Just days before a huge military procession was due to march through London, the British royal family released a cryptic message that seemed to be directed at one of their own.
Buckingham Palace told British media outlets that King Charles III hoped "nothing will detract or distract" from ceremonies to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.
It was an odd message for the palace to seed into the British press.
Who would intend to overshadow events to mark the day Nazi Germany surrendered to Allied forces?
But the veiled warning came just days after Charles's second-born son, Prince Harry, declared a war of his own against his father.
"If anything was to happen to me, my wife, or my father's grandchildren, if anything was to happen to them, look where the responsibility lies," Harry said in an explosive interview with the BBC.
After "stepping back" as a senior working royal in 2020, Harry and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, were stripped of their state-funded protection.
Since then, Harry has been battling the courts, the palace, and most crucially, his father, for his security detail to be reinstated when he is in the UK.
But the battle over police protection is not just about safety or logistics. It's not even about power, jealousy and rivalries within the House of Windsor.
At its core, this is a family still reckoning with the fallout of the tragic death of Princess Diana.
Despite the crowns, the fame, and the privilege that come with being the Windsors, they are locked in a dispute that can happen when a family has endured such a devastating loss.
"I think nearly every decision and utterance that Harry makes is driven by his grief over his mother," Giselle Bastin, a royal commentator from Flinders University, said.
"And his driving motivation in everything he does is his belief that he has to avenge his mother's grievances with the royal establishment and with Charles, in particular."
Harry was just 12 years old when he learnt members of his family could be pursued to their death, but as he has repeatedly asked for protection, his sole surviving parent has told him he can't get involved.
Now the family is split — oceans apart, still swimming in the unrelenting sea of grief.
'I don't know how much longer my father has'
When Harry and Meghan moved to the US in 2020, they insisted that while they were no longer working royals, the threat to their lives remained the same.
Harry, a British military veteran, has been the target of an assassination plot by al-Qaeda, while Meghan was vilified by right-wing extremists because she is a black woman.
"My status hasn't changed," Harry told the BBC.
"It can't change. I am who I am. I am part of what I'm part of, and I can never escape that. My circumstances will always be the same."
Harry's grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, appears to have agreed that they were vulnerable.
Soon after they left the UK, her aide wrote a letter to parliament on her behalf, stating that due to a "well-documented history of targeting of the Sussex family by extremists, it is imperative that the family continues to be provided with effective security".
Just three months later, the UK Protection of Royalty and Public Figures committee (RAVEC) stripped Harry of his protection anyway.
"I have had it described to me, once people knew about the facts, that this is a good old-fashioned establishment stitch-up — and that's what it feels like," he told the BBC.
He has spent the past five years battling RAVEC's decision in the courts, claiming that forces within the palace withdrew his protection as a means of dragging him back home.
Harry says under current arrangements, he can only return to the UK if he gives RAVEC 30 days' notice. And if he makes private security arrangements, his guards are legally banned from carrying guns — a restriction he says makes it impossible to bring his wife and children to the UK.
"I love my country, I always have done, despite what some people in that country have done," he told the BBC.
"I think that it's really quite sad that I won't be able to show my children my homeland."
After his last appeal was rejected, Harry has exhausted his legal options.
But this has always been a broader battle between Harry and his sole living parent.
While he publicly criticises Charles in one breath, Harry expresses his desire to reconcile in the next.
"I don't know how much longer my father has — he won't speak to me because of this security stuff but it would be nice to reconcile," he said.
In some ways Harry may be testing the thread of unconditional love that is supposed to connect a parent and child. But in royal life, that thread is stitched into a complicated tapestry, frayed by protocol, duty and terms set by the king.
A family missing a broker
Harry has tried to appeal to his father through the courts and the press, but King Charles has remained steadfast in his refusal to engage with his son.
Harry wants safety — for himself and his young family. For any person, the need for safety is second only to the need for food and water and Harry believes that to be safe in the United Kingdom, his family needs security.
For Harry the threat is not hypothetical.
Princess Diana was 36 years old when she died in a tunnel in Paris.
From then, Harry would have to figure out how to be safe — and how to grow up — without his mother.
Diana worked feverishly to protect her boys. She knew William was born to rule, but Harry was "a different character altogether", she once said.
The world lost its favourite princess, but Harry lost the biggest advocate for his welfare inside the royal family.
At Diana's funeral, her brother Earl Spencer vowed to do everything he could to ensure William and Harry's "souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned".
Harry has been open about how scarring the day of Diana's funeral was and how her death has continued to impact him.
"My mother had just died, and I had to walk a long way behind her coffin, surrounded by thousands of people watching me while millions more did on television," he told Newsweek in 2017.
"I don't think any child should be asked to do that, under any circumstances. I don't think it would happen today."
When he spoke with Oprah Winfrey in 2021, Harry spoke about how he had undergone therapy for anxiety and anger towards the media over the death of Diana.
He also spoke about how his father told him the spotlight was something he'd had to get used to.
"My father used to say to me when I was younger, he used to say to both William and I: 'Well it was like that for me so it's going to be like that for you,'" Harry said.
"That doesn't make sense. Just because you suffered doesn't mean that your kids have to suffer, in fact quite the opposite."
Inside the House of Windsor, the voice that represented him so passionately to his father and to the Firm was gone — not forgotten by the millions of people around the world who loved her, but missing from her sons' lives and from the decisions about her boys and their public lives that were to come.
In 2021, Harry lost his grandfather Prince Philip. The following year, Harry also lost his grandmother and the only person in his world who had more authority than his father.
"The queen and Prince Philip were the main players in the arrangements made around Harry and Meghan's ceasing to be working royals," Ms Bastin said.
"But many of the tough decisions would have been made by William and Charles."
When he spoke to the BBC, Harry said the devastation he felt after realising there were no avenues left to pursue protection was more about "the people behind the decision".
"Is it a win for them? Is it a win that I don't get the protection that the threats, risks and impacts say that I should?" he said.
"There have been so many disagreements between me and some of my family. This current situation that has been ongoing now for five years with regards to human life and safety is the sticking point, it is the only thing that's left."
Ms Bastin said the relationship was now "at a fairly low point".
"Harry speaks broadly of an 'establishment' that is out to compromise his safety, but his inference is clear: King Charles is the pinnacle of this 'establishment'," she said.
Reconciling a bereaved family
When a child is bereaved, "their whole world view just shatters in an instant", according to Carolyn Johns, a bereavement counsellor at Australia's National Centre for Childhood Grief.
"The view they had about safety and stability and security, all that gets shattered … into a million bits.
"If it's a parent that's died … they're aware now that the worst possible thing in their life has happened and could happen again."
As they grow, bereaved children take their grief with them. As they reach life's milestones, the loss of their parent can again come to the foreground — grieving the missing parent at their wedding, grieving the lack of a grandparent when they have their own children.
"Grief is forever, but it can be in the foreground and the background," Ms Johns said.
To better deal with grief as an adult, bereaved children need a sense of safety, as well as "access to truth and inclusion".
These are all things Harry still talks about today, all referenced in his latest BBC interview.
Death is universal, but grief is cultural and it will often follow the norms inside a family. But individually, grief will make family members a more exaggerated version of themselves, according to Ms Johns.
"A dysfunctional family … they're grieving — they're even a more exaggerated version of that. So the conflicts within the family are going to be heightened," Ms Johns said.
"I don't want to over-generalise, but mums can be the anchor and when that's gone, there's that feeling of [being] lost."
Harry has spoken about his own grief, in particular how he spent his 20s running from it.
He's spoken to bereaved military families about how he once told himself: "I don't want to talk about it because it makes me sad, but once realising if I do talk about it and I'm celebrating their life, then things become easier."
In Meghan, Harry found someone who wanted to hear about his mother Diana and about the void that had been left behind.
In their conversation with Oprah he referenced his trauma as a young child when thinking about the onslaught of abuse his wife was facing. He talked about how it scared him.
In his move to the United States, Harry has perhaps adopted a few Californian sensibilities.
Talking to the press about his grief, how his father was as a parent and breaking cycles within his family is a lot of public introspection for an institution that would prefer to keep it behind palace walls.
"It is more damaging for Prince Harry," Ms Bastin said.
"Harry's public comments about his family, the royal household, and the press have made people weary and wary of him and more inclined to see the working royals in a better light because they are still going about their days behaving in a manner expected of them."
Charles and William are the ones with power and their position appears to be firm. It leaves Harry without a way back into his family and seemingly without a mediator on the inside.
Royal commentators once said the death of Diana forged a bond between a young Harry and William.
Almost 28 years later, they could use the guidance of their mother.
