Meghan Markle set to have a new stepmum – just two years older than her | Royal | News
Meghan Markle photographed with father Thomas before split (Image:-)
Meghan Markle’s estranged father Thomas has told friends he is ready to remarry at 81, according to a close family source. He fell in love with Filipino nurse Rio Caneda, who was 35 years his junior and just two years older than the Duchess of Sussex, and who would be his stepdaughter if they married.
Our source said: “Thomas told me he’s marrying her immediately, and he’s telling the rest of the family that he’s happier than he could have ever imagined at the thought of spending the rest of his life with Rio.”
The couple met at a rehabilitation hospital in Cebu City, the Philippines, after Mr. Markle underwent life-saving emergency surgery to remove his left leg below the knee last December.
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In an interview two months ago, the divorced mother of two grown children told Rio that she felt “blessed and beyond happy” to have found joy again after years of pain following serious health problems and a split from her youngest daughter, Meghan, 44, just weeks before she married Prince Harry in 2018.
Mr Markle, who moved to Cebu with his son Tom Jnr, 59, last year, is now back in America, where he will be fitted with a state-of-the-art prosthetic limb and spend time with his other daughter Meghan’s half-sister Samantha, 61.
Tom Jnr and Samantha are the children of Mr Markle’s first marriage, to secretary Roslyn Loveless, which ended in divorce in 1975. Meghan’s mother is his second wife, Doria Ragland.
They divorced eight years later, in 1987, when the future Duchess of Sussex was six, and they shared custody until she went to college before embarking on a Hollywood acting career.
Mr Markle said of Meghan in a joint interview with his new love Rio: “I still don’t know why you ghosted me.”
To date, she has never met her son-in-law Prince Harry, her husband of eight years, or her grandchildren Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, who turns five on Tuesday.
Thomas Markle appears in a TV interview (Image: GBNews)
Thomas accused of ghosting Meghan before royal wedding to Prince Harry (Image: Getty)
But she insisted: “I have suffered for many years because of what happened to my youngest daughter, Meghan. I am finally at peace. I am enjoying my life. I don’t care what people think anymore.”
“I’m an old man and I never thought I’d be alive at almost 82. What happened with Rio happened naturally. We became close and eventually she moved in with me.
“This is a relationship that I value. He makes me very happy and takes very good care of me. I hope I can make him happy too.”
According to our source, Mr. Markle has not yet given any hints about where he and Rio will get married; In the US or in the Philippines, where he says he “loves” living and “enjoys life”?
The source added: “He still has recovery time to spend at least a few months in America, where he meets Rio face to face almost every day.
“He says he’d like it if she could see America sometime, too, so I think we’ve got a ways to go before we hear the wedding bells. But from everything he’s said, the sound of those bells is very much on his mind, and it’s clear he loves her very much.”
