You Can't Afford Me

He said he didn't care. So why did he crash out? You Can't Afford Me: The Crash Out is a raw, psychological breakdown of a relationship that looked real on the surface-but was built on manipulation, inconsistency, and control behind the scenes. Through an unfiltered first-person narrative, Kia S. Howard pulls back the curtain on a dynamic where time, access, and attention created the illusion of commitment, while accountability was never truly present. What began as connection slowly turned into confusion, as mixed signals, emotional conditioning, and "future faking" kept the cycle going far longer than it should have. Until it broke. And when it did, the man who claimed he didn't care reacted in a way that exposed everything-revealing that what looked like indifference was actually control. This book goes beyond storytelling. It decodes behavior. It breaks down why someone can remain present without ever being accountable, why inconsistency becomes normalized, and why emotional attachment can form in situations that were never designed to be stable. It explains why men return after you leave, why they react when you finally detach, and why closure rarely comes from them. More importantly, it shifts the focus back to the woman. Her awareness. Her patterns. Her power to move differently. At its core, this book is about clarity-learning to stop overanalyzing words and start recognizing patterns. Because once you understand the structure behind the behavior, you stop personalizing the experience and start seeing it for what it is. And when you see it clearly, everything changes. This book is for women who: • Have experienced inconsistency disguised as connection • Have questioned their reality in a relationship • Have dealt with someone who couldn't let them go, but wouldn't do right by them • Are ready to stop explaining behavior and start recognizing it You were never the problem. You were dealing with a pattern. And once you understand the pattern, you don't repeat it. You move differently.