feat(ch01): convert remaining tangents to parenthetical format

Add parenthetical asides for meal-counting, Mere cold-read, hand-brush
overthinking, and house-cost arithmetic. Add two new brief noise flashes
(dockworker read, customs wall analysis) to establish constant frequency.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>

chapters/book1/ch01-draft.md

@@ -48,13 +48,21 @@ He looked at me the way he sometimes did — not unkindly, but with the vaguely
 
 Seventh bell. Open for business.
 
-I leaned against the counter, did the math on my savings of eleven coppers and a shaved half-silver one more time — the answer hadn't changed, but the habit was load-bearing at this point — and waited for the day to start being something other than this.
+I leaned against the counter —
+
+(Eleven coppers. Shaved half-silver, probably not worth a full half. Two meals if honest, three if creative. Same as this morning. Same as yesterday. The arithmetic hadn't changed. The habit was load-bearing.)
+
+— and waited for the day to start being something other than this.
 
 * * *
 
 The morning rush, such as it was, arrived in the predictable sequence of human need.
 
-First through the door: a dockworker with a bruised shoulder and the particular squint of a man who'd been told by his wife to see a healer and had decided, independently, that a jar of something from a shelf would be cheaper and involve fewer questions about how he'd been injured. He was correct on both counts. I pointed him toward the arnica salve, he grunted in a way that passed for gratitude among people who carried things for a living, and he was gone in under two minutes. Efficient. I appreciated efficiency in customers the way I appreciated it in plumbing — when it worked, you didn't have to think about it.
+First through the door: a dockworker with a bruised shoulder and the particular squint of a man who'd been told by his wife to see a healer and had decided, independently, that a jar of something from a shelf would be cheaper and involve fewer questions about how he'd been injured.
+
+(Bruised shoulder, left side. Carried something heavy and twisted. Not the first time — the calluses said dock work, the squint said wife sent him. Wedding band, copper, worn thin. Arnica salve, second shelf. In and out.)
+
+He was correct on both counts. I pointed him toward the arnica salve, he grunted in a way that passed for gratitude among people who carried things for a living, and he was gone in under two minutes. Efficient. I appreciated efficiency in customers the way I appreciated it in plumbing — when it worked, you didn't have to think about it.
 
 Second: a young woman with ink-stained fingers and the faintly manic energy of someone three days into an academic deadline. She wanted ginkgo extract and lion's mane tincture — cognitive enhancers, both of them, and both about as effective as hoping very hard if you weren't already sleeping and eating properly, which she clearly wasn't. I sold them to her without comment. My job was to stock shelves and process transactions, not to practice medicine on people who hadn't asked. Besides, the placebo effect was the most reliable magic I'd ever encountered, and it didn't even require a license.
 
@@ -102,7 +110,9 @@ She wasn't beautiful in the way that word usually gets deployed — not the kind
 
 I noticed all of this in approximately two seconds, which was unusual. I noticed most people the way you notice furniture — present, functional, worth cataloguing for navigation purposes and then forgetting. I did not forget her. This was immediately inconvenient.
 
-My process — the automatic, near-involuntary cold read I ran on every person who walked through a door — engaged the way it always did. Posture: confident, not performed. Clothing: practical, well-maintained, not expensive. Hands: no rings, short nails, a callus on her right index finger that suggested either regular writing or detailed manual work. Eyes: already scanning the shelves with a focus that wasn't browsing. She knew what she was here for. She was categorizing what else was available while she located it.
+My process — the automatic, near-involuntary cold read I ran on every person who walked through a door — engaged the way it always did.
+
+(Posture: confident, not performed. Clothing: practical, well-maintained, not expensive. Hands: no rings, short nails, callus on right index finger — regular writing or detailed manual work. Eyes: already scanning shelves, not browsing. Knows what she's here for. Categorizing what else is available while she locates it.)
 
 All of this was normal. Data. The kind of behavioral surface I could read on anyone in a room and use to predict their next three decisions with reasonable accuracy.
 
@@ -168,7 +178,9 @@ The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. An acknowledgment. "Clearly."
 
 I rang up the binding salts and the silverthorn, wrote the transaction in the ledger, and calculated her total. Our hands brushed when I passed her the package. This was not significant. Hands brush during transactions constantly. It is a function of geometry and proximity and means nothing.
 
-I noticed it anyway. The warmth of her fingers. The brevity of the contact. The fact that she didn't pull away faster than necessary, which was —
+I noticed it anyway.
+
+(Warmth. Brief. She didn't pull away faster than necessary. Didn't linger either — no data there. But the absence of avoidance. The neutral duration. Was that a signal or the lack of one? Baseline: most people retract. She didn't. Deviation from norm or absence of norm? Insufficient sample size. One interaction. One touch. Meaningless. Noted anyway. Filed under —)
 
 *Stop it,* I told myself. I was reading subtext into a woman who didn't have subtext. If she hadn't pulled away, it was because there was no reason to pull away, and assigning meaning to the absence of avoidance was exactly the kind of pattern-matching error I spent my life not making.
 
@@ -220,7 +232,11 @@ I locked up and stepped into the evening.
 
 * * *
 
-Drenwick at dusk was tolerable. The light did something to the river that made it look like it belonged in a better city, and the noise from the docks softened into a background hum that my brain could file away without processing. I walked the route I always walked — south along the quay, past the chandler's and the net-mender's, through the gap in the old customs wall where someone had knocked out two bricks a decade ago and no one had bothered to repair them because the only thing on the other side was scrub grass and a path that led to the part of the waterfront where rent was cheap enough that someone like me could afford to exist.
+Drenwick at dusk was tolerable. The light did something to the river that made it look like it belonged in a better city, and the noise from the docks softened into a background hum that my brain could file away without processing. I walked the route I always walked — south along the quay, past the chandler's and the net-mender's, through the gap in the old customs wall —
+
+(Two bricks missing. Load-bearing? No — decorative course. Gap hadn't widened in the three years I'd been using it. Mortar on the adjacent bricks still sound. Someone had removed them deliberately, not knocked them out. Interesting. Irrelevant. Filed.)
+
+— where no one had bothered to repair the gap because the only thing on the other side was scrub grass and a path that led to the part of the waterfront where rent was cheap enough that someone like me could afford to exist.
 
 My shack sat on a quarter-acre lot between the river and the old mill road, rented from a landlord I'd never met and whose agent collected on the first of every month with the cheerful indifference of a man who knew his tenants had nowhere cheaper to go. It had a view of the water if you stood on the eastern edge and a view of the mill's backside if you stood anywhere else.
 
@@ -232,7 +248,11 @@ I spread the drawings on the table, which I did most evenings, not because I nee
 
 Twelve coppers and a shaved half-silver.
 
-The house needed approximately eight hundred silvers in materials alone, not counting labor, permits, or the warding work. At my current rate of savings — which was not a rate so much as a theoretical concept, like perpetual motion or honest politics — I would be able to break ground in roughly forty years, give or take the occasional windfall or catastrophe.
+The house needed approximately eight hundred silvers in materials alone.
+
+(Eight hundred for materials. Sixty for permits. Two hundred minimum for warding work if done by a licensed artificer, one-forty if I sourced the anchors myself and contracted just the inscription. Labor: three hundred if hired, less if I did the framing. Total: thirteen hundred, give or take. Current savings: twelve coppers and a shaved half-silver. Time to break ground at current rate of accumulation: forty years. Margin of error: irrelevant when the number starts with forty.)
+
+At my current rate of savings — which was not a rate so much as a theoretical concept, like perpetual motion or honest politics — I would be able to break ground in roughly forty years, give or take the occasional windfall or catastrophe.
 
 The Guild changed that math. Guild work paid in silvers, not coppers. Real cases, real fees, real clients who needed problems solved that couldn't be solved through ordinary channels. If they accepted me. If the six weeks of silence meant consideration and not rejection. If the single-line letter that said *Under review. Do not inquire* was a process and not a polite dismissal.