This fall I noticed things. I kept them to myself and called it manners." She straightened the strap of her bag. "Some of it was easier for me."` The unflattering payload — her silence served her own comfort — is back in Ruth's mouth, tied to the S-RUTH-01 access-history arc, while the draft's antithesis stack and the Ch11-retired `That's the whole confession` template stay out, exactly as Dialogue Doctor round 2 order 1 required ("keep the kept-to-myself formulation... let the remainder go functional"). Sharp-line cap: the confession is the spend; `"We know how to deliver a box"` (line 33, restored per round-1 order 9) is plain-logistics deflection under the comedy tracker's own precedent.
- **Order 3 (Nia's kindness defended): restored** in the Dialogue Doctor's suggested flattening — line 135: `"For the record, I didn't put the studio clause in to sweeten it. I meant it. And June, when it opens, come see it."` Nia is no longer a functional door: she defends the beam she cut, and the packet's no-strawman requirement has its evidence back.

Riskiest new diff examined and cleared under criterion 6: the draft's `It was still good. That was the entire problem with the left page.` is absent from the current text — an uninstructed cut of a dilemma-naming paradox the comedy audits had passed. I checked whether the offer's goodness (which the packet makes load-bearing: "Nia is right enough that June's no costs something") still has carriers: `GOOD` in pen from Monday (line 9), June's `"The job's good, Nia. Forty-nine five, keys day one, after-hours access in writing"` (line 109), Nia's `"It wasn't close"` (line 107), and Asha's independent certifications (`"Ninety days to benefits is real"`, line 71; `"Forty-nine five and written access is real"`, line 75). The cut sentence was a composed narration doublet in the family Comedy R16 budgeted to at most one surviving instance; with the restored stepping-back chiasmus and the scumble figure sitting at the canonical comedy audit's declared two-craft-figure ceiling, trading the paradox out was the correct arithmetic, and the goodness fact is fully redundant in specifics. Not a flag. Also cleared: the dish-shelf clause (`not be able to invent a reason to forget it`) stays cut — a self-watching frame under reading-guide §6, and PP round 6 certified the bare version on the strength of `again`.

## 4. Dialogue particularity — REGRESSED (1 instance)

First, the round-1 orders, all resolved:

- **Order 8 (Sam): executed verbatim.** `"What's the freight?"` (line 29); `"If the answer involves moving anything heavier than this, you have our number. That's not an opinion. That's a hand truck."` (line 51). The chapter's thesis is back in Sam's mouth as equipment.
- **Order 9 (Ruth): half executed, half justified.** `"We know how to deliver a box"` restored (line 33). The conditional (`"unless you'd like it to be longer"`) stays out on a genuine conflict: Comedy round 2 R5 explicitly ordered it flattened to `"We're double-parked. Two minutes."` — which is the current text verbatim — to protect Ruth's one-sharp-line cap for the confession. The conflict is real and documented; the omission stands.
- **Order 6 (Asha's close): partially executed, remainder justified.** Restored: `"Send Nia my number. The room's not pretty. Cheap enough to forgive."` (line 87) — the voice-card anchor is back — and `Asha hung up before the word was finished` (line 89). Withheld with cause: `"I have to go be a door again"` (DD round 2 order 4b: one door joke per call; the opener `"I'm holding a door with my whole body"`, line 63, holds it) and June's topper `"That's the listing of my dreams"` (DD 4b ordered the functional close; both comedy rounds log the phrase's absence approvingly).
- **Order 7 (crating logic): executed adapted.** `"Take the crating if you get it. It's indoors."` (line 87) — the working-installer winter logic is reattached to the corrected entity; the `stupid crating` doubling stays planed per DD 4b, which ordered exactly that ("cut or plane... keep the instruction").
- **Order 10 (column exchange): executed, cap-accounted.** `"That's a worse offer on every line I have a column for."` / `"It is," June said.` ... `"The line it wins on doesn't fit in a column. Ten feet, north window."` (lines 127–129). This restoration sits against DD round 2 order 6's recommendation to flatten it, but DD's underlying requirement was *at most one polished Nia construction in the call* — and the current call holds exactly one: `"Buy a ticket like a civilian"`, `"dressing a job in a studio"`, and `"Go do your worse offer"` are all gone, and the "every line" echo scaffold is broken (neither the narration at line 13 nor June at line 109 echoes it anymore). Both audits' actual loads are satisfied; June's half routes the why through the object per PP round 4 order 4 (`Ten feet, north window` immediately follows).

**Instance 4.1 — the decorative radiator, an uninstructed over-cut by the restoration batch.**
- Pre (draft, Asha's terms turn): `"Back room's yours, ten feet of wall in front, the north window's honest light and the radiator is decorative. Wear the coat inside until February."`
- Post (chapter_20.md:83): `"Back room's yours, ten feet of wall in front, north light steady most of the day. Wear the coat inside until February."`
- The honest-light cut was ordered (motif cap, cleared in round 1) and `north light steady most of the day` is a fair working replacement. But `the radiator is decorative` was cut by no one and protected by name: Comedy round 2 R3 flattened the Tasker apartment's `radiators that worked on purpose` to `radiators that worked` (line 9, current) *precisely so that this clause "must remain the chapter's one radiator joke"* — and comedy round 2 item 17 scored it funniness-2, workshopped-no. The batch deleted the protected half of the contrast. Result: the Tasker/Ridgewood radiator opposition — a concrete physical fact pair, in Asha's dock-blunt pricing register — fades to a generic condition statement carried only by June's plain `"no real heat"` (line 125, where plainness is correct: DD ordered the counter read flat) and the narration's `barely held heat` (line 99). Two-sided test: less specific, yes; the coat instruction still anchors Asha's turn, so this is a one-sided fade, but it fails cleanly on that side, it inverts a standing comedy order's intent, and it sits mid-call in the logistics turn — outside the exit-run density DD 4b was thinning, so no order even arguably claims it.

New over-polish scan of the adapted restorations (this is the failure a restoration batch would most likely introduce): none found. The restored Sam and Ruth lines are draft originals already adjudicated; scene 02 still ends on June's anti-polish fumble (`"Both of you--thank you. For the box."`, line 53); `"The box is the errand. The dish is separate."` (line 35) is more parallel than the draft's version but dodges the Ch11-retired `That's the whole ___` template and was comedy-approved as taxonomy-that-fails-on-the-page; the Nia call holds one polished construction per side (the column pair) and otherwise runs on the plain spine (`"I'm calling to say no."` / `"But."` / `"It is."`).

## 5. Inflation accompanying the fade — HELD

Checked every current-text addition against the draft for significance language compensating a thinned particular. There is none. The restored test paragraph is deflationary where the draft's cut sibling was inflationary (`the numbers did not improve` vs. `the version of herself she hadn't met yet`); the batch's other additions are counts and verification behavior (`Twenty-nine days until Dana's key`; `She stepped in once, looking for where the corner failed. The corner stayed.`, line 159; `Her eyes stopped on FRI DEC 4 / NOON`, line 39; `crossed out hard enough to dent the page`, line 9). The draft's genuine inflation — the post-call essay (`Nobody, ever again, would be able to tell her this had been decided for her... In the brochure that had looked like the benefit`) — remains cut, replaced by the receipt squared against the table edge (line 141), which the PP audits certified as the register the book requires. Riskiest candidate: `"I know. That's why this is hard."` (line 117) — sanctioned allowed-plainness attached to a named clause, unchanged from round 1's clearance. No stakes restated bigger anywhere.

## 6. Legitimate edits are not regression — HELD (screen applied; conflicts verified)

Every intentionally-withheld round-1 restoration was checked against the order alleged to block it, and every conflict is real and traceable: the `She was not staying for anyone` paragraph (packet anti-tic, and round 1's own order 1 forbade restoring it); `worth the coat` (Comedy R10 — the chapter's two standing coat beats, line 83 and `FEB = coat` at line 155, are the licensed pair); `It was enough to work in` (PP round 4 order 1); the closing apposition (comedy R16 doublet budget / PP portability, with the day-count adaptation carrying the content); `I have to go be a door again` (DD 4b, one door joke per call); `That's the listing of my dreams` (DD 4b topper cut); Ruth's conditional (Comedy R5 verbatim); `Buy a ticket like a civilian` and `Go do your worse offer` (DD order 6's one-polished-Nia-construction cap, spent on the column line). None of these is a lazy omission; each earlier-audit conflict justifies it, and in each case the load-bearing content was re-housed rather than dropped. The single place the batch cut past any order is the radiator (4.1). The mechanical gate is clean, and the one restoration order below reintroduces no BANNED or capped pattern (no radiator-adjacent pattern exists in the gate report; the clause is Asha-card diction and comedy-protected by name).

---

## Focused extra checks

- **Earned-stay proof:** fixed without generic residue. The test at line 99 separates Ridgewood from Theo/Tuesdays in material terms (`If Tuesdays ended, if Theo never called... the numbers did not improve`), the verdict is an act (`She left the page where it was`), and the continuity ledger's description of the chapter is true of the text again. Swept the full chapter for choose-yourself/choose-art vocabulary: no *brave, leap, deserve, terrifying*, no version-of-herself construction, no staying-for slogans. The chapter's why lives in the Vandercook/key-number exchange (lines 113–121) and `Ten feet, north window` — book-specific throughout.
- **Ruth/Sam, Asha, Nia character-specific again:** yes. Ruth: exact conditional restraint plus the self-implicating `"Some of it was easier for me."` Sam: freight idiom, knees, the chair moved six inches, the hand-truck refusal-of-opinion. Asha: consent boundary, `$980 all in with the wall`, `Cheap enough to forgive` — with the one exception flagged at 4.1, where her terms turn lost its protected physical joke. Nia: columns, payroll, the defended clause. The adapted restorations created no new over-polished dialogue: each call and the visit hold their doctor-imposed density caps, and the plain spines are intact.
- **Study-on-wall ending:** carries the Dana/Kessler future specifically without the portable apposition. The step-back is measured as `the distance she'd have at Dana's between the window and the wall` (line 157), the close counts down to two named obligations (`Twenty-nine days until Dana's key. Thirty-one days until Kessler's armory load-in.`), and the colder-room-better-light trade is fully priced in-scene (`barely held heat`, line 99; `flat gray light across ten feet of empty wall. June looked at the light longest`, line 151) rather than stamped at the exit. HELD.
- **Unresolved round-1 orders:** none. All twelve are executed, executed-adapted, or withheld against a verified conflicting order (enumerated in category 6). The one open defect this round (4.1) is new, introduced by the batch itself, and is not order-conflicted — nothing blocks its restoration.

## REVISION ORDERS

1. **(4.1)** Restore the decorative radiator to Asha's terms turn, line 83 — e.g.: `"Back room's yours, ten feet of wall in front, north light steady most of the day, and the radiator is decorative. Wear the coat inside until February."` This re-arms the Tasker/Ridgewood radiator contrast that Comedy round 2 R3 explicitly reserved for this clause, sits mid-call outside the exit-run density Dialogue Doctor thinned, and leaves June's deliberately flat `"no real heat"` counter to Nia untouched. No compensating-inflation strips required (category 5 held).

**OVERALL: REGRESSED (1)**
