I followed her one day instead of believing her story about the family visits. She didn't go to the bus station — she walked into a hotel with another man.

I'd been coming to Pattaya since the nineties, the classic two-week millionaire: saving up all year back in Poland, job after job, to live it up for a fortnight and go back to the grind like nothing happened, counting down the months to the next flight. I watched the city change completely over those two-plus decades of visits: the same bars closing and reopening under a different name, prices creeping up a little each time, but the feeling stepping off the plane was always the same.

Retiring there at 55 was always the plan, the one I'd been building in my head flight after flight for years, and in 2017 I finally did it. I sold off what little I had left in Poland, closed an entire chapter of my life in a matter of weeks, and settled in with the feeling of starting fresh exactly where I wanted to.

The novelty wore off faster than I expected. The first two weeks as a resident were just an extension of two decades of holidays. By the third I was already bored in a way I'd never felt there before, that strange kind of boredom that comes from having all the time in the world and no schedule to keep. Around then I started getting serious with a girl I'd met in a bar, one of those nights where I'd only gone in for one beer and ended up staying till close. Her name was Apple.

We took a trip to Koh Samet that was meant to be a few days, a short getaway to get to know each other away from the bar scene, and it turned into two full weeks, stretching the return date day after day with some excuse or other. By the time we finally got back to Pattaya, I was completely gone on her, in a way that hadn't happened to me in years.

She was 32, three kids living with her parents back in the village while she worked, six years in the Pattaya bars supporting them, a hard first year alone in the city and then a bit more stability, or so she told me. I talked her — without much effort, if I'm honest — into leaving the room she shared with two other girls and moving in with me.

The plan was simple, or so it seemed at the time: I'd help her out financially every month and she'd visit her family regularly, always alone, because her family didn't know about me yet. It seemed reasonable enough at the time. After all, I'd only been with her a short while to suddenly show up as the foreign boyfriend in front of the whole village, and I didn't want to rush anything that might make things awkward for her or her family.

Life was great. She was great. Attentive, cooking dishes I couldn't even pronounce, cleaning the whole apartment a couple of times a week without being asked, making me feel like the only man alive every time I walked through the door. The friends I'd watched come and go through Pattaya's bars for decades, some of them with stories that should already have been a warning to me, told me I'd got lucky with this one. I believed it too, and told anyone who'd listen.

The family visits happened just as we'd agreed, every few weeks. She was always hard to reach while she was away. Power cuts in the village, she'd explain, which sounded perfectly believable to anyone who knew rural Thailand.

She came back from one of those trips with a new iPhone that, according to her, a friend had won in a lottery and just given to her. From another she came back with 20,000 baht in her bag. I swallowed every story whole, without asking a single uncomfortable question.

Eventually, already fairly in love and thinking seriously about the future, I asked to join her on one of those visits, even just to see the village from outside the car window. She told me her family still didn't know about me, in the same calm tone as always, as if it were the first time I'd ever asked. I bought a ring at a shop downtown, modest but real, and waited for my moment, convinced it was only a matter of time before everything fell into place.

She announced another family visit. I told her I was coming this time. She went cold immediately, something I'd never seen in her before, and told me we had an agreement, and if I didn't like it, I knew where the door was.

I mentioned it to a friend over drinks that same week, a guy who'd been in Pattaya even longer than me, more to vent than to get real advice. He started laughing, slapped me on the back, but stopped laughing pretty quickly once I told him about the sudden coldness, and asked me to call her right there, in front of him, right then, to see what excuse she'd give. No answer. I tried twice more. Nothing.

He explained then, with the patience of a man who'd seen it a thousand times from a bar stool, that more experienced girls in the scene often keep several sponsors rotating at the same time, none of them aware of the others, men who send a fixed monthly allowance and visit Thailand whenever they can, a few weeks a year each. The family visits, he said, without any intention of making me feel worse, lined up perfectly with that kind of rotation.

The iPhone a friend had supposedly "won." The 20,000 baht brought back from another trip with no real explanation. The weeks entirely unreachable because of the village's famous power cuts, which by that point sounded a lot more like a rehearsed excuse than electrical bad luck.

The next time she announced a visit, I said nothing. I nodded, wished her a good trip, and the second the apartment door closed behind her I ran down the stairs while she calmly waited for the lift. I got to the street before her and followed at a distance, my heart going faster than I'd have liked to admit. She didn't go to the bus station, like she'd been telling me for months. She turned the corner, crossed two more streets, and walked straight into a mid-range hotel I didn't even know she was familiar with.

I waited outside, leaning against a wall across the street, not entirely sure what I was expecting to find or how long I was willing to wait. It was almost two hours. When she finally came out, she was hand in hand with another foreign man, older than me, with the easy calm of someone who'd done this many times before. She froze the second she saw me cross the street toward them. He asked, still not understanding the situation, what I was doing there. I told him she was my girlfriend, that she lived with me. His face went as white as I imagine mine did.

He told me, still standing in the hotel doorway, not quite letting go of her hand, that he'd been sending her 15,000 baht a month for two years, that he visited two or three times a year, that he'd even talked about buying something in her name "once things settled down." Then he turned, let her hand drop, and walked back into the hotel without another word.

That night she came back to the apartment late and apologised the second she was through the door, before I'd even said anything. When I pushed for the full truth, no more leaving anything out, she sat down on the sofa and admitted to three sponsors besides me. 15,000, 10,000, and 30,000 baht a month from an elderly Japanese man who only visited once a year but paid more than the other two combined. Plus the 20,000 I gave her every month for "her expenses," which turned out to be exactly the same kind of help as the other three, only I lived with her and had spent months believing that made me different.

The breakup followed shortly after, without much drama, almost quieter than I'd have expected given everything that had happened. There was no house built in her name, no land bought, none of the big commitments I'd watched ruin other men in Pattaya over the years — just the monthly allowance I stopped sending and a ring I ended up returning to the shop with more than a little embarrassment. But I felt like a complete idiot regardless. I'd watched this exact story play out with other men for years, sitting in the very same bar where I met her, always thinking that with all my accumulated experience since the nineties, something this textbook wasn't going to happen to me.

Still in Thailand. Still enjoying life, with no intention of going back to Poland or anywhere else. And thank god, every time I think about that returned ring, that I never got around to building her that house. Take care out there.