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A few hours later, my room is ready. I’m handed a heavy bronze metal key that looks like it should be unlocking a vault of secret treasure rather than a hotel room. After a few twists of the knob, the door swings open. Inside is a four-poster bed with a floral headboard all surrounded by walls painted a soothing pale blue—like if Daphne Bridgerton took a time machine to the 2020s and decided to redecorate. A claw tub sits by a window where Dean Street bustles below with Britons drinking pints outside a nearby pub on the first nice day of summer. It’s all very lovely. But instead, my back is turned and I’m staring at the wardrobe in the corner. Its presence deeply disappoints me, as it means that I don’t have the same room as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
Lying in bed, the raucous cheers from the pub crowd becoming a kind of white noise, I wondered why I even cared. Perhaps it was because I was conditioned to. As a child, my life revolved around Disney movies. And just as I grew out of those, I grew into Kate Middleton: in March 2004, The Sun broke the news that Prince William had a girlfriend: “Wills gets a girl!” read their frontpage. It somehow reached me, a sixth grader in the suburbs in Connecticut, whose parents allowed her an hour a day on the family’s Windows 2000. Despite Kate being a child of multi-millionaires who went to prestigious English schools, they painted her as a Cinderella: she was a middle class girl who managed to win the heart of the future King of England through beauty and grace. In my freshman year of college, I set my alarm to 6 a.m. so I could watch their wedding—but I partied too hard the night before and slept through it. When I woke up and realized what happened, I felt disappointed in myself, despite it being the wedding of these two distant people I didn’t and would never know.
As Kate Middleton stepped into her role as Princess Catherine, I stumbled into my early twenties. I met a boy that I loved. For a while, it was perfect. Then it wasn’t. And every time we fought, a delusional thought crept up from my subconscious even as I fought to push it back down: What if a prince was still waiting in his castle? Just as our relationship ended, the press uncovered Prince Harry was dating Meghan Markle. The familiar narrative I’d thought about had actually emerged: an American commoner had charmed the Prince of England with her elegance and intelligence.
