Kate Cassidy reflects on her last words to late boyfriend Liam Payne: ‘It brings me pain and peace’

The moment in question unfolded slowly, with one of Liam’s friends calling Kate to tell her about how he may have fallen off a balcony. At the time, she recalled forcing herself to think it was just a rumour. But the panic had already begun to settle in. “I’m making all these phone calls and nobody’s answering. I’m starting to get a little bit panicky. I call his friend back and I say, ‘have you heard any updates? I’m really confused. Like what’s going on?’ and he was like, ‘the only update I’ve heard is that Liam’s…Liam’s dead’.”

Kate further recalled being in stringent denial as the horrifying news was delivered to her: “I still didn’t believe it to be true. There was just no way. I just kept saying, ‘no no no, are you sure? he’s probably just…he broke a bone, he broke a rib, he broke something. He’s not dead, he’s NOT dead. There’s no way he’s dead, there’s no way’. And at this point I just, lost it. Even talking about it, brings all these emotions back where it just still, doesn’t even feel true…I never thought I would ever get that phone call”.

But Kate has attempted to find healing by processing the pain with help from her memories with him, their last day together being a goldmine of it. She shared, “The last words that we said to each other, it brings (me) this mixture of pain and peace. It brings me pain because I can’t fully still process that, that day was the last day I was able to touch Liam, to hug Liam, to speak to him, to be in the same room as him. But it brings me peace because it was such a beautiful last moment we had together”.

Kate also painted a beautiful picture of their last day together, made up of the scenic country side, a sumptuous breakfast and horseback riding.

And while the day ended with her evening flight back to Florida following their Argentina vacation, goodbyes, however short, were never a casual affair for the two “I don’t even know, what other word to describe it, but we had this clinginess to us, where if I even went away for one night to go spend the night at my girlfriend’s house, or even go to dinner with my girlfriends, the way me and Liam would say goodbye to each other wasn’t just like ‘oh, I’ll see you later’. Majority of the time it was this heartfelt, long goodbye”.

Liam died on October 16 last year after falling from a third-floor balcony of his hotel in Buenos Aires. He was 31.⁠