Before flying to Bangkok, I bought a fake Rolex for forty dollars in New York. It turned out to be the smartest decision of the whole trip.

I'd been divorced three months when my mate Dave told me I needed a trip that would restore my faith in something. He didn't specify what, exactly. Women, myself, the general idea that there was life after signing some papers and splitting a flat down the middle.

By then I was sick of the same conversations, the same apps, telling the same divorce story to strangers who'd feign polite interest for twenty minutes before checking their phone. Dave put it bluntly: I needed to leave the country before I became insufferable at every dinner party I was invited to.

I booked flights to Bangkok that same night, half as a joke. By morning it didn't feel like one anymore.

The route had an overnight layover in New York. I went out for dinner alone, head still full of solicitors and furniture, and on the pavement a street vendor stopped me with a case full of watches.

He pulled out a Rolex and set it in my palm like he was handing over something sacred. The finish was flawless. The weight, the crystal, the tick of the second hand. If I hadn't known he was asking eighty dollars for it, I'd have sworn it was the same model my brother-in-law wore to weddings.

"Same weight as the real one," he told me, dead serious, as if that settled any moral question about the transaction. I asked if he'd put that in writing. He laughed harder than I did.

I haggled him down to forty. Put it on right there on the street, and spent the rest of dinner glancing at my wrist like a teenager with his first real watch.

I'd thought about bringing my actual watch on the trip. In the end I left it in a drawer, just in case. Instinct or laziness, I'm still not sure which, but it turned out to be the smartest financial decision of my adult life.

I landed in Bangkok eighteen hours later, fake watch on my wrist and no plan beyond the hotel name.

I spent the first couple of nights wandering with no direction, moving from bar to bar, letting the city decide for me. And at some point I started noticing something odd: people kept looking at the watch.

Nobody said anything. Nobody mentioned the brand. But I'd catch fingers running over the bezel when someone poured me a drink, catch eyes lingering on the face a beat too long, doing some quiet arithmetic behind them. It was funny, honestly. The thing had cost less than the round of beers in front of me, and yet it seemed to open more doors than anything I'd actually said all night.

I started playing it up a bit. Left my wrist resting on the bar longer than it needed to, turned the watch toward the light whenever someone leaned in. Wasn't pride in the object itself, it was the comedy of it: forty dollars buying the same attention that back home would've cost me a loan.

One bartender even called me "lucky farang" the second night, nodding at my wrist, and I raised my glass like I actually believed him.

One of those nights I got talking to two girls, Mint and Fah, at a bar that was already starting to feel like mine. We talked, we drank, the night tipped into something I had no intention of putting the brakes on. No regrets there at all.

The next day, hungover and starving, I ducked into a place near the hotel for lunch. At the next table sat a woman on her own, older than the girls from the night before, with a way of sitting that commanded a kind of quiet respect without trying to.

We talked for a while. I asked for her number, asked it two more times in different ways, asked what she did for work. She answered everything with the same calm, giving away nothing at all.

She told me that if I was actually serious about getting to know her, I should come back to that same table at the same time the next day. That was it. No surname, no contact, just that one condition.

It struck me as strange enough to say yes to.

That night I went back out with Mint and Fah and the rest of the crowd I already recognized at my usual bar. Someone asked about the watch, I said it was a gift from my grandfather, and everyone left it there, though I noticed the same looks landing on my wrist as always.

The next day she was at the table, right on time. Her name was Waan.

We spent the whole day together. We hired something to get around and drove out of the city, stopping at a couple of places with no fixed plan: a quiet temple, nearly empty at that hour, a food stall by the river where we ate perched on plastic stools, a small market where she bought fruit and wouldn't let me pay for it no matter how many times I tried.

At every stop we took turns covering the bill, fifty Baht here, two hundred there, with neither of us keeping score of who owed whom. She paid for the boat that took us across the river; I paid for coffee after. None of it felt calculated, and maybe that's exactly why, after three days of split rounds and strangers pricing my fake watch, it felt so different. It felt normal, almost boring in the best possible way.

We talked about my divorce at some point in the afternoon, sitting on a wooden pier watching barges go by. I gave her the real version, not the short one I trotted out for strangers from the apps. She listened, didn't say much, and for the first time on the whole trip I didn't feel like I had to fill the silence with a joke.

Later, while we were having a drink before heading back, her phone rang. A friend of hers wanted to join us. Waan hesitated for a second, said yes, and fifteen minutes later a woman introduced herself as Bee, with an energy completely different from Waan's — louder, faster, ordering the next round before we'd finished the last one.

The afternoon turned into evening and the evening turned a bit chaotic. Toast after toast, some karaoke drifting over from the place next door, Bee changing the subject every two minutes, Waan laughing at something I never quite caught. At one point Bee asked, casual as anything, how much longer I was in Bangkok and which hotel I was staying at. I told her without thinking twice, still convinced the night wasn't much different from any other long, boozy dinner.

At some point we called it. The three of us walked back toward the hotel, and Waan and Bee said goodbye outside the entrance, hugs and laughing, still riding the effects of the last round.

I went up to my room a bit unsteady on my feet, happy, thinking maybe Dave had been right about this trip after all. Halfway down the corridor I glanced at my wrist out of habit, just to check the time.

No watch.

I had no number for either of them. No surname, no address, not a single way to trace a path back to that restaurant table where the whole thing had started. Nothing at all.

I laughed to myself, standing there in the corridor, for longer than I'd care to admit. Forty dollars for two nights I'll genuinely remember, plus a free lesson in how quickly I'll trust someone I barely know.

The next morning, back at my usual bar, someone asked about the watch. I told them it was off getting a diamond replaced. Nobody blinked, and I carried on enjoying the rest of the trip like nothing had happened, because honestly, I hadn't lost much at all.

I still don't know whether Waan had that whole thing planned from the first day at that table, or whether she simply made the most of an opportunity that landed in front of her outside the hotel. I'm not sure it matters a great deal either way.

What I do know is that next time I'm back in Bangkok, the real watch stays in the drawer again, and the fake one is coming with me from day one.