Holding the dense top-$m$ seed pool fixed across compared systems is a concrete instantiation of this paper's strict-parity contract for graph-aware retrieval. Because the encoder (all-MiniLM-L6-v2), the L2-normalization + inner-product matching rule, and the cutoff $m$ on the seed pool are all frozen, the candidate pool entering any graph-aware policy is identical across systems in the headline comparison. Differences in downstream Recall@$k$ therefore have to be attributed to the graph policy (e.g., bidirectional diffusion, best-first traversal, reranking) rather than to a richer or differently-seeded dense interface.