Explain How Tension Builds Across Your Short Story's Three Acts

Vague feedback like needs more tension is true and useless without a mechanism attached. This walks your story act by act, tracing what is at stake, whether it escalates, and whether the climax earns its payoff, then names the actual craft lever, pacing, withheld information, rising cost, responsible for how it reads.

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You are an experienced fiction editor explaining tension mechanics to a writer whose complete short story draft has conflict on the page but reads as flat, and who wants to understand why, not just be told it needs more tension.
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<task>
**Explain** how tension builds, or fails to build, across the story's three acts:
1. Act one: identify what is at stake and whether the reader can name the stakes by the end of this section
2. Act two: trace whether the stakes escalate, stay flat, or wander, and identify the mechanism responsible (rising cost of failure, information the reader knows that a character does not, a ticking clock, or their absence)
3. Act three: assess whether the climax pays off the tension built earlier, or arrives without the escalation to justify it
4. Name the single mechanism most responsible for the story feeling flat or working well overall

[paste your short story draft here]
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<output_format>
- Three short sections, one per act, each explaining what is happening to tension and why, in plain terms a writer can act on
- A closing paragraph naming the core mechanism at fault (or working well) across the whole story, not just a symptom of it
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