I'd been going to Thailand for fifteen years and thought I knew it all. One game of pool in Pattaya proved me wrong.

I'd been going to Thailand for fifteen years. Holidays, golf, the odd friend who'd moved there for good and who I'd drop in on whenever I landed. I considered myself a seasoned traveller, the kind who thought nothing about the country could surprise him anymore.

I was 39 when I found out I was wrong.

I landed in Pattaya on a Thursday afternoon, after a long flight from Australia with two stopovers and zero decent sleep. I left my suitcase half unpacked on the bed, showered fast and went out to stretch my legs before dinner. I had no plan more ambitious than finding something to eat and maybe a cold beer.

I ended up in a bar on Soi 13, looking for the toilet through neon lights and music that was too loud, when a girl stopped me dead.

Hello, handsome man.

The most worn-out line in all of Thailand. I'd heard it a hundred times in a hundred different bars, always with the same professional smile behind it, the same hand on the arm. I was about to keep walking without even slowing down. I already knew how the script went.

Something made me stop. Maybe it was the jet lag, maybe it was simple curiosity about the pool table right behind her. I suggested a game instead of the drink I suspected she'd been planning to sell me.

We played a few rounds. She was better with a cue than I was and had no problem reminding me every time I missed an easy shot, pointing at me with it and laughing without any shame. We laughed more than you usually laugh with someone you've known for five minutes. When the deciding game came around, with half the bar watching, I did what any gentleman with fifteen years of Thai experience behind him does: I lost on purpose.

The rules we'd set were clear. Loser buys dinner. We ate grilled fish at a street stall near the bar, sitting on plastic stools far too low, then walked barefoot along the beach until we ran out of excuses not to say goodnight.

I asked if she had a boyfriend.

She told me she'd just ended a long relationship with a Scottish man. She needed time for herself, she said, time to figure out what she actually wanted after so many years with the same person. Half joking, I asked if she'd consider an Australian boyfriend as a long-term replacement. She laughed, said yes, and in the way she said it I couldn't tell how much was a joke and how much was something else. At the time, I didn't think twice about it.

We spent ten days together. Rented bikes along the coast, a hilltop temple we climbed just to watch the sunset, night markets where she haggled on my behalf in Thai while I pretended to follow along, long meals that started at seven and finished well past midnight. I don't know how to describe it without sounding like everyone else who's written something similar about Thailand. I remember lying there one night thinking the country had got me completely, no conditions, no reservations of any kind, something that hadn't happened to me in fifteen years of coming and going.

A few months later I had a golf tournament in Indonesia. I invited her without thinking too much about it, almost as a test to see if what we had in Pattaya would survive outside Pattaya. It was another ten days, different setting but the exact same feeling, dinners by the hotel pool, her waiting for me on the eighteenth hole on the afternoons I played badly and needed someone to laugh at me. I won the tournament with a calm I don't remember feeling when I played alone. I put some of the winnings towards her and her family, a few thousand Baht that meant nothing to me and changed their whole month.

She never asked me for anything. Not money, not clothes, not a new phone, none of the requests I'd heard other foreigners describe as a warning over uncomfortable bar-side laughs. I made sure she wanted for nothing without her having to ask, which is a difference you only understand once you've lived it.

Over the trips that followed we grew closer. I met her family. I stayed several nights at their house, in a village in Isaan where the chickens wandered in and out of the kitchen like they were part of the family too. Her mother taught me to make sticky rice while her father beat me at pool in a bar in the village, something I never admitted to her. Her neighbours called me by my name instead of shouting Farang the way people did in the city, a small detail that felt enormous at the time. It didn't feel like a holiday with a companion anymore. It felt, in every sense of the word, like a relationship.

Then work took me away for six months. Germany, Australia, the UK, one meeting bleeding into the next with barely a breath between flights. The messages went from daily to weekly, and from weekly to whatever she felt like answering that day. There was no argument, no specific reason I could point to. Just distance doing what it always does when nobody's watching it closely, eating away at conversation until all that was left was a good-morning text.

I decided to make a surprise visit. No warning, not even a return ticket booked, on the idea that showing up would fix what words over the phone no longer could.

I walked into her bar in Pattaya and she was happy to see me, I have no doubt about that. But there was something off about how happy she was, like she was calculating something inside while smiling on the outside, a beat of delay between the surprise and the hug.

Over the next few days she started asking me for money. Amounts that didn't fit the girl who, in two years, had never asked me for a thing. There was also a new sharpness in the way she spoke, silences where there used to be only jokes, a hurry to change the subject any time I asked too much.

I asked her best friend what was going on. It took her a while to get it out, she looked at the floor while she said it, clearly uncomfortable, but eventually she told me: the Scottish man had never actually been an ex. He was still very much in the picture, documented in detail on a Facebook account I didn't know existed. New Year's together. Christmas dinners. Photos tagged with hearts and comments from mutual friends I'd never even known existed.

I wanted to see it for myself before I believed it completely. I didn't have to wait long.

I saw them walking hand in hand towards the bar one ordinary afternoon, her laughing at something he'd just said, both of them carrying night market bags on their free arms. She didn't see me. I walked past, gave her a nod, and kept walking without stopping to ask for explanations I no longer needed.

I wish her well. I mean that. But that was that, no shouting, no scenes, nothing left to say out loud.

Sometimes I think back to that first game of pool, to how I lost on purpose to do the gentlemanly thing, convinced I was the one calling the shots. I should have paid closer attention to how she played that night. She already knew exactly when to let someone win, and when to let him think he'd won it all on his own.