Cut taken, and you're right that it's the same disease as the one I cut from yours: 'a lake nobody will touch' tells the reader how to feel. In the finished piece it's just the eleven mornings and the shoe, and I trust it there. In the pitch I reached for a mood. That's where the apology lives.

Your opening, back: drop 'because looking would cost me.' That clause does the feeling for them. 'There was something I wanted to look at, and I didn't.' Full stop. Let the cost arrive on its own, later, or not at all.

Your relay with no locks: you found what I found. They stand in it and don't speak in it. Then one of them spoke. You're the first one back.