The romance between Princess Diana and the handsome doctor she fell in love with in the years after her split from Prince Charles has become the stuff of legend. In the final weeks before her tragic death in Paris in 1997, friends say it was Hasnat Khan—and not Dodi Al-Fayed, the man killed alongside her in that violent car crash—who was occupying her thoughts. The affair with the heart surgeon had begun two years before. They met when she visited a friend at the London hospital where he worked. Minutes after first laying eyes on him, she described him as “Mr Wonderful”—a nickname which stuck and ultimately sent the press into a frenzy when the media found out about her new suitor a few months later. The War of the Wales had left Diana a husk of her former self. Being cast out of the royal family meant she was fraught with insecurities and loneliness. Yet despite the breakdown of her marriage, the public’s fascination with her life seemed to only increase with each passing month. The Princess of Wales was hounded everywhere she went. But her relationship with the press was mutually beneficial; the year Diana met Hasnat, 1995, coincided with the explosive “there were three of us in this marriage” interview she gave to the BBC’s Martin Bashir. In Hasnat, Diana found comfort. As a friend of hers told me recently, “She was extremely lonely by the time they met. She had lost everything and because things had gotten so bad with Charles, she didn’t know who to trust. She felt rejected and discarded and then along came this incredibly kind and compassionate man,” the friend said. “Unlike some of the people in her life who had sold her out to the press, Hasnat didn’t care about her fame. He was different and she knew she could rely on him.” The couple had an intense love affair for the next two years. There were clandestine meetings at his flat and also Kensington Palace, and she even introduced him to Prince William and Prince Harry; however, not many other people got to meet him, as Hasnat would often sneak past the royal security guards by hiding in the trunk of a car. In an exhaustive statement given to the final inquest into her fatal car crash, Hasnat described how being together exposed the woman, who once thought she would be queen, to the normality of everyday life: “Diana was also not used to doing everyday things that the rest of us take for granted. For example, we once went to the pub together and Diana asked if she could order the drinks because she had never done so before. She really enjoyed the experience and chatted away happily to the barman. On another occasion we had to queue to get into Ronnie Scott’s jazz club. She later said she loved queuing as you get to meet so many people.” In the limited time they were together, they discussed marriage, the possibility of moving in and all the usual things lovers contemplate when considering a future. But, in the summer of 1997, it all came crashing down and they decided to split. In the years since, it is often written that Hasnat was “the love of her life” but was unable to handle the public attention which accompanied her fame or bridge the cultural divide between her English aristocrat and his Pakistani upbringing. The doomed circumstances have always fascinated me, the idea that Diana could have died while in the middle of trying to make her ex jealous by publicly dating international playboy Dodi. What led to her decision to be in Paris on the night she died? Was it really her way of taking revenge and trying to get Hasnat back? And was there a possibility that, if she hadn’t been in the car that night, Diana and Hasnat would have found a happier ending? But as I started contacting Diana’s circle of friends, a different version of her story began to emerge. “Hasnat was not the love of her life, at all,” says one member of her inner circle.