Bloodlines of Windsor

Fiction about a DNA Scandal in the Modern Monarchy

The notification appeared on screens like any other news alert.

A soft vibration, a glowing banner, a line of text.

Most people swiped it away before the words fully registered.

“BREAKING: New DNA Evidence Sparks Questions Over Meghan’s Children’s Royal Lineage”

Within seconds, phones lit up again.

Within minutes, hashtags began to form.

Within an hour, the palace was in crisis.

1. One Minute Ago

It started with a single email.

Not to a gossip blog, not to a fringe website, but to an international media outlet known for pushing boundaries: a network that had made a brand out of skating dangerously close to the line of defamation without quite crossing it.

The subject line was simple:

“Lineage Clearance – URGENT”

Attached, a file.

Encrypted but not impenetrable.

Inside: a partial DNA analysis, labelled with clinical detachment.

Two initials: A.M.
Two more: L.M.
And a string of anonymous identifiers, marker codes, percentage matches.

Underneath, one phrase:

“To be reviewed in the context of succession legitimacy.”

When the outlet’s legal team opened the file, the room went very quiet.

“This isn’t tabloid material,” one lawyer murmured. “This is constitutional dynamite.”

They did not publish immediately.

They did what responsible piracy looks like in the 21st century: they called London.

The message reached the palace before it reached the public.

But only just.

 

2. The First Tremor

In a small office buried deep inside Buckingham Palace, a junior aide was scrolling through messages when the screen flashed.

Her inbox updated.

A forwarded email, flagged URGENT – EXTERNAL PRESS QUERY.

The attachment would not open on her restricted device.

She called her supervisor.

“From who?” he asked.

She told him.

He went pale.

“Don’t touch it again,” he said. “I’ll take it from here.”

Within fifteen minutes, the file was in the hands of the palace’s cyber-security team.

Within thirty, it was on a secure screen in a windowless room where crises went to be contained—or to explode.

The DNA report was incomplete, carefully cropped, just enough to provoke questions, not enough to answer them.

But one thing stood out: a comparison profile, a set of genetic markers that did not match the patterns expected.

The labels were clinical, devoid of humanity.

But the implications weren’t.

“Is this real?” someone asked.

“It looks real,” replied the head of tech. “Or someone wants it to.”

“What’s the risk?”

“Global,” came the answer. “If this gets out.”

They were too late.

It already had.

3. Whispers of a File

Long before screens began to buzz and notifications blared, the trouble had been quietly growing in the spaces the public never sees: in archives, in medical files, in memories.

When Archie was born, the monarchy had bent itself out of shape to accommodate a new, modern version of itself.

No traditional hospital photo call.

No step-out-of-the-winged-doors, baby-wrapped-in-blanket moment.

The arrangements had been unusual.

The paperwork had moved differently.

Some called it progress.

Others called it defiance.

Neither label mattered as much as the fact that certain forms, typically rubber-stamped and filed without question, had drawn more eyes than usual.

A flagged medical file.

A question mark inserted as a code, not a word.

Nothing was pursued.

Not then.

The Queen was still alive.

The threshold for scandal was higher.

And Megan’s resistance to royal oversight—her insistence on privacy, on doing things “her way”—was, at the time, written off as culture clash.

“She’s American,” some said.

“She doesn’t understand how this works,” said others.

“She understands perfectly,” a few muttered.

After Meghan and Harry stepped away, after they crossed an ocean and then detonated a televised interview over it, the palace had other fires to put out.

The file stayed locked.

But it did not disappear.

Nothing ever really disappeared.

It only waited.

4. After the Queen

When Queen Elizabeth II died, a certain invisible membrane dissolved.

There were ceremonies, of course—days of rehearsed grief and flawless choreography. But beneath the mourning bands and black coats, something else was happening.

Protection fell away.

Folders once marked PRIVATE – SOVEREIGN EYES ONLY were reclassified.

Access restrictions on certain archives loosened.

It wasn’t malicious.

It was procedural.

Transition requires review.

Review requires access.

Access invites temptation.

Princess Anne, who had spent her life avoiding emotional entanglements in favor of raw duty, began to notice oddities.

Not in the ceremonies.

In the paperwork.

Document requests logged at strange hours.

Files flagged “for constitutional review.”

Among them: health records.

Not just of the Queen.

Of the line.

At first, she ignored it.

Then she saw the designation on one file:

“Sensitive – Postnatal – 2019”

The same flag she’d seen years earlier.

The same file that had been quietly sealed.

Now it had been accessed again.

“Who authorized this?” she asked.

The answer was evasive.

“A routine check, ma’am,” a clerk said.

“On whose orders?” she pressed.

He hesitated.

She didn’t like the look in his eyes.

Something was moving.

Something she might need to see before it was weaponized without her.

She began to ask questions.

That’s when Camilla came to her.

5. Camilla’s Alarm

Camilla had not expected to play this role: the one warning of institutional risk, the one urging caution not for herself, but for the future.

She had lived long enough inside the crosshairs of the crown to recognize the tremor before a quake.

An adviser—not one of hers, but someone who respected her keen sense of survival—had quietly approached her.

“There’s chatter,” he said. “About medical records. About lineage.”

“Whose?” she asked.

He hesitated.

“Archie’s,” he said. “And Lilibet’s.”

The name Lilibet still made something twist in Camilla’s chest, even after all this time—a history written in another woman’s common nickname.

“What sort of chatter?” she pressed.

“Inconsistencies,” he said carefully. “In documentation. Nothing conclusive. Just… noise. For now.”

“And if it becomes more than noise?”

He looked at her.

“Then it becomes existential.”

She carried that word with her to her next private audience with Charles.

They sat facing one another in a room that had seen every flavor of royal confession.

“Have you heard?” she asked.

He sighed.

“There are always whispers,” he said. “You can’t chase all of them, or you’ll lose your mind.”

“This one is different,” she said. “It’s not coming from the tabloids. It’s coming from within.”

He frowned.

“Within where?”

“The archives,” she said. “The files. Someone is digging. And whoever it is, they’re not doing it for curiosity.”

She laid it out—the flagged file, the access logs, the questions.

“And if someone decides to use this?” she finished. “If they choose to make this into a weapon?”

He rubbed his temples.

“Against who?” he asked.

“Against the crown,” she said. “Which means against you. Which means, whether you like it or not, against them.”

Them.

Harry.

Meghan.

And two children who had never asked for any of this.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Get ahead of it,” she replied. “Quietly. Internally. If there’s nothing there, we bury it. If there is…”

She didn’t finish.

He didn’t ask her to.

6. The Sandringham Question

The meeting at Sandringham had no agenda.

That was unusual.

You do not bring together King Charles, Princess Anne, and Prince William without an agenda.

Yet there they were, in a cold, narrow room whose walls had watched the abdication of a king two generations earlier, now prepared to hear a question that would make even that crisis look simple.

They went over the basic facts:

– A flagged medical record.
– A series of internal document requests.
– A suggestion—never written, only spoken—that the lineage of the Sussex children needed “clarification.”

“What we cannot afford,” said one constitutional adviser, “is doubt. Not about the line. Not about the blood.”

The word blood hung in the air.

No one said Meghan’s name.

No one needed to.

Then, finally, someone said it:

“Do we know with certainty,” the adviser asked, his voice very quiet, “who the children belong to?”

The question dropped between them like a stone.

Anne’s jaw clenched.

Charles closed his eyes briefly.

William stared straight ahead.

The adviser swallowed.

“I mean no disrespect,” he added quickly. “But if this becomes public, and we have not asked the question ourselves—”

“We will be accused of concealing it,” Anne finished.

“Or of negligence,” he added. “Which may be worse.”

The room fell silent.

To ask was to open a door that might never close.

To refuse to ask was to risk the crown on blind faith in a world that no longer believed without proof.

Finally, William spoke.

“Who started this?” he asked.

The adviser hesitated.

“That hardly matters now, sir,” he said.

“It matters to me,” William replied.

Because he already knew.

It had started with a request he had made himself.

7. William’s Line

The idea had not come to William fully formed.

It had grown over time, the way cracks widen in a stone under years of pressure.

He loved his brother.

He meant that.

He also did not recognize him anymore.

Harry’s book.

Harry’s interviews.

Harry’s stories about cruelty and neglect and a system that had nearly destroyed him.

William had watched them all.

He had seen their father’s shoulders sag under new waves of blame.

He had watched every struggle inside their private world be weaponized for public consumption.

He had not forgiven that.

He wasn’t sure he ever would.

Yet he understood, in his own way, the anger that fueled it.

He knew what it felt like to be trapped.

The difference was this: he had chosen to be trapped.

He had chosen the crown over escape.

And that meant something.

In late-night meetings with constitutional advisers, he began by asking hypotheticals.

“What would happen,” he said, “if someone in the line turned their back on the institution completely? Could we remove them to protect the crown?”

He listened to answers about precedent, about how far back messy bloodlines travelled, about affairs and illegitimate children and secrets buried for stability.

It was, at first, abstract.

Then came the flagged file from the postnatal records.

Then came the whispers.

“Could questions about a child’s paternity,” he asked carefully one night, “create a constitutional crisis?”

The adviser paused.

“Yes,” he said. “If that child stood anywhere near the throne. Or even if they did not, but their position could be used as leverage by those who wished to destabilize the monarchy.”

“And if there were doubts?” William asked. “Not allegations. Doubts.”

“Then those doubts would need to be resolved,” the adviser said. “Privately, if possible. Publicly only if necessary.”

“Who has the authority to initiate that?” William asked.

“The sovereign,” came the answer. “Or the heir apparent, under certain circumstances, through legal channels.”

William did not specify which he was asking as.

Son.

Or future king.

He requested a legal analysis.

Not about Archie and Lilibet by name.

On paper, it was about “succession legitimacy in modern constitutional frameworks.”

In practice, it was about them.

He told no one.

Not at first.

Not even Charles.

8. The Leak

The palace is a sieve.

It has always been a sieve.

Whispered conversations pass through walls. Private calls echo down stairwells. Papers left on desks are read by eyes that were never meant to see them.

The DNA report did not come from a lab chosen by Meghan and Harry.

It was compiled from fragments—medical data, genealogical markers, partial profiles obtained under unclear circumstances.

Unclear, but not accidental.

It found its way into a file labelled “lineage clearance” and onto a restricted network.

Most who had access looked and then looked away.

One did not.

A staff member—mid-level, intelligent, disillusioned—watched the file’s existence become a topic of hushed conversation.

They heard the way the children were spoken about—as problems, as risks to be managed, as “questions.”

They thought of two small faces on screens, thousands of miles away, dragged into a game they could not even name.

They made a choice.

They downloaded the report.

They encrypted it.

They created an anonymous email account.

They sent it—not to a British paper, which would be easiest to silence, but to a foreign network they knew wouldn’t ignore it.

Then they waited.

They did not wait long.

9. Meghan’s Fury

On a hill in Montecito, the Pacific rolling blue and endless beyond the windows, Meghan was reading a book to Archie when her phone buzzed.

She almost ignored it.

Then she saw Harry’s name.

“Have you seen it?” his text read.

“Seen what?” she replied.

He sent a link.

She clicked.

The headline was cautious, the wording lawyer-approved:

“International Outlet Probes Alleged DNA Report Tied to Royal Lineage Questions”

Her eyes skimmed the first paragraphs.

Her hand tightened on the phone.

“Archie, darling,” she said softly, forcing her voice to stay calm, “go find Daddy. Tell him Mama needs him.”

He ran out happily.

Her heart hammered.

The article did not mention names.

Not yet.

But the hints were clear enough to anyone who understood the royal family’s structure.

“Children recently added to the line of succession…”

“Questions reportedly raised about postnatal documentation…”

“Sources point to a high-profile couple who stepped back from royal duties…”

It was them.

It was their children.

A cold clarity dropped into her bones.

They were doing this.

Again.

When Harry walked in, she thrust the phone at him.

“They’re coming for our kids,” she said.

His face went white.

The sound that came out of him was not royal.

It was wounded animal.

“We shut this down,” she said. “Immediately. Legally. Publicly. We do not let them make this into a circus.”

He shook his head.

“If they’ve got anything official…” he began.

“They don’t,” she snapped. “Because there is nothing to have. This is a smear. A coordinated, hateful, racist smear. And we are not playing along.”

She stared past him, as if seeing through time.

“They couldn’t break us as individuals,” she said. “So now they’re trying to poison the bloodline.”

She called her lawyer.

By the time she hung up, cease and desist letters were already being drafted.

She also called someone else.

A journalist.

One she trusted.

“Off the record, for now,” she said. “But listen carefully. They’re trying something new.”

10. The Name

When the DNA leak hit, it came with just enough detail to ignite speculation and just enough vagueness to pull restraint over hard facts.

But internet speculation does not respect restraint.

In the dark corners of social media and the bright lights of gossip forums, a theory began to form.

Screenshots resurfaced.

Old photos.

Past acquaintances.

Megan’s life before Harry was not a blank slate.

Someone began studying the overlaps.

Another man’s name emerged.

An American.

Wealthy.

Visible.

Successful.

He had been in her orbit, if not her heart, years before anyone imagined her curtseying to a queen.

His travel schedule lined up, in places, obscenely neatly, with unphotographed weeks in Meghan’s past.

The metadata in the leaked report contained a partial match code—a string of numbers that, when cross-referenced against a database run by an American genealogy company, appeared to ping something.

It was circumstantial.

It was flimsy.

It was enough.

By the time tabloids began hinting at “a prominent American media figure” with possible “genetic overlap,” Meghan’s lawyers had already filed preemptive actions in three jurisdictions.

Defamation.

Privacy violations.

Data theft.

The man in question issued a terse statement denying everything and promising his own legal response.

King Charles was informed of the name during a briefing he had not wanted.

The adviser spoke it.

Charles’s face drained of color.

He did not shout.

He did not curse.

He simply leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.

“For God’s sake,” he whispered. “Not the children.”

11. Harry’s Explosion

The palace walls had seen arguments before.

They had heard shouted accusations, slammed doors, whispered betrayals.

They had never heard what echoed through one chamber when Harry returned to London alone.

The meeting was arranged under the guise of a “private family discussion.”

Present: King Charles.
Prince William.
Prince Harry.

No cameras.

No advisers.

Just blood.

Harry walked in with shoulders squared and jaw clenched.

He did not sit.

“Say it,” he said.

Charles blinked.

“Say what?” he replied.

“The question,” Harry said, voice shaking. “The one you’re all asking behind closed doors, in corridors, in your little crisis meetings. Say it to my face.”

William shifted in his seat.

“Harry,” he began, “this isn’t—”

Harry cut him off.

“Are you questioning whether I am the father of my own children?” he demanded.

Silence.

He looked from one to the other.

“You want to talk about blood?” he said. “Fine. Let’s talk about blood.”

His voice climbed.

“Mine was never good enough for this place. Not when I married a woman you didn’t like. Not when I told the truth about what this family did to us. But now it’s good enough to dissect? To pull apart in public guesses over my son and daughter’s DNA?”

Charles’s hands trembled.

“Nobody wants this,” he said. “Believe that or don’t, but it’s true.”

“Then shut it down,” Harry snapped. “Right now. Issue a statement. Deny it. Say the reports are false, disgusting, and beneath response. Say it loudly. Say it together.”

William’s eyes hardened.

“We can’t do that,” he said.

Harry turned on him.

“Can’t or won’t?” he said.

“Both,” William replied. “We don’t comment on this kind of thing. You know that. Once the monarchy becomes a lab report, it never stops. And if there is even a shred of doubt—”

“There isn’t,” Harry said, each word a bullet.

“You know that,” William shot back. “We don’t. Not formally. Not in a way that will stand against what’s coming if this escalates. This is bigger than—”

“Than what?” Harry growled. “Bigger than my children’s right to exist without being called bastards in every corner of the internet?”

The word hung in the air like a slap.

Charles flinched.

“We will not allow that language,” he said weakly.

Harry laughed, a harsh, humorless sound.

“You won’t allow it inside these walls,” he said. “Out there?” He gestured toward the window. “Out there, it’s already happening.”

He slammed a hand on the table.

“You have two choices,” he said. “Stand with us, or admit you never have.”

William’s jaw clenched.

“The crown,” he said quietly, “must be protected.”

Harry stared at him as if looking at a stranger.

“And what about family?” he asked.

Neither of them answered.

Harry’s voice dropped.

“Do you really think,” he said slowly, “that if you push this any further, Meghan and I won’t tell the world everything? Every comment. Every doubt. Every time someone in this building questioned the legitimacy of our children because their mother wasn’t the right shade for this family?”

Charles stood up abruptly.

“Enough,” he said, louder than either of them had ever heard him. “Enough.”

He looked at Harry.

“I am your father,” he said.

“And I am a father,” Harry replied. “That is the only title I care about now.”

He turned and walked out.

No one followed.

12. Diana’s Shadow

After that meeting, Harry did something he hadn’t done in years.

He wrote a letter.

Not an email.

Not a text.

A letter.

He sat at a small desk in a guest bedroom at Frogmore, the house that had once been a gift and then a reminder and now felt like a ghost.

He began simply:

“Mum,”

He poured everything onto the page.

The rage.

The humiliation.

The betrayal.

The irony of his life coming full circle—his children now subjected to the same institution that had dissected his mother.

He wrote about the DNA leak.

About the palace’s hesitation.

About William’s cold, careful logic.

He asked questions to a woman who could never answer them.

“What would you tell me to do?” he wrote.
“How do I protect them from a machine that devours everything it touches?”
“When do I stop hoping they will choose me over the crown?”

He folded the letter and did not send it anywhere.

He left it on the table, under a photo of her.

It did not need a destination.

It had one.

Inside him.

13. The Queen’s Letter

The discovery of Queen Elizabeth’s letter did not make headlines.

Not yet.

It was found by a royal archivist in Windsor, a man whose job it was to sort through documents that most people would find mundane but which, occasionally, contained the weight of history.

The envelope was tucked behind a false panel in the Queen’s private desk.

No name.

No date.

Just a wax seal.

He hesitated before opening it.

Then, following protocol, he reported it up the chain.

Eventually, it made its way to Charles.

He broke the seal himself.

The handwriting was hers: upright, careful, firm even in age.

There may come a time,
the letter read,
when bloodlines must be protected, even when love misleads.

He read the line again.

And again.

The rest of the letter was reflective, almost meditative—a monarch near the end of her reign contemplating the balance between duty and affection, between the people she loved and the institution she had promised her life to.

She wrote of past scandals—never by name, only by shape.

Illegitimate heirs.

Hidden affairs.

Rewritten histories.

“The crown cannot be inherited through doubt,” she wrote. “Doubt is a crack that will break us from within.”

Charles felt something heavy settle in his chest.

Had she known?

Had she seen this coming?

Or was this simply her experience distilled into warning, now horribly relevant?

Anne read the letter too.

She didn’t speak for a long time afterward.

“This wasn’t meant to be buried,” she said eventually.

“It was meant for guidance,” Charles replied.

“Then let it guide you,” she said. “But don’t use it as a weapon.”

Her eyes were hard.

“Against who?” he asked.

She didn’t answer.

She didn’t need to.

14. The Options

The emergency meeting that followed was less about feelings than about strategy.

Present:

– Charles.
– William.
– Anne.
– Three constitutional lawyers.
– Two crisis communications experts.
– A private secretary.

Three options were written on a board.

Quiet removal
Remove Archie and Lilibet from the line of succession quietly. Offer no explanation beyond “family decisions.” Hope the public’s interest dies down.
Public DNA
Demand formal DNA testing. Present it as a move to protect the integrity of the crown. Risk turning two children into specimens and their parents into defendants in the court of global opinion.
Silence
Do nothing. Issue no comment. Let the storm rage, betting that scandal cycles move on and that the monarchy’s mystique will outlast the noise.

“Each one is a disaster,” said the head lawyer.

“We’re choosing our flavor of disaster,” the communications expert replied.

William spoke first.

“We cannot have uncertainty in the line,” he said, voice like steel. “Not now. Not when everything else is already shifting. We need clarity. Official, legal clarity.”

“You’re talking about option two,” one adviser said.

“Yes,” William replied. “If they have nothing to hide, they should welcome the chance to put this to rest.”

Anne shook her head.

“You are not turning your nephew and niece into exhibits,” she said.

“And what happens,” William countered, “if we do nothing and a year from now someone produces more data, more allegations? What happens to the crown then? To George?”

The room fell silent at his son’s name.

Charles stared at the options.

“I will not strip my grandchildren quietly,” he said.

“And you will not strip them loudly either,” Anne added.

The crisis expert cleared his throat.

“Option three,” he said cautiously, “gives us room. We can condemn the leak, condemn the intrusion, but avoid engaging with the specifics. Emphasize the children’s privacy. Frame the story as an attack on them, not us.”

“It is an attack on us,” William said.

“It’s both,” Anne replied. “Which is why we must not be the ones making it worse.”

A phone buzzed.

A note was passed to Charles.

He read it and closed his eyes.

Meghan’s legal team had sent an ultimatum.

Any public action that implied doubt about her children’s legitimacy, it read, would be met with full disclosure of every private conversation she and Harry had ever had with the royal household about race, lineage, and acceptance.

“They’re threatening to scorch earth,” the lawyer said.

“Of course they are,” Anne muttered.

“They’re protecting their children,” Charles said quietly.

So was he.

In his way.

They all were.

That was the problem.

“Option three,” he said at last. “Silence. For now. We condemn the leak, not the people it targets. We protect the children before the institution. This time.”

William stiffened.

“You’re making a mistake,” he said.

Charles looked at him.

“I’ve made plenty,” he replied. “But I will not make them pay for ours.”

 

 

15. The World Reacts

The palace statement, when it came, was brief.

It called the DNA leak “a gross invasion of privacy,” condemned the “unauthorized and likely illegal use of medical data,” and reminded the world that “two young children are at the heart of this speculation and must be protected from it.”

It said nothing about authenticity.

Nothing about tests.

Nothing about legitimacy.

It was, in effect, Option Three.

Silence, dressed in outrage.

The world did what it always does.

It filled the gaps.

Some saw the statement as a refusal to play a grotesque game.

“Good,” said one commentator. “We should not be asking for DNA reports on children like they’re lab specimens.”

Others saw it as confirmation.

“If it weren’t true,” one pundit said on a late-night panel, “why not simply deny it outright?”

Hashtags rose and fell.

#RoyalBloodline
#ProtectTheChildren
#ShowTheProof
#LeaveThemAlone

Parliament took notice.

In back rooms and committee discussions, politicians began to ask uncomfortable questions.

“Should the line of succession,” one MP asked, “include people who live permanently outside the UK? Should there be formal verification procedures in place, given modern technology?”

It was not about Archie and Lilibet by name.

It didn’t need to be.

The monarchy, for the first time, found itself facing the prospect that its future might be decided not just in palaces and public squares, but in legislative chambers.

16. The Children

Archie did not know what DNA was.

Lilibet did not understand what a bloodline meant.

They knew their parents.

They knew their house, their garden, their routines.

They knew that sometimes their faces appeared on screens and their parents turned those screens off quickly, with tight smiles and gentle distractions.

“Let’s go play outside,” Meghan would say.

“Let’s build a fort,” Harry would suggest.

They did not know why their parents’ voices grew quieter behind closed doors.

They did not know what it meant when lawyers’ names were mentioned more often than grandparents’.

They did not know they had become symbols in a war older than both of them combined.

They were children.

Caught in an argument about blood.

The cruelest part, perhaps, was this:

No result—no test, no denial, no decree—could ever undo the fact that their names had been dragged through this.

Even if the leak was proven fake.

Even if the data was discredited.

Even if the world moved on.

Some will always remember.

Some will always believe the worst.

It would follow them, in whispers and articles and sideways glances.

That is what scandals do.

They stain memory.

Not fact.

Memory.

17. The Fragile Crown

The monarchy did not fall.

In the weeks that followed, it carried on with the business of appearing unshaken.

Investitures.

Walkabouts.

Visits to schools and hospitals.

Ribbons cut.

Hands shaken.

Smiles carefully arranged.

Behind the scenes, nothing was the same.

William and Harry spoke less.

When they did, their conversations were brittle, edged, full of things unsaid.

Charles aged visibly.

He found himself glancing at his grandchildren’s photos more often, feeling a kind of guilt that had no clear name.

Meghan fortified her world.

She tightened her circle.

She chose her interviews carefully.

When asked directly about the DNA scandal in one televised segment, she looked the interviewer in the eye and said:

“My children know who their father is. That is all that matters to us. The rest is noise created by people who cannot stand that we chose love and peace over their expectations.”

It was both an answer and a declaration of war.

The palace responded with nothing.

They had chosen their option.

They would live with it.

Historians would later debate this period.

They would argue about whether the monarchy had weathered the storm or merely survived it.

They would ask if this was the moment when the public’s faith in royal blood as an unquestioned fact quietly eroded, replaced by a new, modern skepticism.

They would point to the Queen’s letter.

To William’s inquiries.

To Harry’s explosion.

To Meghan’s fury.

To two children whose names became shorthand for a question the crown never thought it would face:

What happens when royal blood is no longer believed on trust?

The palace gates still stood.

They shone in the sunlight, iron and gold, as they had for generations.

But the foundation beneath them?

It had cracked.

Not enough to collapse.

Not yet.

Just enough that, on quiet nights, when the city slept and the cameras were off, those who walked the corridors of Buckingham, Windsor, and Kensington sometimes wondered—

How many more shocks could this structure take before it stopped being a symbol and became a relic?

Blood had always held it together.

Now blood was pulling it apart.

And somewhere far from London, in a house on a hill by the sea, a boy and a girl ran through a garden, laughing, blissfully unaware—for now—of how much of the world’s fear and fury had been pinned to their DNA.

They were not scandals.

They were not threats.

They were not line items in succession analyses.

They were just children.

The rest was a story the adults had written around them, in ink too dark to wash away.