Hold up, is Meghan Markle really working on a book detailing her divorce from Prince Harry?

For die-hard Royal watchers, a Meghan Markle divorce announcement would see all their Christmases come at once. Markle is public enemy number one for a certain type of curtain-twitching obsessive, as this (imagine the sneeriest voice possible) American actress stole away Prince Harry from his nation and his family.

As such they’ve been trying to manifest the Sussexes’ divorce as hard as possible, with every solo appearance the pair make held up as “proof” that they’re definitely separating. Divorce speculation is practically a cottage industry of its own, populated by legions of “body language analysts” who’ll confidently expound on how they know someone’s internal monologue from the way they’re sat in a chair.

But, if this weekend’s piece in Vanity Fair about the couple is anything to go by, the prospect of a Harry/Meghan split (Megsplit?) was taken so seriously that a book deal was on the cards. The article recounts a story in the publishing world “which a person with knowledge confirms the broad details of” that Meghan’s team approached a publishing house to gauge interest in a tell-all book about her future divorce from Prince Harry.

The idea was to tell Meghan’s side of the story of her split with Harry, letting her in her own words explain why the divorce happened, her reaction to the deluge of publicity, the inevitable legal battles, and the beginnings of her post-Harry life. This was obviously all speculative as, so far, there is no divorce, but if true it’s certainly odd for Meghan’s team to have approached a publisher with the idea, and doesn’t exactly bode well for the marriage.

Vanity Fair has another source who pours a little cold water on the idea, pointing out “if that’s true to any degree, she would have been approached and not vice versa.” This makes sense to us, as we can’t imagine Harry would be overjoyed to find out Meghan was putting out feelers about a divorce book deal.

For now, any Harry/Meghan divorce remains pure speculation, as much as some people would love it to be true. A high-profile celebrity couple not being on each others’ arms at all times is far from unusual and, if we take them at their word, they remain very much in love and deeply committed to one another.

That said, a glance back at the tumultuous 1990s shows a royal divorce is far from impossible. In that decade alone Princess Anne and Mark Philips, Prince Charles and Diana, Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson all went through high-profile divorces, generating untold public interest and millions of miles of column inches around the world. The current generation of royals aren’t keen to repeat the controversies that bedeviled their parents and appear to be focused on making their marriages work, but a lot can happen in the pressure cooker of a marriage firmly in the public eye.

So, perhaps deep in some book publisher’s safe is a carefully maintained ultra-secret contract between them and Meghan, giving them the exclusive deal on what would be one of the most scandalous celebrity tell-alls since… well, Prince Harry’s Spare. So while we underline that there’s no evidence a divorce will happen, there’s a lot of money to be made if it did, and plans are most certainly afoot to capitalize on it.