She raised her palm flat and said "don't speak." Then walked back to the other man without looking back.

My name is Kurt, I'm 43, from Frankfurt, and this was my fourth trip to Pattaya, so I can't claim inexperience or any real surprise about what I'm about to tell. I knew the city, knew the scene, and thought I knew exactly how the game worked after three previous trips without a single incident worth mentioning. I was on night 11 when I walked into Ibar past midnight, more out of habit than any real plan, and noticed a girl who was exactly my type, the kind you spot in a crowd without even meaning to.

She looked over and smiled. I walked straight over and told her she was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. She laughed and called me crazy. Her name was Siri, 28, divorced, with a six-year-old son.

Within minutes it was obvious she was a professional who knew exactly how to handle tourists. There wasn't a single hesitation in how she spoke, none of the awkward questions you get from girls new to this line of work, none of that initial discomfort that gives away someone fresh to the job. Every line landed at exactly the right moment, every silence seemed calculated to get me talking more.

Good English, total confidence, the kind of presence that makes men act stupid without even realising it. I told her upfront I wasn't rich and had no interest in any kind of sponsor arrangement, that I'd already heard stories like that before travelling and wanted no part of one.

She said she wasn't looking for that either, just wanted to hang out and a tip for her time, said with a casualness that struck me as completely genuine at the time.

She was really easy to talk to. She told me about her ex-husband, who drank and gambled, who'd blow in a single night of betting what took her weeks to earn, and how she'd ended up more or less alone raising the boy after they split, first at her mother's place and then, once that became unsustainable, working in Pattaya and sending money home every month. She told me about her village in Isaan, the rice paddies, how little there was there for someone her age beyond farming or moving to the city, about her two sisters, both working in Phuket in the same line of work as her, almost like an inherited family tradition nobody had actually chosen. I asked her to spend the rest of the holiday with me. She agreed, almost without hesitating. It wasn't cheap going out with her, she was popular at the bar and I knew it full well, other customers specifically asked for her when they walked in, but I decided it was worth it anyway.

We had a good run over the following days. Day trips to nearby islands, whole afternoons by the hotel pool, good conversation, good company generally, the kind that makes you forget entirely why you'd walked into that bar alone in the first place. One afternoon by the pool, a cocktail in hand and the sun already dropping, she mentioned she'd been saving for a Honda sports bike for two years, with 200,000 baht already put away in the bank, a figure she said with a certain pride, like someone who'd worked hard for something specific.

She also mentioned, almost in passing, in the middle of a completely different conversation, that she had two permanent overseas sponsors who sent her money regularly. She said it with the same casualness as everything else. Neither detail registered the way it should have, too busy enjoying the sun and her company to stop and do the maths.

Day 27. We had breakfast together like every morning, she left on a motorbike taxi heading to the hairdresser and said she'd message me later about the gym.

Three o'clock, nothing. Five o'clock, nothing. Six messages from me with no reply at all. Anyone who knows a bit about how this works knows that a Thai girl ignoring her phone that long means something's going on.

At midnight, tired of waiting and with that feeling in my stomach you'd rather ignore, I went back out alone and ended up at a different club on Walking Street, not the one we usually went to together, lower lighting, louder music, the kind of place I wouldn't have taken her myself. I saw Siri across the room, holding hands with a man who looked about 65 or 70, dressed in that expensive, understated way men wear when they've been coming to Thailand a long time and no longer feel the need to prove anything.

When she noticed me she looked visibly embarrassed and turned her back. She didn't leave though, which by itself said everything about how valuable that man was to her at that particular moment.

I waited near the toilets for half an hour until she walked past. When she saw me she raised her palm flat, a clear "don't speak" gesture, and went straight back to him without stopping for even a second. I called her name twice, out loud. Nothing.

I sent her one last message that same night, thanking her for the time we'd spent together. She never replied.

I spent the remaining nights with someone else I met, called Wawa, straightforward, no games, and good company without any of the complications of the previous days. No big declarations, no stories about motorbikes or sponsors, just cold beer, easy laughs, and the pleasant feeling that nobody was calculating anything behind my back while we talked.

On the last day, bags already packed and waiting for the taxi to the airport, the phone rang. I assumed it was Wawa running late again, as usual, always fifteen or twenty minutes behind whatever we'd agreed. It was Siri, on a video call, beautiful as ever but visibly stressed, her eyes already a bit red before she'd even started talking. She asked me straight out whether I hated her. I said no, not at all. She started crying then, genuinely, not something performed for the camera as far as I could tell, and told me she was sorry, that the man from the club was someone she'd known for a while, pretty well off, and she hadn't been able to turn him down when he showed up that night.

She said she was tired of that life, tired of having nothing of her own, tired of always depending on other men's generosity just to get by, that she loved me specifically out of every man she'd known, and wanted to wait for me until I came back to Pattaya at some unspecified point in the future. The last thing she said before I ended the call, her voice breaking right at the end, was "don't forget me."

On the flight home, with hours ahead of me and nothing else to do, I thought it all through calmly, without the initial anger I'd felt that night near the club toilets. The motorbike savings story and the story about having nothing of her own couldn't both be true, someone who saves 200,000 baht in two years and gets regular money from two sponsors on top of that doesn't match the desperate, empty-handed woman she described herself as while crying on a video call. The call on my last day was almost certainly a calculated move, either to get whatever leftover cash I had before boarding the plane, or to leave the door open to landing another sponsor, this time one sending money from Germany every month for years to come.

The "don't forget me" line was designed exactly to plant guilt and leave the door open just in case, a calculated phrase, not the spontaneous emotional slip it seemed like in the moment. And yet, even knowing all this, some part of me still couldn't entirely rule out that there was something real underneath all the calculation.

Maybe some of it was genuine, people aren't made entirely of stone, not even the ones who do this professionally, and I don't rule out that somewhere in everything she told me there was a fragment of truth deliberately mixed in with the rest. But I left Pattaya with my wallet intact, without sending a single extra baht or committing to anything long-distance, and that, at the end of the day, taking everything else into account, counts as a pretty decent result in my personal book on trips like this.

I haven't heard anything from Siri since, and haven't actively tried to. Wawa did message me a couple of times over the following months, short and unpretentious messages, nothing about money or sponsors or promises to keep, and with her, at least, the accounting was always clear from day one, right down to the last baht.