Meghan Markle’s estranged father Thomas has told friends he is ready to marry again at the age of 81, according to a close family source. He has fallen in love with Filipino nurse Rio Caneda, who at 46 is 35 years his junior and just two years older than the Duchess of Sussex, who would become her step-daughter if they tie the knot.
Our source revealed: “Thomas told me he’d marry her in a heartbeat and he’s telling the rest of the family he’s happier than he could ever have imagined at the thought of spending the rest of his life with Rio.”
The couple met at a rehab hospital in Cebu City in the Philippines after Mr Markle underwent life-saving emergency surgery last December to remove his left leg below the knee.
In an interview two months ago, he said he felt “blessed and beyond happy” to have found joy again with Rio, a divorced mother-of-two grown-up children, after years of anguish over serious health issues and separation from his youngest daughter Meghan, 44, since just weeks before her 2018 marriage to Prince Harry.
Now Mr Markle, who moved to Cebu with his son Tom Jnr, 59, last year, is 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 were divorced after eight years in 1987, when the future Duchess of Sussex was six, sharing custody until she went to university prior to pursuing a Hollywood acting career.
In his joint interview with new love Rio, Mr Markle said of Meghan: “I still don’t know why she ghosted me.”
To this day, he has never met his son-in-law Prince Harry, her husband of eight years, or his grandchildren Prince Archie, seven, and Princess Lilibet, who turns five on Tuesday.
But he insisted: “I was in pain for so many years about what happened with my youngest daughter Meghan. I’m finally at peace. I am enjoying my life. I don’t care what people think any more.
“I’m an old man and never thought I would be alive at nearly 82. What happened with Rio happened naturally. We got close and she ended up moving in with me.
“It’s a relationship I treasure. She makes me very happy and takes very good care of me. I hope I make her happy too.”
According to our source, Mr Markle has given no indication yet as to where he and Rio might tie the knot – in the US or back in the Philippines, where he has said he “loves” living and is “enjoying life.”
The source added: “He still has a recovery stretch to navigate with at least a few months in America, where he’s been face-timing Rio almost every day.
“He says he’d also love her to be able to see America sometime, so I think there’s a way to go before we hear wedding bells. But from everything he’s been saying, the sound of those bells is very much on his mind and it’s pretty clear she loves him to bits too.”