# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 06: Sightlines — ROUND 2 (post-repair verification)

Auditor stance: cold re-read, skeptical. Inputs: `output/chapters/chapter_06.md` (repaired, 168 lines, one scene, no internal breaks — manifest's single-scene segmentation still holds), round-1 audit `output/critiques/claude/chapter_06.dialogue_doctor.md`, Codex repair memo, voice cards, `premise/READING_GUIDE.md` + `reading_guide_bans.tsv`, dialogue scene manifest (ch 06 row predates repair; line span 2–169 vs. current 168 — immaterial, still one scene), chapter card 06, mechanical gate (0 open, WATCH only). No reading-guide exclusions apply: standard quoted dialogue, ordinary-outing scene. Verification discipline: I verify the six orders against the text, then re-sweep all modes; I do not manufacture new objections to justify the round, and I flag only what would block on a cold read.

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## Round-1 order verification

**ORDER 1 (Mode 1 / Mara flattening) — FIXED.** The flattened two-beat commands are gone. Scarf line now: "Keep it through Monday, please. I checked three forecasts, which Luis says is two forecasts past useful, and I have the gray one in my bag." — runs a clause past necessary, explains before asked, carries the Luis-translation tic her card owns. Wall assignment now: "You two take this wall for me, please. I can't tell whether I'm having an opinion or enjoying the clip lights, and I become difficult when unsupervised." — over-hosting, self-deprecating, audibly longer than anyone else in the room. Sightline ask ("Is the middle one crooked, or is it me?") and the Luis gloss ("Luis checked it from two places before anyone asked, so now we all benefit") are functional and card-true ("with Luis, translates"). "He measured. With his eyes. It's a whole thing." is cut. Residual risk checked: "I become difficult when unsupervised" is the most quotable Mara line left; it survives because the card warns against *every* line being a social punchline, not any line, and her other five utterances are functional hosting. The convergence engine — one house cadence — is broken.

**ORDER 2 (Mode 1 / furniture-deflation doubling) — FIXED.** Priya's antithesis "It's not a question about how you feel. It's a stool." is replaced with "You've been on your feet since five. Stool." and, against Mara's "I'm fine.": "I know. Your left knee keeps looking for a wall. Stool." — body-observation in her card channel (notices fatigue/pain/posture), evidence not epigram. Sam's near-card-verbatim "Stand here. Not symbolically. You can actually see all three from here." is kept per the order. The two moves no longer rhyme: Sam deflates a symbolic reading; Priya answers a denial with a knee.

**ORDER 3 (FAKE-SHARP a / rent-math three-beat) — FIXED.** The pre-scripted "sign / Tuesday / It's a Thursday / For them it was a Tuesday" sitcom unit is gone entirely. Ben now reports with too much practical information and visible nerves: "Broker. The Suffolk place is back on. Somebody's financing fell through. Fourth floor, no elevator. I know that's bad. The rent is less bad, which is how they get you." — the contingency-spiral model the order prescribed. Priya's pushback is functional friction aimed at his state: "Read the actual text before you plan our furniture." Ben no longer scripts her reactions; nobody tags the exchange. "I made the font bigger, because the font needed help." is a self-deprecating logistical joke his card licenses, speakable, anxious rather than landed.

**ORDER 4 (FAKE-SHARP b / Priya capper density) — FIXED.** "You're considering it. I'm watching you consider it." is cut (the frame-shop beat is now Mara's "Sublet" and Ben's "Don't"). Priya's chapter inventory: "Read the actual text…", "He has a note, and a spreadsheet, and the note has a rule at the top.", "He understands the rule. He just thinks if the numbers get clean enough, the rest becomes automatic.", "Did you eat?" (card-verbatim), "That means no." (the sanctioned keep), the two stool lines, "Put the phone down for one room." The one line I weighed against the at-most-one-landed-dry-line budget: "He just thinks if the numbers get clean enough, the rest becomes automatic." It survives — no antithesis, no punch-word landing, aimed at Ben's certainty-wound exactly as the order directed ("aimed at the numbers or at Ben's state"), and it sets the Ch 08 cohort thread. It is diagnosis of a person, not performance for the room. "That means no." with the clementine remains her only capper.

**ORDER 5 (FAKE-SHARP c + Mode 1 / Ruth's walk) — FIXED.** Evidence inventory kept (slot, boss's class, building/chairs/tins, the bar map); core question kept near-verbatim and improved by the framing "Here's my question, and it's the only one I have."; "I saw enough to be worried. Not enough to be right." kept with the plain extension "I haven't said anything to anyone, and I'd rather not. But I'd like there to be an answer." The Sam-vocabulary totalizer "I think the room is arranged so you'd never have to ask" is replaced with "I think every official form points back to your desk. Maybe I'm wrong. I'd prefer to be." — professional/forms domain, hedged, a *partial* misread per her card's narration-transparency rule. Of the two sanctioned edges, "Don't solve it on this block. That's the reflex I'm asking about." keeps its edge; "Find her one. Not me." is replaced by "Make sure it belongs to her." — checked hard, since it is still her exit line: it survives as roughened because it has no parallel snap, no self-reference twist, and is grammatically dependent on Theo's "I'll find one" (it edits *his* sentence's pronoun toward June, which is care, not aphorism). One editorial-sharp line per appearance: satisfied.

**ORDER 6 (BOOK-SPECIFIC + Mode 3 / caption cuts) — FIXED.** "Good answer." is cut; June now answers Theo's "I genuinely don't know." with content in her own lane: "Then I get to keep both theories." followed by "She kept looking." carrying the approval behaviorally. "Theo had received the ease. June had paid for its boundary." is cut with no replacement theorem. The triple-apposition gloss is compressed to a single reactive clause: "There it was again, the ease of being consulted as a unit." — and the carrier beat survives intact: "The route card seemed less necessary for a dangerous instant." / "The route card came back against Theo's shirt." The interiority now reacts once instead of explaining twice.

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## Full re-sweep

SCENE 01 / gallery walk: Orchard basement → Vestibule on Rivington → frame shop → Allen St. walk → bodega (entire chapter, manifest single scene):

- **1. Voice convergence — CLEAN** — Covered attributions and read for the round-1 house cadence (clipped declarative + corrective restatement). The registers now separate: Mara runs long and over-hosts; Luis stacks three flat facts ("It's the wall. The floor slopes. The painting's level."); Ben spirals ("There's track work. There's always track work. I have three theories."); Priya is brisk-clinical; Ruth builds multi-clause questions; Sam directs bodies; June compresses. Strongest counter-candidate: June's "It's the only data." against Luis's "It's the wall." — both clipped correctives, but dry correction is June's card-owned register ("short-to-medium lines, dry corrections") and Luis's is placement diagnosis; with the other five speakers no longer sharing the cadence, two card-sanctioned instances in different domains is differentiation, not convergence.
- **2. Monotone Q/A rhythm — CLEAN** — Checked the Ruth–Theo walk and the Ben rent thread. Strongest counter-candidate: Ruth's long build "If the class stops being good for her, week five, say, and she wants out, and she doesn't want to explain herself, who can she tell who isn't you?" against Theo's degrading answers ("Yes." → "I close out the tins. Odile counts them." → "Yes. I hear it." → "It had a shortcut on it."). Survives: weights are asymmetric and Theo audibly loses material as the pressure lands; the new aborted "I can," he started. is a further break in any volley pattern.
- **3. Missing interiority — CLEAN (both directions of Rule 9)** — Theo's mind never goes dark (route card, pocket inventory, "Theo did not hate it fast enough," the *Boss*-cover paragraph, the name-testing walk down Allen) and the round-1 double-explanation is repaired (see Order 6). Strongest remaining counter-candidate for explaining-twice: "Nobody stayed to watch them. Mara assigned them a wall the way she would have assigned it to any settled pair, no supervision needed." — survives because Mara's line does not say this; the narration is Theo *registering* being believed, which is the chapter card's revelation ("Theo enjoys being believed and hates that he enjoys it"), not a restatement of the dialogue's content.
- **4. Questions-as-statements — CLEAN** — Checked Ruth's question, Ben's overlap question, Mara's sightline ask, June's closing "Which way are you walking?" Strongest counter-candidate: "who can she tell who isn't you?" — carries the chapter's thesis but demands and receives an actual answer-hunt; Ruth states in plain text that she wants one ("I'd like there to be an answer.") and withholds her conclusion ("Maybe I'm wrong. I'd prefer to be."), per card.
- **5. Fake-McCarthy minimalism — CLEAN** — Checked the bodega beat, Ben's "Don't," and the goodbye. Strongest counter-candidate: "'Two,' he said. 'Ask her first.'" — four words, but the chapter spends its full length building the anticipation reflex this line breaks, attribution is intact, and June converts the starkness into action ("Coffee. Black. Separate." plus paying in singles). Earned, as round 1 ruled; nothing new in this mode was introduced by the repairs.
- **6. Jargon-trading without translation — CLEAN** — Checked "plate tone," "miters," "glassine sleeves," "CORTADO YES," Ben's "the overlap." Strongest counter-candidate: "Is that plate tone, or did they just not wipe it?" — untranslated, but the payload is Theo's "I genuinely don't know," which needs none; reading guide smallness test affirmatively sanctions technical craft truth (named exclusion, declining to flag). "The overlap" is Ben's coinage, defined by his own previous sentence ("Not the lease.").
- **7. Attribution opacity — CLEAN** — Eight speakers; checked the Vestibule cluster and the bodega. Strongest counter-candidate: the unattributed "I'm fine." — pins to Mara because Priya sets the stool "behind Mara" and the reply ("Your left knee keeps looking for a wall") re-anchors. Sam's they-pronoun lines are tagged by action ("they moved out of the corner and steered June"); the Ben/Priya volleys carry tags every two lines. No drift.
- **FAKE-SHARP — CLEAN** — Ran every exchange against the cut-list. The three round-1 instances are repaired (Orders 3–5 above). Strongest remaining counter-candidates, each checked: (a) June's "The gold one isn't gold. It's confident, though." — dry and shaped, but it is a painter reading a frame sample through her card-owned visual lane (edge/value/exact), speakable at a shop window, and one of several flat June lines ("Sort of.", "Delancey."), not a capper habit; (b) Ben's "The rent is less bad, which is how they get you." — wry, but it arrives inside a nervous information-dump, not as a landed beat, and his card licenses self-mocking logistical jokes tied to stakes; (c) Mara's "I become difficult when unsupervised." — see Order 1; one social punchline in an over-hosting clause-train is her register, not the cut-list's every-line-lands pattern. Loaded-short-line check: Ben's "Don't." is followed by June's miter-reading, but the silence carries no unregistered tactical weight — the sublet thread is comic, and the narration has already priced Ben's temptation ("as if terms might be hidden in it" comes later and pays it off).
- **INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION — CLEAN** — Checked whether any repair stripped the focalizer. Strongest counter-candidate: the compressed couple-unit gloss (Order 6) — compression did not blind the scene, because "There it was again, the ease of being consulted as a unit." plus the route-card beat still orient cost and seduction. The bodega beat retains full interiority ("He knew it from Sonia's, twice over, the way he knew the alarm code. His mouth was already open to say it for her…").
- **BOOK-SPECIFIC (zero-tolerance dialogue diagnosis, §2) — CLEAN** — "Good answer." is gone; swept the full chapter for replacement captions. Nearest misses checked and declined: "Sam said, not in a whisper" (volume staging establishing Ruth was meant to hear — physical fact, not evaluation of phrasing); "Ruth said good night to everyone equally, which landed worse than being singled out" (registers the distribution of goodbyes, a behavior, and the cost lands on Theo's guilt — round-1 ruling stands); "*Boss* had passed because every public fact supported it" (mechanics of the lie's cover, aimed at the fact pattern); "She was not performing attention" (attention, not language). "Oh." appears mid-paragraph ("'Oh.' Ben blinked. 'That's also data.'") — the §6 cap targets one-word reaction *paragraphs*; this is not one. `load-bearing` ban: zero hits, confirmed against `reading_guide_bans.tsv` and the gate report (0 open findings). Plain-speech floor: each principal says at least one unguarded sentence — Theo: "You think I'd hurt her." / "I'll find one."; June: "We don't live together."; Ruth: "I'd like there to be an answer."; the walk is followable as text without decoding.
- **VOICE-CARD / RULE 4 CHECK — CLEAN** — All casual dialogue contracts. The gate's two uncontracted-casual WATCH hits at line 43 resolve to "Rent math is not a proposal." — quoted written text from the shared note, verbatim from Ben's card, sanctioned. No speaker breaches a never-says list: Theo offers no polished aphorisms about care (his closest, "Ask her first," is an instruction, not an aphorism); Ruth holds to one editorial-sharp line; Mara's translation tic appears once; Luis, Sam, Priya, June all inside card register. The two round-1 card breaches (Mara's missing over-explanation; Ruth's cap) are repaired per Orders 1 and 5.

REVISION ORDERS: none. All six round-1 orders are executed in the current text, and the re-sweep surfaced no new blocking instance of any audited failure mode.

OVERALL: CLEAN
