Child support payments

My partner (F) and his ex (N) have split custody of their son (J), but N and J live in another country so for the past 6 years, he has spent most of his time there, and he comes over to us for 2 or 3 weeks at a time, every 6 weeks.

We pay child support payments to N every Monday. Their custody agreement states that payments should be made on a Wednesday (something to do with how the banks work in her area) but she requested that it be paid early a every week so we just started doing it early each week anyways. The amount we pay is reviewed yearly, and we always round it up to the nearest 10, plus give extra when we can, plus we pay for and undertake all of the travel arrangements to bring him over and take him back to his mum.

For a few weeks now, N has been saying that she isn’t coping and needs a break away from J, but every time we’ve tried to say that he could come and stay with us for a while she’s shut the conversation down. Last week however, she called very upset and basically said that we needed to go and get J by the weekend, and that he needs to stay with us “for the foreseeable future”, until she’s more able to manage. We talked with her a lot to make sure she really means it etc, and yesterday we made arrangements to go and get him today.

To get him over to us requires 2 flights and 11 hours of driving, and because of the pandemic, we’ve also had to apply for emergency relocation licenses etc, and all in all its cost us around £650 just to get him here. We didn’t really care about the cost at all because it is what it is, he comes first, and it’s an emergency situation. However, I’ve just texted N to say we’re home etc, and she just replied with “cool, when can I expect my money? I forgot to pack a few things in his suitcase so I’ll send them over as soon as that money is there”. And honestly, I don’t know what to say. We spoke about the financial side of things briefly a few days ago and basically said that if she couldn’t afford to come any visit or have J go back to her for a visit there then we could help out with that because it is important that they can see each other, and she was very grateful, and the child support payments were brought up and she did give a quick “yeah sure” but F and I figured that the short reply meant that maybe she wouldn’t really want to pay the child support payments to us; we never really considered that she’d still want us to pay her while J isn’t even living with her. The custody agreement doesn’t name parents, it just states that the parent who has the child for the majority will receive payment from the other parent.

Am I being dumb or missing something here, or is it wrong of her to expect us to keep paying child support for a child who lives with us?

F is currently in work unfortunately as he got called in very early this morning before we left so I haven’t had chance to speak with him about it yet, but just wanted to get some advice on what’s expected here as I’ve never had to deal with this situation.

Thanks 🙏🏼