Five years, a house in Chiang Mai, a pickup truck and £30,000. She had my case packed in seconds.

I'm from Manchester, 55 now, never married, and this is the story of five years of my life I'm never getting back.

In 2014 I went to Thailand with an old mate from work, one of those trips we'd been promising ourselves for years and never organised until one of us finally booked the flights without asking the other too many questions first. We started in Bangkok, muggy heat, night markets, the usual chaos of the city that both of us found fascinating rather than overwhelming. Then the Tiger Temple, back when it still existed before it got shut down over all the allegations that came out later, and I remember thinking at the time something didn't quite sit right about the place, though I couldn't have put a name to the feeling back then. Then the Bridge on the River Kwai, with its museum and its almost solemn atmosphere, and to finish it off a few weeks backpacking around the southern islands, sleeping in cheap bungalows and drinking far too much Chang beer. We had a great time, met some interesting people along the way, and I came home with a great impression of the country, with absolutely no idea what I'd end up caught up in a few years later.

Back in Manchester I joined a dating site looking for a girlfriend, someone local, nothing complicated. After a few weeks of not much happening, a Thai woman living nearby popped up on my screen.

She messaged quickly, gave me her number almost immediately, and wanted to meet that same evening, which at the time struck me as a good sign, enthusiasm, genuine interest, you know how it goes.

We met up at a pub near the centre of town, nothing special, and she brought along a Vietnamese friend who spent most of the evening trying to push me towards her instead of talking about herself, going on about how good a person she was, how well she cooked, how much she liked serious English men like me. At the time it just struck me as funny, like an amateur matchmaker at work, and I didn't think much more of it. A week later the Thai woman came round to my house, on her own this time, no friend in tow. The first thing she asked, before she'd even sat down, was whether I owned the place outright, no mortgage left on it. A bit of a cheeky question that early into anything, but I let it go, put it down to plain curiosity, maybe some Thai way of feeling out the situation I simply wasn't familiar with yet.

After that visit she dropped the friend angle completely and focused on me. Things moved along nicely, she was pleasant company, an excellent cook, ran a small food business in Manchester, and the relationship felt solid, the kind you assume is going to last.

Her name was Sunisa.

One day, completely out of nowhere, she told me not to worry about money because she owned a hotel in Chiang Mai and was quite well off. Looking back on it now, I know that was the very beginning of everything, the first brick in a building that would take five years to come crashing down on top of me.

We also went on holiday together that first year, and she paid her fair share without me asking, unusual enough that it stuck in my memory for a long time afterwards. I understand now that she was deliberately building trust, brick by brick, and I didn't see a single bit of it coming.

About a month later she suggested I move in with her and rent my house out for extra income, while she covered all the shared bills. It sounded reasonable, generous even, on her part.

I kept my own house just in case, which turned out to be, by some distance, the smartest decision I made over the following five years. I sold a lot of my belongings and gave plenty more to charity because I had nowhere to store them, and I regretted that for years afterwards, especially the things with no real value beyond the sentimental.

Eighteen months in she suggested I buy a pickup truck in Thailand, around twenty thousand pounds, and that she'd buy land of the same value, so we'd go into retirement fifty-fifty. I did it, without thinking it through nearly as much as I should have.

When I got out there I wasn't entirely sure I'd made the right call. The area was nothing like the tourist Thailand I'd known back in 2014, dirt roads, unfinished breeze-block houses, not a trace of the beaches or the golden temples I remembered from that first trip. Her 23-year-old son was there, more or less living on the plot of land, not a word of English on him, me not a word of Thai beyond the basic greetings, and her utterly convinced the lad was perfect in every possible way, incapable of seeing a single flaw in him no matter how obvious it seemed to me that the boy had no intention whatsoever of working or doing anything productive with the land we were buying.

A colleague at work warned me, once I was back in Manchester, that foreigners can't own land or property in Thailand, that everything would end up in her name. That alone should have been enough to stop me dead in my tracks.

Over the following four years, living above her food shop, I gave her 400,000 baht towards a house being built in Thailand, another 10,000 pounds towards extra land and boundary walls, on top of the pickup truck I'd already bought.

A friend who'd been going to Thailand for thirty years, an older bloke who'd seen it all, pulled me aside one day at the pub and told me, quite seriously, that he'd watched plenty of foreign men over the years try to build a life with Thai women, and that not one, not a single one, had come out of it well. I nodded, thanked him for his concern, and did absolutely nothing about it, as if the warning was meant for someone else entirely, not me.

By October 2018 she wanted more money for the house, which had already gone well over the original budget. I came home from work one evening and she asked me directly whether I still wanted to go ahead with building the house. I said no.

She had a suitcase down off the top of the wardrobe and my clothes packed into it within seconds, as if she'd had it ready and waiting for that exact moment, just waiting for the wrong word from me to set it off. There was no shouting, no argument, no chance to even talk it through. Five years together and I was on the street that same night, suitcase in hand, not entirely sure where to go at that hour. My father took me in that very night without asking a single question, opened the door, put the kettle on, and didn't say a word until the next morning.

She kept everything. My belongings in England, my belongings in Thailand, cameras, mountain bikes, personal items with no value to anyone but me, things I'd built up over decades and now had no way of reclaiming without flying halfway round the world to do it. I wrote several emails asking for at least the family photos and a few things that had belonged to my mother, who'd passed away a few years before, and never got a single reply. She wouldn't return a single item, however small. Over 30,000 pounds out of my own pocket in total, between the house money, the truck, and everything else I never got back and never will now.

Everyone who knew her adored her. Friendly, chatty, always buying people something for Christmas, always smiling, the kind of woman neighbours and colleagues would describe as an absolute sweetheart if you asked them, which made the whole thing harder to explain to anyone who hadn't lived through it themselves.

My father summed it up better than anyone: she was capable of anything and had never loved me, not for a single day of those five years. It takes a particular kind of coldness to pack someone's bags and throw them out of the house after five years together without a second thought.

Years have passed now, and I still don't fully understand how someone can live alongside a person for five years, share meals, holidays, plans for the future, and feel absolutely nothing while packing that person's bags and putting them out on the street on some random night in October. I suppose that's exactly the part I'm never going to fully understand, no matter how much time goes by.

And the hotel she claimed to own in Chiang Mai? If that part of her story is even true, I'm fairly certain it was paid for exactly the same way, with some other man's money before me who never saw any of this coming either.