Two in the morning. I couldn't sleep. The villa was silent — the kind of silence that only exists when nine women and four friends are all unconscious at the same time, a statistical improbability that occurred maybe twice during the entire vacation. I got up, pulled on shorts, and went to the pool.
The water was warm — Miami warm, the kind of warm that made you forget it was two AM and you should be asleep. I swam laps, slow and mechanical, letting the water do what water does: erase the noise, wash the day off, give the mind nothing to hold onto. I'd been doing this since college — swimming when I couldn't sleep, swimming when the System was too loud, swimming when the weight of nine women and a criminal empire and a phone that talked to me got too heavy to carry on dry land.
