Kim Kardashian has a lot on her plate. Shapewear empire? Check. Cementing her status as a billionaire? Check. Enrolling in law school while appearing on reality television? Check. What she doesn’t have is a great deal of free time, and yet, as she proved in a caption posted to Instagram on Sunday, she’s thinking about Kate Middleton‘s whereabouts.
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“On my way to go find Kate,” Kardashian captioned the photos, which feature the reality star sporting bedazzled pants, a duckface, and an apparent thirst for royal intrigue. Does Kardashian know something we don’t? Is this like when Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was one of the first people to share the news that Osama bin Laden had been assassinated? Life is a rich tapestry, and you just never know which former pro wrestler is going to have an in on the hot geopolitical goss. Why not Kim?
In mid-January, Kensington Palace released a statement saying that Middleton, the Princess of Wales, had undergone a “planned abdominal surgery” and that “based on the current medical advice, she is unlikely to return to public duties until after Easter.” The palace has held firm in their policy of not sharing a play-by-play of her recovery.
Though time continues as usual and Easter has not yet arrived, recent weeks have seen a rise in speculation about the nature of Kate’s procedure and recovery as well as her whereabouts, as she hasn’t been seen in public since Christmas. The frenzy only grew after the social media accounts for Prince William and Kate posted a family photo of Kate and the Couple’s three children purportedly taken this year post-surgery by William, then swiftly had to issue an apology after international newswires pulled the pic from distribution saying it had been manipulated. After the Mother’s Day photo blunder, amateur sleuths grew even more watchful, questioning the veracity of a photo of William in a car with a person who is purportedly Kate with her face turned away from the camera and stockpiling yarn to make dioramas of their theories. Even King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands is in on the memeification of Middleton: He joked last week about Photoshopping a family photo.
Meanwhile, Blake Lively hasn’t made any six-part explainer TikToks about Middleton, but never let it be said that she doesn’t know her memes. On Saturday, Lively posted a photo of herself to Instagram to announce new flavors of her beverage lines, Betty Buzz and Betty Booze, featuring some remarkably obvious image editing (what amateur photographer among us has not experimented). We’d call the manipulation heavy-handed, but we don’t want to make the gigantic thumb that Lively sports in the pic feel self-conscious.
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“I’m so excited to share this new photo I just took today to announce our 4 new @bettybuzz & @bettybooze products!” she captioned the pic, poking fun at the public discourse. “Now you know why I’ve been MIA.”
According to a report in The Sun over the weekend, Kate and William were spotted at a farm stand about a mile from Adelaide Cottage, where she has been recovering, and the princess looked “happy, relaxed, and healthy.” No photographs were published with the report, nor was the person who claimed to see the couple named.
Now it’s all up to Kim Kardashian, the hero we deserve.
A rep for Kardashian did not immediately return Vanity Fair‘s request for comment.