Audit written to the file — and, as ordered, here is the completed document itself:

# Dialogue Doctor — Chapter 21 — Round 1

audit: dialogue_doctor | chapter: 21 | round: 1 | owner: claude | stance: cold read, skeptical
chapter text: `output/chapters/chapter_21.md`
manifest coverage: scene 01 (lines 2–59) required; scenes 02–04 not-required (0 counted dialogue lines). Scene 04 (SMS exchange, lines 96–117) audited by explicit round-1 order despite the manifest exclusion.

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## SCENE 01 — stockroom confrontation, Theo / Odile (lines 2–59)

**1. VOICE CONVERGENCE:** CLEAN — read with attributions covered, lines 15–57. Theo stacks facts and goes long under shame ("You could have pulled them yourself. You haven't asked me to pull anything off that shelf in years... and I number the crates," line 27); Odile compresses and narrows ("I sent you for nine catalogs," line 25). Strongest counter-candidate: "That's not an answer." (Theo, line 31) — compressed enough to be Odile's; it survives because it is a grievance-demand, not a correction, and Theo reverts to fact-stacking in his very next turn (line 35), so both rhythm signatures hold.

**2. MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM:** CLEAN — turn-length map: short accusation / short correction at the top (17–25), Theo long (27), Odile medium (29), Theo short (31), Odile monosyllable plus action (33), Theo long with self-interrupted list (35), Odile silence then her longest speech (39), broken Theo line (45), five-word verdict (47), soup pivot (51), boundary speech (53), five words (55), one word (57). Strongest counter-candidate: the opening four-beat volley (17–25), similar weight on both sides; survives because beat five (27) breaks it and the volley is Odile's card-licensed corrective literalism against Theo's accusation, not two speakers sharing one rhythm.

**3. MISSING INTERIORITY:** CLEAN — the focalizer stays lit through the exchange: "He waited for anger to come and do the work, and it did come, but it came the size it actually was instead of the size he needed" (35); the utility-knife fold-in / fold-out (49). Strongest counter-candidate for a dark stretch: lines 55–57 ("You will be less convenient." / "Yes.") where Theo registers nothing between the lines; survives because the boundary speech itself has just priced the cost and the O.M. paragraph (59) immediately resumes his read of consequence.

**4. QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS:** CLEAN — "Did you want her to find it, or did you want me to finally say it, and she was just in the path?" (35) is a real question seeking a real answer, and it is pointedly never answered — correct for the true-partial design. Counter-candidate: "You will be less convenient." (55) is a position delivered as a statement, which is what it should be; no portent-question detected.

**5. FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM:** FAIL — "The room held that." (line 49, narration between "It was partly your fault." and the knife beat). A clipped stark-stamp performing weight the knife action in the same paragraph already carries — and a direct hit on the Ch21 prompt calibration ban: "No object-as-agent or room-that-waits personification." The scene does not need the room to hold anything; the focalizer's hands are already doing it.

**6. JARGON-TRADING:** CLEAN — checked headcap (3, 5), loan sheet / returned column (11), condition reports (53), "the '96" (27): every term is translated by the action around it or by four chapters of catalog plot. Counter-candidate: "headcap" — survives because the sentence shows thumbs checking a book's top edge; the reader can weigh it without a gloss.

**7. ATTRIBUTION OPACITY:** CLEAN — two speakers, alternating turns, action anchors ("she said, and drank her coffee," 33; "She picked her cup back up," 51). Counter-candidate: the unattributed "Yes." (57) — survives; only Theo can be accepting the inconvenience he just purchased.

**FAKE-SHARP:** FAIL — Odile's line-run exceeds the chapter's declared calibration ceiling (Ch21 prompt: "Odile quotability is at ceiling. Give her accuracy, not a run of memorable aphorisms"). In one scene: "You hid inside this room and called it a job." (39), "Put it on my side of the ledger." (43), "I got tired before you got brave." (51), "Eat before you decide anything else about yourself." (51), "You will be less convenient." (55) — five shaped, quotable lines. The sharpest offender is "I got tired before you got brave": a balanced antithesis arriving at the exact moment she is conceding fault — cut-list bullet "zingers that arrive at the moment a character should be confused, tired, afraid, ashamed, ordinary, or quiet," plus rule 8 (the line lands cleanly where friction is owed). Secondary: "Put it on my side of the ledger" re-coins the fiscal/ledger figure family tics.md ordered rested after Ch18, with the literal loan sheet hanging in the same room. "You will be less convenient" (accuracy) and the soup imperative (feeding, card-licensed) may stay.

**INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION (rule 9, both directions):** FAIL — in the over-explaining direction, two instances:
(a) "That was all the confession he was going to get, and it was more than she had ever put on paper in her life." (59) — the O.M. beat is already decoded in the same sentence chain ("the lender owning the loan"); this caption decodes it a second time and rates it. Interiority must react to the exchange, not explain it twice.
(b) "he said the thing he had worked out somewhere between the second trip to the shelf and now, and it cost him exactly what he'd known it would" (53) — pre-certifies the boundary speech's weight before the reader hears a word of it; the narrator announces significance instead of the focalizer paying it afterward.

**STANDING BANS / CHAPTER-SPECIFIC CHECKS (scene 01):**
- **DIALOGUE DIAGNOSIS (guide §2 zero tolerance; §6 "any instance ... in narration about speech"):** FAIL — three instances:
  (a) "he understood the quiet was her declining several sentences, not searching for one" (37) — captions Odile's delivery; the exact species of "that had the rhythm of a partial answer."
  (b) "His voice stacked facts because the facts were easier to lift than the next sentence. He made himself lift the next sentence." (27) — narration characterizing speech shape.
  (c) "He heard the list happening and stopped it." (35) — narration naming his own speech pattern instead of showing the stop.
  Considered and survived: "That's not an answer." (31) — rates the content sufficiency of her reply, not its phrasing or delivery; it is what a person actually says when refusing deflection, and §2 requires deflection be visible as deflection. Also survived, narrowly: "and did not claim it was" (33) — reports what she declined to assert, not how she said it; the opposing rewriter should not extend this shape.
- **ORACLE MONOLOGUE / FINAL-REVEAL LEAK (Odile true-partial check):** CLEAN on the leak — nothing states or implies knew-from-night-one; she never claims ignorance; Theo's either/or question (35) stays unanswered, correctly. But FAIL on reread integrity — "That is the whole of what I did, and I did it on purpose." (39). On reread, with Odile knowing everything since night one and having conducted the pairings, "the whole of what I did" is a flat falsehood, not a true partial. The guide's reread test ("every Odile scene must be consistent with her knowing") breaks on the word "whole."
- **MENTOR-SPEECH MASS (Odile card: "one sentence, sometimes two; no speechifying"):** her longest turn (39) runs four sentences — double her card mass. Content is admission, not oracle, so this is folded into the FAKE-SHARP repair (order 4) rather than counted separately.
- **THEO ASHAMED / PRACTICAL, NOT SPEECHIFIED:** CLEAN — "I need you to tell me it wasn't my fault." (45) is the scene's best line: plain, ashamed, costly. The boundary speech (53) is long but built from freight nouns; "I'm done being the route" survives because "route" is this chapter's literal freight fact (lines 3, 13), not a coined abstraction. "out loud, with your own mouth" is rhythmic but speakable in anger; survives. The framing around the speech fails separately (see INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION b).
- **THERAPY-SPEAK:** CLEAN — strongest counter-candidate: "Both of those things happened." (51), which brushes the two-things-can-be-true validation cadence; survives narrowly because it asserts dated facts (October, November), not feelings-management. The rewrite of line 51 must not tip it over.
- **PLAIN-SPEECH FLOOR (§2):** CLEAN — Theo: "I need you to tell me it wasn't my fault." Odile: "It was partly your fault." Every exchange is followable as text: a cold reader can state what each party asked, learned, or refused without decoding.
- **CONTRACTIONS (rules 4–5):** CLEAN — Odile's full forms ("It has been public for thirty years," 29; "You will be less convenient," 55) are card-licensed cutting precision; Theo default-contracts throughout ("You haven't asked me," "I'm done being the route").

**REVISION ORDERS (scene 01):**
1. Line 49: cut "The room held that." entirely. The paragraph continues into the utility-knife fold-in / fold-out, which carries the beat. Do not replace it with another beat-holder; the chapter calibration bans room-as-agent outright.
2. Line 51: rewrite "I got tired before you got brave." to break the epigram symmetry while keeping the admission that her patience ran out before his courage arrived. Direction per her card (few words, clean verbs, no cushioning): anchor it to the calendar she has already invoked ("You had October. You had most of November.") and let the admission arrive as dated fact, not chiasmus. Do not produce a replacement zinger.
3. Line 43: replace "Put it on my side of the ledger." with a non-figural equivalent in her register — imperative, self-accountable, no coinage. The loan sheet is literally on the wall; she can assign herself the fault without reviving the rested ledger/fiscal figure family.
4. Line 39: trim Odile's four-sentence speech toward her card mass (one to two sentences), preserving the material admission ("I put public paper where hands would find it" + the on-purpose) and cutting or compressing the biography preamble ("You have worked under my name for eleven years ... called it a job") — Theo's own line at 27 already establishes the years and the hiding; she does not need to caption his life to justify her act.
5. Line 39 (same rewrite): change "That is the whole of what I did" to "That is what I did" or equivalent — remove the totality claim that falsifies on reread against her knew-from-night-one truth.
6. Line 37: replace "he understood the quiet was her declining several sentences, not searching for one" with what Theo does during the quiet (waits, looks at the loan sheet, does not fill it) and let her eventual answer prove the quiet was refusal. Perceptiveness must be action, not caption (§2).
7. Line 27: cut "His voice stacked facts because the facts were easier to lift than the next sentence. He made himself lift the next sentence." The dialogue already performs the stacking; bridge with a physical pivot into "You knew what was printed in the '96," or with nothing.
8. Line 35: replace "He heard the list happening and stopped it." with the stop itself — end the list mid-item or on an action so the reader hears the list stop without the narrator naming it.
9. Line 53: cut the pre-certification — reduce "he said the thing he had worked out somewhere between the second trip to the shelf and now, and it cost him exactly what he'd known it would" to a plain launch (she stops in the doorway; he speaks). If the cost must register, pay it after the speech in his body, not before it in the narrator's voice.
10. Line 59: cut "That was all the confession he was going to get, and it was more than she had ever put on paper in her life." End the scene on the physical: initials, clipboard one degree straighter, upstairs. "The lender owning the loan" may stand; one decode is the limit.

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## SCENE 02 (lines 62–73) and SCENE 03 (lines 76–93)

No dialogue; manifest: not-required. Not audited for failure modes 1–7. One routing note outside Doctor remit: scene 02's "She had painted a man maintaining the perimeter of a room so that he would never be required to stand in the middle of it" (71) summarizes the fear canvas's meaning in a single thesis sentence — the Ch21 prompt ordered "Do not summarize what it means," and the sentence paraphrases Theo's own voice-card operation snapshot. Route to Narrator-Publicist / Plain Translation.

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## SCENE 04 — SMS exchange with June (lines 96–117; manifest: not-required; audited by explicit round-1 order)

Form note: two-party text exchange, documentary form (Ch18 precedent). Exclusions applied and named per verdict: a three-message exchange cannot volley (mode 2), and SMS compression is the native register of the form, not performed starkness (mode 5).

**1. VOICE CONVERGENCE:** CLEAN — Theo's ask is practical and specific ("Can we talk? Sonia's. You pick the day and time and I'll be there." 101); June's reply is a compressed fence in her exact-noun economy ("Sunday. 9. Just coffee." 109). Counter-candidate: his one-word "Okay," (113) against her clipped register — survives; the single word is the only non-managing acknowledgment available, and the mass asymmetry elsewhere holds.

**2. MONOTONE Q/A RHYTHM:** CLEAN — exclusion: one ask, one answer, one acknowledgment; there is no rhythm to converge.

**3. MISSING INTERIORITY:** CLEAN — the focalizer is present through the wait (brushes, the set-it-down-like-the-drill move, 105). The failure here runs in the opposite direction; see INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION.

**4. QUESTIONS-AS-STATEMENTS:** CLEAN — "Can we talk?" (101) is a real request with a real answer required; the reply neither poses nor answers a portent-question.

**5. FAKE-McCARTHY MINIMALISM:** CLEAN — exclusion: the clipped texts are form-true. Counter-candidate: "and that was all." (113) — narration performing restraint; survives as a scene-closer, but it must not be joined by additional restraint-stamps (see order 13).

**6. JARGON-TRADING:** CLEAN — "Sonia's" is the established diner commons; nothing untranslated.

**7. ATTRIBUTION OPACITY:** CLEAN — sender and receiver unambiguous throughout the exchange.

**CONTINUITY (extra check, this scene):** FAIL — "He sent the four sentences" (105), but the sent text at 101 is three sentences ("Can we talk? Sonia's. You pick the day and time and I'll be there."). A reader who counts loses trust in the reported message.

**FAKE-SHARP:** FAIL — the wait paragraph converts restraint into quotable thesis: "There was nothing to prepare. Preparing was the old tool. The entire point of Sonia's, if Sonia's ever happened, was that he would walk in carrying nothing." (105). This is the chapter card's armed failure state — "Theo explaining his growth" — stamped three ways, and rule-8 polish where friction is owed; the paragraph already has the honest version in "The wait was terrible in an ordinary way."

**INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION:** FAIL — two instances of explaining twice:
(a) Consent logic (103): the deletion is shown ("recognized the species, and deleted them back to nothing") and then explained for three more sentences — "That sentence was not kindness. That sentence was him managing her answer in advance, setting out a refusal for her before she had chosen one. June did not need him to pre-approve refusal." The action already says it; the explanation additionally runs the rested "not X. That's/was Y" template (Ch21 prompt: rest it) and closes on a thesis sentence.
(b) Reply-reading (111): "He read it four times and did not mine it for more than it held" — immediately followed by the narration mining it: "It gave him a day and a fence. Neither was forgiveness." The paragraph performs the exact operation it certifies Theo as refusing.

**STANDING BANS / SPECIFIC CHECKS (scene 04):**
- **DIALOGUE DIAGNOSIS:** FAIL — "Six syllables, no door opened, no door closed." (111) captions the form and rhetorical effect of June's message (§6: any instance, in narration about speech, is a defect). Syllable-counting her text is the SMS version of "that had the rhythm of a partial answer."
- **THESIS NAMING:** FAIL — same passage: "no door opened, no door closed ... Neither was forgiveness" states the chapter card's felt experience ("a door opening without forgiveness yet") nearly verbatim in narration, and re-cashes in words the door figure the portrait scene has already paid in paint (the half-open, undecided door, 81–85).
- **OVER-MANAGED APOLOGY:** CLEAN — the sent text contains no apology essay, no painting mention, no management clause. Counter-candidate: "You pick the day and time and I'll be there" — puts full scheduling control with June without performing deference; survives.
- **HIDDEN COERCION:** CLEAN — checked gift-leverage (the study stays faced to the wall and unmentioned, 93, 115), urgency pressure (none: "Sunday" accepted with one word), and guilt-freight (none in the sent text). Strongest counter-candidate: naming Sonia's as the venue; survives because it is a public, neutral, June-known room and she countersets the terms ("Just coffee").
- **OVER-EXPLAINED CONSENT LOGIC:** FAIL — the defect identified at INTERIORITY-OVERCORRECTION (a); the typed-and-deleted fragment is right, the three-sentence sermon on why it was deleted is the failure. Shares its repair with order 11.

**REVISION ORDERS (scene 04):**
11. Line 103: cut everything after "deleted them back to nothing," or keep at most one clause of recognition — without the "not kindness / was managing" antithesis and without the "June did not need him to pre-approve refusal" thesis line. The typed-and-deleted fragment is the scene; trust it.
12. Line 105: fix the count — "He sent it" (preferred) or "He sent the three sentences." Counting his own sentences is one more self-audit the beat does not need.
13. Line 105: cut "There was nothing to prepare. Preparing was the old tool. The entire point of Sonia's, if Sonia's ever happened, was that he would walk in carrying nothing." Keep the ordinary terrible wait and the set-it-down-like-the-drill action; the growth stays unexplained (card failure state: "Theo explaining his growth").
14. Line 111: rewrite the reply-reading beat: cut "Six syllables, no door opened, no door closed." and cut or replace "It gave him a day and a fence. Neither was forgiveness." Let the quoted reply stand with physical or minimal reaction (he read it four times; the phone goes back on the sink edge). If one orienting clause survives, it must be about what he does with Sunday, not a rating of her message — "Sunday was two days away and he was not going to spend them building anything" may serve as that single survivor.

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## OVERALL: BLOCKING (11 findings)

Scene 01: 5 FAIL verdicts (fake-McCarthy stamp; Odile fake-sharp run; interiority over-explaining ×2 instances; dialogue diagnosis ×3 instances; Odile reread-integrity totality claim) — revision orders 1–10.
Scene 04: 6 FAIL verdicts (continuity count; growth-thesis fake-sharp; interiority over-explaining ×2 instances; dialogue diagnosis on June's text; thesis naming; over-explained consent logic, sharing repair with the interiority finding) — revision orders 11–14.

Per the audit contract, findings are BLOCKING and resolve via opposing-model rewrite; self-repair by the drafting lane is not an accepted resolution. The chapter's object spine — box, loan sheet, O.M. initials, knife, drill, glassine, stretcher-bar label — is doing the real work throughout; every order above removes narration or polish sitting on top of beats the objects already carry.
