I promised her I was serious. I didn't tell her I already had a wife and three kids waiting at home in Ireland.

Before a long trip through Asia in 2019, I spent months talking to a few Thai women through an app.

Most of those conversations fizzled out on their own, the way they almost always do. One didn't.

Her name was Ning. She was 26 and lived in Samut Sakhon, a port city southwest of Bangkok that smells of the sea and of fish-processing plants in roughly equal measure. She worked at a local seafood company, on the admin side, and never drank, not a drop, which over those endless conversations became something close to a personal trademark.

We video-called almost every night. I'm 44, from Cork, in Ireland, and by then I'd already been planning a long trip around East Asia, with the flexibility my work gave me. Ning was the reason Thailand stopped being just another stop on that itinerary and became the destination.

Over those months on screen we talked about everything. Her family, my travels, food, music, shows neither of us ever finished. She never once brought up money. She never mentioned Sin Sod, that custom I'd heard so much about and that other women I'd chatted with before brought up by the second week, almost as a formality. With Ning that moment never came. That, more than anything, is what made me let my guard all the way down.

---

I met her in person in Samut Sakhon, outside a noodle place near the market, and for the first hour she barely felt like the same person I'd been talking to for months.

Her answers were short. Her smile came late. She checked her phone more than usual.

I put it down to nerves. Months on a screen don't prepare anyone for having the other person sitting across from you, flesh and blood, asking for the bill in a language you don't understand.

We spent those first days seeing the area: the floating market, the fishing port at sunset with the boats stacked together and salt worked into your clothes, and a temple with a huge Buddha looking out over the river that she insisted on showing me on day two. Bit by bit the initial distance wore off. By day three we were already laughing at the same nonsense that had made us laugh over video calls for months. By day four, there was nothing careful left about any of it.

---

It was in those first days that we had the conversation that, looking back, shaped everything that came after.

We were sitting at a food stall by the river when she asked me, straight out, whether this was something serious for me or whether I was just after a good time on the trip.

I told her serious. And in that moment, sitting across from her, I meant it, no catch.

She also asked if I'd had Thai girlfriends before. I told her no, nothing serious. And she made clear, with the same calm she asked everything else, that she really didn't like the idea of me talking to other women, whether on the app or anywhere else.

I respected that. At the time it felt like the least I owed her, given what I was asking her to trust me with.

I didn't tell her I already had a wife and kids waiting for me in Cork. I didn't tell her then, and I didn't tell her for many weeks after.

---

The rest of my trip through the region had other stops, but I came back to Thailand, and to Samut Sakhon, every time I could fit it into the itinerary.

Between visits we talked every day. At first it was pleasant, the kind of routine that makes a long-distance relationship feel real before it's fully earned that. Over time it started to weigh differently, though I wouldn't understand that until later.

Each time I came back, the city felt a little more familiar. I learned to order at the noodle stall without pointing at the menu. I met a couple of her friends, always in a group, always with the same careful courtesy you use to size up someone new.

One of those nights, back in Samut Sakhon, things got less careful than they should have.

A few days later she messaged me to say she'd gone to get the morning-after pill, but that she was still worried she might be pregnant anyway.

She asked what I'd do if that turned out to be the case.

I told her I'd take responsibility. I meant it, without really thinking through what that word meant for someone in my position.

---

Over the following days she started to change.

She kept asking where I'd been, who I'd talked to, whether I'd seen any other women while I was in the country. At first I read it as part of the fear we were both carrying about the pregnancy. Over time it turned into something else, closer to an interrogation than a conversation between two frightened people.

We'd planned a weekend in Bangkok, just the two of us, to get away from everything before I flew home. Two days before, she messaged to say she'd twisted her ankle getting out of a songthaew and that we should push it back.

I didn't think much of it at the time. Looking back, the story never quite added up: no photo of the ankle, no limp when I saw her a few days later, not one complaint. At the time I let it go. I had no reason not to.

---

On my last day in Thailand before flying home we had a long talk, the longest we'd had, sitting on her terrace as it got dark and the neighbours closed up their food stalls down the street.

She talked about the future. About what would happen after this visit, about whether I planned to come back soon, about how this was supposed to turn into something with structure, with a name.

I talked with the vagueness of someone who knows he can't give what's being asked of him, but doesn't want to be the one to say so first.

It became clear, without either of us saying it in so many words, that she wanted more commitment than I could offer her at that point.

---

I flew home not knowing whether she was pregnant.

The weeks that followed were some of the hardest I can remember. I looked into private clinics that ran paternity tests, buried myself in Thai visa paperwork, worked out timelines, worked out costs, worked out everything you can work out when you can't work out the one thing that actually matters. All of it while keeping up, at home, the same old life: school runs, dinner with my wife, pretending there was nothing in my head but the day-to-day.

Ning called more and more. She needed to hear me say it would be fine, that I wasn't going to leave her alone with this, that I hadn't forgotten about her the moment I walked through the airport door.

The pressure, week after week, eventually wore me down.

I told her. I was married. I had three kids. It had all been true since the first day we ever spoke, and I'd hidden it from her for months.

---

She was furious, and rightly so. She told me she felt used, that I'd made her believe in something that had never been real on my end, though for me, strange as it sounds, it had been, at least in part.

We had several rough conversations those weeks, some of them shouted, others silent in a way that hurt more than any shouting. In one of them I promised that if she was pregnant, I'd get a divorce and bring her and the baby with me, and in that moment I meant it, with the same clumsy sincerity I'd meant "serious" that first day at the food stall by the river.

Eventually she took the test on a video call, right in front of me, phone propped up on the bathroom counter.

Negative.

I felt relief, real and enormous relief. And behind it, something I hadn't expected and still find hard to fully admit: a strange kind of disappointment, as if some part of me had wanted the answer to go the other way.

---

We kept talking after that. We even made plans to see each other again.

It was during those weeks that, without quite meaning to at first, I started pulling on a thread about her life in Samut Sakhon that didn't add up. An old photo tagged with a name I didn't recognise. A comment from one of her friends that didn't match what she'd told me. I kept looking, night after night, until there was no doubt left.

She had a boyfriend. Foreign, like me. They'd been together for three years, the same three years during which, as far as I knew, she'd been single and waiting to find someone serious.

She'd hidden him from me with the same ease I'd hidden my wife from her.

---

I brought it up on a video call, with the evidence already gathered.

She denied it at first, with the same calm she denied everything. Then, once she saw there was no point denying it any further, she admitted it, slowly, word by word.

I told her I wasn't going to say anything to the other guy. It wasn't my place, and after what I myself had hidden from her for months, it would have been hard to keep a straight face while being indignant about it.

That conversation, oddly enough, ended up being the most honest one we'd ever had. No performance, no half-truths, both of us with our cards face up on the table.

The last I heard, she'd moved to Europe, to be with him, to try it properly this time, with no one else in the picture.

---

Looking back, it's a story with blame spread all around, and I'm not the one who gets to hand it out with clean hands.

I was married the entire time I knew her, so I can hardly cast myself as the victim here. I asked her for honesty while betraying her a little more every day I let the truth go untold.

It just goes to show that lying, there or anywhere else, doesn't carry a passport. Foreigners can lie just as well as anyone.