Found while chasing a flaky live test, but the flakiness was a real bug: only the ask_human path recorded a pending item, so AWAIT_INPUT reached any other way — planning failure, stopped milestone, boot reconciliation — refused every operator reply with "no pending question to answer" and the agent could never be recovered. The operator had no way back short of wiping state. Every path into AWAIT_INPUT now records what a reply should resume, and answering dispatches on it: planning failures and questions resume planning, a stopped milestone returns to its still-approved gate, and the fallback says what commands work instead of dead-ending. Two regression tests cover the recovery paths. The live test also scripted a fixed approve/approve/start sequence, which a real model breaks by legitimately calling ask_human at a gate. It now plays the operator adaptively, responding to whatever the agent actually did. Five consecutive live runs pass. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>