Kate Cassidy’s decision to leave Liam Payne ‘will haunt her for the rest of her life’: friend

Liam Payne’s grieving girlfriend Kate Cassidy is tormented by her decision to leave her One Direction boyfriend’s side just two days before he plunged to his death, a friend tells The Post.

“She did what she needed to do at the time,” the pal said. “She had no idea what was going to happen. I can tell you that her decision will haunt her for the rest of her life.”

The Argentina trip was supposed to last just four days, but Payne kept asking his influencer girlfriend to extend it. They ultimately spent two weeks together before she headed home to Miami.

“She wanted to be home in her own bed with her dog,” Cassidy’s friend said. “She wanted to come home.”

The friend added: “She feels bad. Everyone in her life is saying that it’s not her fault. You can’t babysit a 30-year-old grown man 24/7/365. But she’s not yet in a place to hear that.”

Two days after she left Argentina, Payne hired two prostitutes and went on a drug-fueled bender that culminated in a fatal fall from his hotel balcony, according to reports. The 31-year-old singer died instantly of massive internal and external injuries.

An autopsy found that Payne had a toxic mixture of drugs in his system at the time of his death — including crack and so-called “pink cocaine” — which is a mixture of ketamine and other drugs.

After Cassidy left Argentina and suspected her boyfriend was on a bender, she encouraged him to return to Miami, the friend says. “She tried, really. But he wasn’t receptive. She will forever be the villian for abandoning him, but that’s not what happened.”

“She planned a certain time away from home, and he wanted to extend it indefinitely,” the source says. “She wasn’t ready to do that.”

Cassidy hasn’t addressed the online backlash against her, but on Wednesday, she revealed on her Instagram that Payne told her he planned to ask her to marry him and that the couple spent time “manifesting our lives together” just weeks before his death.

“I keep your note close, even though you told me not to look at it. It said, ‘Me and Kate to marry within a year/ engaged & together forever 444,’” she said in a note to her followers.

The 25-year-old influencer said that despite Payne’s death, that they will still be “together forever” — just not “in the way we had planned.”

“You’ll always be with me,” she wrote. “I’ve gained a guardian angel.”