After winning the Wimbledon Championship at the age of nineteen, Chris Monte received an offer of fifty thousand dollars to turn professional. His coach, a Frenchman who had himself been a tennis star, turned down the offer flat - next year, he told Chris, he would get one hundred and twenty-five. But next year Chris was out of big-time tennis, as a result of an injury to a leg. When, therefore, nine years later, Elizabeth Jones walks into the tennis shop of Cobia Isle Spa on Miami Beach and offers Chris fifty thousand dollars to marry her, the figure strikes him as an unnerving coincidence. But events far more unnerving are to follow on his acceptance...