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"When I need to shut my head off."

The answer comes too fast to have been fully considered.

I look at him for a second. "Were you a swimmer?"

His gaze shifts past me toward the dark line of the sea beyond the terrace wall. "Yeah."

"Like, recreationally? Or competitively?"

His mouth does something that isn't quite a smile. "Competitively."

"How competitively?"

A beat passes.

Then, "Enough that the Olympics were once a possibility."

I blink.

"You almost tried out for the Olympics?"

"Would have," he says, and there's something flat in the words that stops me from sounding too impressed. "At one point."

I take another step closer. "What happened?"

He doesn't answer right away.

His jaw tightens.

Then he looks away and says, "It doesn't matter."

And there it is.

That door. The one I keep walking into.

I cross my arms over my chest, robe loose around my legs in the night breeze. "Are you ever going to tell me anything real about you?"

His eyes come back to me then, and for a second I think I've gone too far.

Or maybe just far enough.

He pushes off from the wall and stands in the shallow end, water sliding down his chest, his expression shuttering back into something calmer. Colder.

Safer.

"This is exactly why we need to be careful."

The words hit with a small, sharp sting.

"Careful?" I repeat. "What does that even mean at this point?"

"It means," he says, voice low and controlled now, "that this is a marriage on paper, Aria. That was always the arrangement."

The night goes very still around us.

I stare at him. "So what, we're having separate honeymoons in the same villa?"

His jaw tightens. "If that's what we need to do."