I think you would need to validate the response from the first call before determining it to be a success?

First call: fetch a widget

Success! Your widget expires in 30 seconds

Second call: use widget

Failure! For some reason or another

Ok, so restart the flow…

First call: fetch a widget

Cached! Receive the same widget again

Second call: use widget

Failure! widget has now expired

Ah I see what you mean. In this case the handler should complete with a terminal error - we weren't able to finish the task in time. Of course, many types of errors and timeouts are valid application-level results, not transient infrastructure issues. And sadly, tight timeouts push transient issues into application-level issues, and this is unavoidable, I think