Drag and Drop- Reset Items to Their Original Positions

Hello, everyone.

I've been working on a project at work for a while now and neither I nor any of the other developers at the office have been able to fix this one issue. I thought maybe you all will know something we do not to address it.

Basically, we have a Freeform drag and drop interaction where two four potential drag items can be dropped into either of two drop targets.

Here is a quick mock-up of the slide. The Storyline file containing the mock-up is attached to this post.

The submit button starts out disabled and is not enabled until a numeric variable indicates that enough items have been dropped. In order to ensure that the button reverts to the Disabled state if an item is removed from a drop target, a hotspot has been placed behind the interaction. When an item is dropped on the hotspot, it deducts from the drop-count variable.

That all works just fine. However, the client wants items to return to their original position when removed from the two rectangular drop targets, but that can't be done because of the hotspot in the background which is necessary to make sure that the submit button disables appropriately.

I've searched for solutions on here and many developer blogs but have not been able to find any information that works alongside a screen this complex.

Any ideas to get the items to snap back to their original positions in spite of their interactions with the hotspot? 

Thanks for your time.

-Blake