Seven months of video calls every night, and she never asked me for anything. Then I saw her pre-wedding photos with another man.

I'm Danish and last year I took my first solo trip to Thailand. I'm 46, and I'd wanted to make that trip for a while without really knowing what to expect from it.

I stayed near Patong Beach, in Phuket, and spent most of the trip doing what a lot of single guys do when they arrive alone for the first time, enjoying the nightlife, meeting different people every night, having a good time with no intention of getting serious with anyone. It was two weeks of beach bars, short hangovers, and conversations I'd forgotten by the next day, exactly what I'd gone looking for at that particular point in my life.

When I got back home, though, I couldn't stop thinking about Thailand. It wasn't just the usual post-holiday nostalgia, it felt more persistent than that. I created a separate Facebook account, just for my contacts from there and for my photography hobby, which I'd picked back up thanks to everything I'd photographed during the trip. I posted sunset shots from the beach and the odd portrait of strangers taken with their permission, and little by little I started getting comments and messages from people who'd seen the photos and wanted to talk about Thailand with me. That's exactly where I met a Thai woman called Bun.

Bun was 26, worked as a translator for a fashion magazine in Bangkok, and did some modelling now and then for the same magazine and the odd small brand. We started chatting casually, commenting on photos and not much else, me asking her about good spots to photograph next time I came back. But before long we were messaging every single day without fail, short messages in the morning at first and then longer conversations at night. We video called several times a week, and kept it up for seven whole months before meeting in person, something that felt perfectly reasonable at the time and that, looking back now, still strikes me as the healthiest part of the whole story. We talked about everything, her job at the magazine, my job at an engineering firm in Copenhagen, shows we watched separately and discussed afterwards, how strange she found the Danish winter when I showed her snowy photos of my street.

One of the reasons I trusted her was that she never asked me for anything at all during that whole time. Not a family emergency, not an outstanding bill, not even a hint. The only thing I ever sent her over those seven months was 3,000 baht, and that was because I wanted to do something nice for her birthday, not because she'd asked for it or even expected it.

When I went back to Thailand in December, she met me at the airport in Bangkok holding a hand-written sign with my name spelled wrong that I still have saved in photos. We spent the next month together between Bangkok and Pattaya. She introduced me to her boss and co-workers over a lunch that made me more nervous than I expected, showed me the places she actually liked, not the typical guidebook spots, small markets, a café hidden down a street with no clear name, and we talked constantly about the future, about where we might live one day, about whether she'd like to see Denmark in the middle of winter with all its darkness.

Apart from one fairly silly argument over dinner in Pattaya, about something to do with who'd picked the restaurant that neither of us remembers clearly anymore, we got along really well the whole month. I remember we made up that same night walking along the beach without saying much, and that neither of us brought it up again the next morning.

In Bangkok, on the other hand, the days had a completely different rhythm. She worked until mid-afternoon, so I'd spend mornings wandering alone through markets she'd recommended the night before, and we'd meet up afterwards for dinner and to tell each other about our day like an ordinary couple anywhere in the world. One night she took me to a birthday party for one of her colleagues from the magazine, and I spent most of the evening smiling without understanding half the jokes in Thai, something she found far funnier than I did.

During the trip I noticed she was living in a pretty run-down apartment, damp on the bathroom ceiling and a window that never quite shut properly, letting the street noise in all night, so I helped her move into a much nicer condo near her work, with a doorman and a rooftop pool. I wasn't paying any of her bills or anything resembling an ongoing monthly rent, I just wanted her to have somewhere decent to live while I was there and afterwards too.

When I got back to Denmark, things carried on as normal for about two weeks. We kept talking every day, making plans, telling each other about our day like always. Then her messages started becoming shorter and less frequent, something I put down at first to work or simple everyday tiredness. One day she told me, by message and not by video call, which in itself already struck me as odd, that she thought it would be best if we ended the relationship.

The reason she gave was that she still loved her ex.

It didn't make much sense to me, because only a few weeks earlier we'd been together talking about our future as though nothing could possibly get in the way. I messaged her several times that same week asking if we could at least talk over video one last time, face to face rather than by text, but she refused every time with a different excuse. Every time I asked for a fuller explanation, she just repeated that she had her reasons, without giving a single detail beyond that same phrase repeated almost word for word each time, like a script she'd memorised.

After that she slowly blocked me everywhere, first Line, then Instagram, and finally Facebook, as if she were calmly ticking items off a list, no rush at all, spread out over almost two full weeks instead of doing it all at once.

A few weeks later I was scrolling Facebook without much interest, killing time on the sofa, when I came across a photo posted by one of our mutual friends from Bangkok. The caption simply said "Pre-Wedding," and in the photo was Bun, dressed in a way I'd never seen her, elegant almost to the point of being unrecognisable, next to a man I didn't recognise at all, his hand resting on her back in a way that left little doubt what that word in the photo actually meant. I sat there staring at the screen longer than I'd like to admit, zooming in with my fingers to get a better look at a face that, until that day, hadn't existed for me at all.

The more I thought about it that night, the more I remembered something she'd told me months earlier, almost in passing, during one of our first video calls when we barely knew each other yet. She'd nearly married an ex-boyfriend once before, but the relationship ended because he couldn't afford what her parents wanted for the wedding at that point in his life.

My guess, and it's only ever been a guess since I never got confirmation of anything from her directly, is that he came back at some point with better financial prospects than before, with whatever it was her parents needed to see to give their approval, they got back together without me ever knowing, and she chose him instead of me when it actually came time to decide.

I'll never know for sure, because she never actually explained what happened, not then and not afterwards, no matter how much I pushed for an answer in those last messages.

The last thing I saw were those pre-wedding photos circulating among mutual friends for a couple of weeks, gathering more comments and congratulations underneath each time. After that, I never heard from her again, not a word, not a late explanation, nothing at all.

Sometimes I wonder whether the condo I helped her move into is still her home now, or whether she moved again once she got married. It's a fairly pointless thing to wonder, I know, but it's the kind of thought that sticks in my head whenever I think about all this late at night, for no logical reason at all, long after there's anything left to actually wonder about.