On Princess Lilibet's first day of pre-K, another mother walked up to Meghan Markle at the school gates — and the two women realised they had been in the same Girl Scouts troop as children growing up in Los Angeles.

Markle told the story in an exclusive interview with PEOPLE magazine, published 4 August 2026, while promoting her new film Cookie Queens (PEOPLE). She described the moment as a full-circle encounter. Hello! and the Daily Express re-reported the account in the days that followed (Hello!; Daily Express).

Lilibet, five, attended pre-school for the first time on a date Markle did not specify. Her older brother, Prince Archie, seven, goes to a different school — a split Markle had already mentioned on The Jamie Kern Lima Show. Because the two children are at separate sites, the morning school run takes two and a half hours. Markle said she leaves home at 6:30 a.m. and returns at 9 a.m. on drop-off days. On the other mornings, the family nanny — who has been with the household for five years — takes over the run.

The exact location of the children's schools is not publicly known. The Sussexes have consistently kept that information private.

Markle turned 45 in the week of the report. The PEOPLE interview ranged across motherhood, work and the new film, but the Girl Scouts anecdote was the detail that travelled.

There is a sharper edge to the school-run story, too. In 2022, Markle told The Cut that if Archie were at school in the UK, she would never have been able to do pickup and drop-off without it becoming a royal photo call — her words were "a royal photo call with a press pen of about 40 people." The contrast between that picture and an anonymous gate-side chat with a former troop-mate is the kind of detail that needs no editorialising to land.

Lilibet herself has been seen only sparingly. A Father's Day photograph shared by Markle in June 2026 showed the five-year-old with flame-red hair, a feature that drew attention from the same outlets now carrying the pre-school story (Hello!).

For a household that has treated its children's daily lives as off-limits, a school-gate anecdote told to a magazine is a choice, not a leak. Markle controlled the telling: the fact shared, the location withheld, the timing tied to a film promotion. The reader gets the charm of the Girl Scouts coincidence and nothing more — which is, presumably, the point.