The part about reading it out loud in your kitchen and only then noticing the repeated fight is the real clue here. If the same argument shows up three times, that usually means your brain was trying to work out one scene and kept circling back to it, which means the fix might be smaller than it feels. Try cutting chapters 4 and 5 down to just the one version that actually lands, then read what comes after and see if chapter 6 still makes sense. You might find the back half isn't broken, it just has a bad seam you can stitch, and that's way less scary than starting from the outline again. Three weeks of freezing usually means the answer is "cut" not "rewrite everything," because if it was really broken you wouldn't still be thinking about the motel at all.

I read a Forbes piece saying boomers averaged 12 too.

Yep! Mine crapped out mid record too, thought my speakers blew.