He almost sent 400,000 baht. The only good decision he made was not to.

He was 41 years old and it was his third trip to Thailand.

He was not a newcomer. He knew Bangkok well enough to get around on his own, to know which bars were tourist traps and which were not, to avoid paying double in the tuk-tuks. He considered himself someone who knew what he was doing.

That, he later discovered, counts for nothing when you decide that what is in front of you is different from everything that came before.

---

He met her on the second night, at a bar on Soi 4.

Her name was Nang. She was in her early twenties, with a smile that made one forget to pay attention to other things, and a way of holding a conversation that made the night pass quickly. The next day they were still together.

That was where he made the first decision that would change the weeks that followed: instead of leaving it for what it was, he suggested spending more time together.

She agreed.

---

What followed was, on the surface, perfect.

Pattaya. A nearby island. Days on the beach, nights drinking, the kind of time that one remembers as light when looking back and that in the moment feels real because everything feels real when the sun falls right and there is nothing urgent to do.

He paid for everything. Clothes, gifts, hotels, dinners. He did it without thinking too hard about it because at that point it did not seem like there was much to think about.

Back to Bangkok for her birthday. An expensive handbag. Dinner with her friends. A night that ended late and left the feeling of having stepped into something, even if he did not yet know exactly what.

---

Phuket was another five days.

And that was where the conversation shifted.

They began talking about the future. About what it would be like to actually be together. About what would happen when he went back to the UK. The words used in those conversations were the right words, the ones you hope to hear when you are with someone and want things to be real.

He believed them. Or wanted to believe them, which is not exactly the same thing but feels the same in the moment.

---

When he got home, the calls started.

Video calls throughout the day. Constant messages. The feeling that the distance changed nothing, that what had begun in Bangkok was still alive from twelve time zones away.

Then came the first requests for help. Small ones at first. He dealt with them without asking questions.

Then came something more concrete: she wanted to leave the bar where she worked. Problems with other girls. She needed money for a deposit on a flat. Fourteen thousand baht.

He sent it.

---

The calls began to space out.

First without explanation. Then with excuses: she was busy, she had had a hard day, her phone was playing up. One day she told him the phone was overheating and needed repairing.

Then she disappeared for four days.

He waited. He wrote to her. He got no reply. He started to genuinely worry, with the specific worry one feels when someone you care about stops giving any sign of life and you do not know whether to call someone or simply keep waiting.

A friend of hers sent him the photos.

Nang was on an island. With a man from Singapore. The images were clear enough to need no explanation.

---

When the phone "came back from the repair shop" and she called, he showed her the photos.

She said the man from Singapore was just a friend.

He wanted to believe her. And that, more than anything else he did in the months that followed, is what he himself cannot quite understand when he looks back. Not her lie. His own decision to stay.

---

Then came the matter of the previous marriage.

Not all at once. It came out gradually, the way things tend to come out that someone does not want to say. Nang was still legally married to a man in Isaan. Separated, she said. With plans to divorce, she said. By the time he found out, he no longer knew quite what to believe of what she told him and what not to.

Despite all of that, he went back to Thailand.

He travelled to Isaan. He met the family. They welcomed him warmly, with the genuine warmth that Thai families have when someone takes the trouble to go to their homes rather than waiting for them to come. They spent several days together. Conversations drifted towards marriage.

And at some point in those conversations, he heard himself agreeing to pay four hundred thousand baht towards finishing the family home renovation. And another two hundred thousand as a dowry.

Six hundred thousand baht in total.

---

When he returned to the UK, things fell apart slowly.

Always online. Taking hours to reply. Men appearing on her social media with a regularity that did not match anything she said. Every time he asked about anything, she turned the question into an accusation and the conversation ended with him feeling guilty for having asked.

As Christmas approached, she began demanding the house money.

He told her he preferred to wait until they were actually married.

She did not take that well.

---

The arguments became more frequent. Communication broke down. Days without a reply, then weeks with cold replies, then the silence that no longer needs explanation because both sides know what it means.

That was when he finished understanding something he had probably known for some time: that everything they had planned, the marriage, the future, the promises, revolved around that money. Not the other way around.

The four hundred thousand baht were never sent.

---

Shortly after that she went back to working in a bar. He never heard from her again except for a message threatening to have him blacklisted from Thailand.

When he adds up the time the whole thing lasted, the number that comes out is more than one hundred and thirty thousand baht sent from the UK, plus everything spent during two trips: flights, hotels, restaurants, clothes, gifts, the birthday handbag, the fourteen thousand for the flat that never existed.

A considerable amount. Not the amount it could have been.

That is the only thing he salvages from the whole affair: that when the moment of the biggest decision came, he had enough clarity to say no.

Everything else he lost. That, he did not.