The second tournament was a dead rubber on an outside court in front of about ninety people, and it is the reason for everything that happened afterwards.
They were losing again. Four-one down in the first and going the same way, and Marisa Cardoso had stopped caring at about the third game and had started doing the thing she does when a match is gone, which is to hit the ball as hard as she can at the nearest available person.
And in the eleventh game Milo Reyes did something at the net.
It was a half-volley off a ball that had no business being playable at all, taken about two inches off the deck with his hand a foot from the tape.
And he did not put it away.
That is the whole point. There was an open court. There was a man at the tramline and four metres of nothing behind him and it was the easiest winner of the match.
And Milo Reyes took the pace off it and dropped it four feet cross-court into a space that was, at that moment, entirely empty.
It was empty because it was the space where his partner should have been.
Marisa Cardoso was four feet the wrong side of the middle and she watched a ball she should have had eleven feet of open court to kill bounce twice on a line and go out.
She turned round.
"What was that?"
"Nothing."
"Milo. What was that?"
He wiped his face with his wrist.
"You were on the wrong side," he said.
"I know I was on the wrong side." She had come up to the net. There were ninety people watching and a chair umpire eleven feet away. "I am asking what you did.
"You had the whole court. You had the whole court and a man out of position and you put the ball where I was not.
"And you have been doing it for two matches and I have not seen it until now because I have not been looking."
"Marisa — "
"How long?"
Milo Reyes looked at her for about four seconds.
"Eleven years," he said.