Hi Malik,
She most likely doesn’t want to make you feel bad.
If she genuinely liked you and wanted to be in a relationship with you, she would have expressed the same sentiment and would have been truly excited about venturing into a possible romantic relationship with you.
After a close year-long friendship with you, she should be very clear about how she feels about you in terms of friendship or romance.
She may have told you that she is willing to explore more because she didn’t want to put herself in a position where she could possibly lose that friendship if she were to tell you that there was absolutely no romantic interest on her part.
This being said, the prospect of romance may not be entirely unachievable.
Your best determiner of whether she genuinely likes you and wants to be in a relationship will depend on how she starts behaving towards you from here on out.
If she makes it easy for the both of you to get to know each other and hang out on a one on one basis and is receptive during those interactions to what are you doing and saying, then there’s a good chance that she truly does want to explore this and see where it leads.
However, if she continues acting the way she has always acted as your platonic friend and doesn’t put that much effort to get to know you and hang out on a one on one basis, then she most likely doesn’t genuinely like you on a romantic level.