She gave me a free bowl of noodles at her mum's stall. The buffalo has never been sick.

My name's Martin, I'm British, and I'd been married 25 years, was already on the wrong side of 50, exactly 50 as it happened, and facing a friendly but expensive divorce back in the UK, the kind without shouting or recriminations but with lawyers involved all the same.

When my company offered me time in our Singapore and Bangkok offices, I said yes almost without thinking twice. A change of scenery paid for by work, and a chance to clear my head after all that.

Singapore was good. Bangkok blew me away completely from the very first day.

In 2018 the team got pulled into a refurbishment project at an international school in Khon Kaen. Long days, productive work, the odd beer in the evening, nothing more than that.

I had zero interest in finding anyone. I'd heard the usual stories, formed the usual assumptions on the subject, and told myself I was too old for that kind of hassle anyway.

Second week there I started crossing paths again and again with a maths teacher at the school who'd been helping my team get access to classrooms at the right times, coordinating with caretakers and headteachers who weren't always keen to cooperate. She spoke beautiful Thai with the students in the corridors and excellent English with me, always nice in a way that didn't feel forced, never any trouble with scheduling or anything else.

I asked her for restaurant tips near the school and she mentioned, almost in passing, that her family had a noodle stall at a local street market, her mother's business for years. A day or two later I went with some colleagues from the team, more out of curiosity than anything, and she was there after school helping her mum serve, hair tied back and an apron that clearly wasn't part of her usual teaching wardrobe. She gave me a free portion, without me asking or expecting it, insisting with a smile when I tried to pay for it anyway.

We started talking properly that evening. Her name was Nitia, 36, 14 years younger than me, never married. One previous boyfriend, a Norwegian, a relationship that had ended five years before we met.

She'd chosen mathematics over relationships since then, throwing herself completely into her teaching career, and had no interest in Thai men, whom she described bluntly as serial cheaters without any exceptions worth mentioning. She told me foreigners who came to Thailand were, in her experience, either backpackers passing through or two-week tourists looking for exactly what I'd spent my whole life avoiding, and that I'd been a genuine surprise to her, not fitting neatly into either category she'd already assumed.

I told her I was single and asked if she'd let me take her to dinner. She didn't say yes, didn't say no. An hour after I got back to the hotel, my WhatsApp went off with a message from her.

We kept messaging after I returned to Bangkok. A week later she said she'd like to come down and see me before I went back to England, that she had a cousin there she could stay with, no problem.

She mentioned she'd need to pay other teachers to cover her classes, and that the flight wasn't cheap. I braced myself for what was coming. Nothing came. No request, no sob story, absolutely nothing.

She met me at the hotel reception at 6:30pm sharp, not a minute late, dressed perfectly for the occasion, stunning in a way that caught me completely off guard. She knew an inexpensive Thai place nearby, which turned out, to my surprise when we arrived, to be her cousin's family birthday dinner, tables pushed together and a homemade cake waiting at the end. Under 800 baht for the two of us, tip included. Brilliant food, great conversation from start to finish with no awkward silences in between. Her cousin picked her up right at 11pm and she gave me a quick peck on the cheek on the way out, nothing more.

I told myself, that same night, to stop it there before it went any further. 14 years older than her, six thousand miles away within a week, a marriage barely over behind me, doomed from any rational angle you looked at it.

I didn't stop it, of course. She came back the next night with a small overnight bag she left propped by the door without saying a word about it. We had street food from stalls she knew far better than I did, had a great night together, talked for hours without noticing where the time was going. She stayed the following day too, I made fairly weak excuses at work to leave earlier than usual, and we spent the whole afternoon by the hotel pool, not doing much beyond talking and laughing.

Her cousin collected her in the morning and she went back to Khon Kaen. From there we kept it going through FaceTime and WhatsApp, constant messages during the day and video calls most evenings.

I visited twice more during that posting, each time with fewer work excuses needed and more genuine wanting to see her. COVID made everything a lot harder afterwards, quarantines and endless paperwork, but we managed to arrange a visit each way around the restrictions as best we could. I kept going back through the Test and Go scheme as soon as something resembling normality reopened, spending time with her and her family in Khon Kaen whenever work allowed it. Good people who've never asked for anything the whole time, who've only shown genuine appreciation for the smallest things, and who seem sincerely happy that she's happy after years of keeping men at a distance by choice, not by chance.

The buffalo has never been sick, not once in all these years. The chickens are all in perfectly good health. Her mum doesn't need any operation, and never has. None of those stories I'd heard other expats tell before coming here have repeated themselves with me, not even close.

We've never really argued. Not once in all this time, something I still find hard to believe when I think about it calmly, after 25 years of a previous marriage with its normal share of fights and long silences. She's got a way of looking at the world, calm and practical at once, that makes everything feel lighter even on the complicated days. I wish I'd met her twenty years earlier than I did, though I know perfectly well that neither of us would have been in the right place in our lives back then for it to have worked.

She's doing an Advanced English course, studying evenings with a dedication that still surprises me, so her teaching qualifications will eventually transfer to England if we end up moving there down the line. In the meantime we'll be working remotely from Bangkok, no rush to decide anything definitively just yet. And we had our first child recently, the daughter I'd always wanted and never got in my first marriage. Her mother, with all the love in the world but with no ambiguity either, has made it fairly clear that making things official is not optional at this point.

It all started from randomly crossing paths in a school corridor in Khon Kaen, two people who weren't even looking for anything like this, both fairly convinced at the time that we'd sworn off exactly this kind of complication for good. Never been happier in my life, not by a long way, and not a day goes by now where I take any of it for granted.