diff --git a/docs/concepts/index-health.md b/docs/concepts/index-health.md
index 18bf7010..96199f11 100644
--- a/docs/concepts/index-health.md
+++ b/docs/concepts/index-health.md
@@ -68,6 +68,19 @@ a maintenance window, a divergence `repairIndex()` will clean up on its own
 schedule. `serving: false` is not benign. It means this provider is refusing to
 answer, on its own word, right now.
 
+**How a failure gets its grade — the serving law.** A provider grades `heal` by
+one question only: *could an answer be wrong?* — never *how expensive is the
+fix?* A missing-postings shortfall, however large, is `heal: 'repair'` (re-post
+exactly what the ledger names, reads serving throughout); it can never withhold
+serving just because healing it takes work. `serving` is withheld only by a
+small, named set of rebuild-graded conditions — the index not initialized, its
+durable state absent, a manifest naming files that are not resident, a replay
+that did not complete cleanly — the states in which an answer could genuinely be
+wrong. And a read is only ever refused by the family it actually consults: a
+metadata filter is answered by the metadata index alone, vector search by the
+vector index, traversal by the graph index — one family's refusal never blocks
+another family's reads.
+
 ## Reads refuse — they never rebuild
 
 A query that reaches a not-serving provider does not trigger a rebuild from inside