We know Prince Harry and Prince William can’t stand each other anymore (not quite to Mufasa and Scar levels, thankfully, but still), and we know that Meghan Markle and her brother-in-law never got along. One pairing out of the Royal family’s former Fab Four we don’t often hear about, however, is Harry and his sister-in-law, Kate Middleton.

Meghan and Kate might have had such an argumentative dynamic that they both allegedly made the other cry amid the drama of Harry’s wedding, but things were ostensibly much different between the Duke of Sussex and the Princess of Wales prior to the great Royal rift of 2020. In fact, Harry and Kate might’ve once been a whole lot closer than many ever realized.

How close? Comparable to Harry’s bond with his much-missed mother, Princess Diana, apparently…

“Losing Kate was Harry’s second great loss after losing his mother:” Prince Harry’s true feelings about Kate Middleton, revealed

While speaking to The Mirror, Royal author Tom Quinn made some bold claims about what hurts Harry the most about how everything went down with the Royals. According to Quinn, Harry and Kate were once as close as can be, with their “warm, uncomplicated” friendship meaning so much to him that Quinn even says that losing this bond was “Harry’s second great loss” after Diana’s death.

“He really misses that warm, uncomplicated relationship [with Middleton], and he is torn between loyalty to his wife and regret about the loss of the woman he was so close to,” Quinn posits. “Losing Kate was Harry’s second great loss after losing his mother.”

We have seen other evidence of how much Harry cares for Catherine in recent months. He’s known to have broken the two sides of the family’s radio silence with each other a few times this year to reach out to Kate, in the wake of her cancer diagnosis. Most recently, it’s said to have meant a lot for Harry to have seen her looking so happy and healthy while attending July’s Wimbledon tennis tournament, so he sent her a personal message to wish her the best.

Unfortunately, it seems Kate is less keen to keep the flame of their friendship alive. It’s been reported that William and Kate have implemented a “self-imposed ban” on all things Harry and Meghan this summer, as the princess joins her family for a retreat to the Royals’ Balmoral estate in Scotland to recuperate. Likewise, as per Quinn, there’s no love lost between Kate and Meghan, with Harry’s wife not sharing his fondness for his sister-in-law.

“Meghan doesn’t feel guilty about Kate, because she feels that Kate should’ve been the one person in the Royal Family to back her against every difficulty,” Quinn said, echoing what we’ve known all along about Kate and Meghan’s frosty relationship. “Apart from anything else, Meghan knew Kate was an outsider, so she just couldn’t understand why Kate always towed the royal line rather than supporting her, Meghan, the other outsider.”

Is being cut off from Kate genuinely a much bigger loss to Harry than severing ties with his father and brother, and almost as painful to him as losing his mother? If so, then is this the thread that Harry can tug to pull himself closer to the Royal family again? Or is everything already too unraveled to fix?