When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle met in 2016, did Princess Diana serve as matchmaker?

When Harry first saw Meghan on Instagram, he was overwhelmed by her beauty in a playful photo with a friend named Violet. Harry reached out to a mutual friend on July 1, 2016, seeking Meghan's contact information. It was his late mother's 55th birthday (Princess Diana had died in a car accident in Paris in 1997 at the age of 36, and Harry was only 12).

After connecting via Instagram over their shared love of Africa (Harry's feed was filled with photos from the continent), "we eventually exchanged phone numbers and conversed via text late into the night," the Duke of Sussex wrote in Spare. He recalled that he spent all day the next day "texting like a teenager."

"It occurred to me how eerie, how surreal, how bizarre that this marathon conversation should have begun on July 1, 2016," he wrote.

Harry confided in People about his mother, saying, "I struggled for years to accept or even talk about her death. I couldn't accept that my mother had died. When you lose a parent, or when you lose someone, especially when that grief may be the only thing left for that person, I don't think anyone can ever truly have closure."

Harry told "People" that military service and therapy helped him grieve her enormous loss and that "because of the healing process, I now feel my mom's presence more than ever. She's always with me, she's my guardian angel."