I enjoy celebrity gossip as much as the next person. At first, the story of Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, was a charming one: two people from very different worlds finding each other and forging a path forward. Their wedding ceremony, which included a gospel choir as well as the black bishop Michael Bruce Curry offering a sermon about the power of love, gave the impression that a shift, however subtle, was on the horizon. In his sermon, Bishop Curry referred to Martin Luther King Jr. and how, with love, we can “make of this old world a new world.”

As endearing as Meghan and Harry’s story was, reality was never far behind. The biggest crisis, of course, was that a woman of color was infiltrating the royal family and, more important, the royal bloodline. What should have been merely fraught but manageable quickly became untenable. There was nothing Meghan could do that would have ever been good enough, and as she has detailed in the years since, the pressures from within and outside the royal family had a detrimental effect on her mental health.

In January 2020, 20 months after their wedding, Harry and Meghan announced that they would no longer serve as senior royals. A mere 10 days later, Queen Elizabeth II made a statement that the couple would no longer be His and Her Royal Highnesses. Relations between Harry and his family only worsened, and amid this deep public rift he and Meghan came to the United States, eventually making their home in Montecito, Calif. They also settled some scores in a rather scorched-earth set of moves, including a Netflix documentary series and an interview with Oprah Winfrey.