<p>This paper examines Rebecca E. Harrison’s process theory of apology in order to clarify the temporal structure of apology and, more broadly, the relation between speech acts and their conditions of success. Harrison challenges the traditional “Momentary View” in speech act theory by arguing that apologizing is not completed at the moment of utterance but unfolds over time through such elements as addressee uptake and the speaker’s subsequent fulfillment of commitments to forbearance and amends. While her account illuminates apology in ideal interpersonal moral repair, I argue that it overextends the concept of apology by treating its practical success and completion as constitutive conditions, rather than external normative and pragmatic outcomes. More specifically, I raise three objections. First, Harrison’s model relies on a bidirectional and real-time interactional structure, which makes it unable to adequately explain unidirectional or ritual apologies, such as apologies addressed to the dead, to history, or to abstract entities. Second, it improperly bundles the speech act of apologizing with the later fulfillment of the commitments expressed in the apology. Third, its critique of the Momentary View depends on an overly coarse characterization of that view, thus generating a misleading opposition. In response, I propose a layered and separable framework for analyzing apology, one that distinguishes among the illocutionary core of apology, its sincerity conditions, and its perlocutionary and reparative effects. This framework preserves Harrison’s important insight into the temporality of moral repair, while avoiding the conceptual inflation generated by treating the entire reparative process as constitutive of the speech act itself. The aim of this paper is not to reject the process perspective outright, but to delimit and refine it. This paper thereby contributes to a more precise understanding of the temporal and normative structure of speech acts, particularly those involving commitment.</p>