They had known each other since they were fourteen and neither of them had ever liked it.
It is a small world. There were about ninety of them in that age group across four countries and they saw each other eleven times a year from fourteen to nineteen, in the same four hotels, at the same tournaments, with the same parents.
And Milo Reyes was the one everybody had already decided about.
He was the best fourteen-year-old anybody in Europe had seen in a decade.
He had a forehand at fifteen that men on the tour drove to watch. He had a manager at sixteen and a clothing contract at seventeen and a car at eighteen that his father would not let him drive. He was in the top hundred at twenty and in the top ten at three and twenty, and there is a photograph of him at Roland-Garros that year that is on the wall of about four hundred tennis clubs in Spain.
His shoulder went the first time in the March of that year.
Marisa Cardoso was the other kind.
She was not the best fourteen-year-old anybody had seen. She was fourth in her own country at fourteen and she was fourth at sixteen.
She got to forty-one in the world at four and twenty by hitting about four million balls.
She has been described in print as the hardest worker on the tour eleven separate times, which is what people write about a player they have decided is not talented, and she has read every single one of them.
Here is what she thought of him.
She said it to Teresa once, at nineteen, in a car park in Portugal, and never again in eleven years.
"Everything was given to him."
And here is what he thought of her, which he has never said to anybody at all, including in the years afterwards when it would have helped enormously.
At fifteen, at a junior tournament in Porto, he watched her lose a fourth round from about four feet away.
She went off court and sat on a bench and cried for eleven minutes, with her hood up, in the way that fifteen-year-olds do when they think nobody can see them.
And then she got up, and went to a practice court, and worked for two hours in the dark.
Milo Reyes went back to a hotel that night and could not sleep.
He was fifteen. He had never once in his life wanted anything that badly, and he had already worked out — at fifteen, lying on a hotel bed in Porto — that this was going to be a problem for him for a very long time.