After Meeting a Teenage Prince William for the First Time, Then Camilla Parker-Bowles Quipped “I Need a Gin and Tonic,”

Queen Camilla and Prince William have bonded this year over the shared devastating experience of both of them watching their spouses battle cancer—a newfound closeness forged through fire. After years of what outlets have referred to as “a strained relationship,” the stepmother and stepson have a genuine warmth between them and have gotten far closer in recent months, with former BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond telling OK earlier this year that they have formed an “unlikely” bond through the firestorm.

Recent events have obviously brought William and Camilla much closer,” Bond said at the time. “They have been left, almost literally, nursing the Crown while the King and the Princess recover. Their teams will be working more closely to coordinate diaries and cover the engagements that have been planned, and Camilla and William are bound to have been in much closer regular contact.” (Bond’s comments came before the King returned to public-facing royal duties on April 30; the Princess of Wales still largely remains away from front-facing public duty, though she did make two major appearances this summer at June’s Trooping the Colour and Wimbledon earlier this week.)

“Apart from the business side of things, I’m sure they will have been an emotional help to one another as well,” Bond added. “Both will have been so worried about these unexpected health issues, and I imagine they will have shared their concerns.”

When William was a young boy, Camilla Parker-Bowles was famously the other woman in the marriage of his parents, then Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Diana famously opened up to her eldest son about her marital problems, and William often shouldered the burden of his mother’s unhappiness. Charles and Diana eventually separated in 1992, when William was 10, and divorced when he was 14 in 1996; Diana died just one year later, on August 31, 1997.