Meghan Markle, In New Diamond Necklace, Reveals Her Safe Space Is a Bookstore

When Meghan Markle made two appearances at a brand new bookstore over the weekend, she also debuted a new piece of jewelry. Photographers snapped Meghan wearing a Logan Hollowell Fortuna tennis necklace in 18k yellow gold worth upwards of 29 thousand dollars during her visit to Godmothers, founded by friends of the duchess and located in Summerland, California, a short drive from the Montecito home she shares with Prince Harry.

The store celebrated its opening weekend with two days of festivities, and the duchess wore the necklace on both days, pairing it with a black Club Monaco jumpsuit on Saturday and a white tank top and trousers by Ralph Lauren on Friday. On Saturday, Meghan spoke for the crowd assembled, and according to Town & Country, she mentioned the feeling of safety she found in a West Village bookstore during a 2019 trip to New York City for her baby shower.

“For me, sneaking to New York five years ago was a really big deal,” she said of the trip, which took place during her first year as a working royal. “I was still so uncomfortable being out in the world… The safety of what I was craving, I knew I could find in a bookstore.”

Godmothers was founded by author and entrepreneur Victoria Jackson and literary agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, who represented Oprah Winfrey, Glennon Doyle, and Brené Brown. In a post to the store’s Instagram account, Walsh said she wanted “the authors who are local to this area to know that this is their bookstore.” The store’s local author display featured Meghan’s 2021 children’s book The Bench and Harry’s 2023 memoir Spare alongside Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook It’s All Easy.

Walsh has been a resident of Montecito, a small community favored by celebrities, since 2020. Though Paltrow wasn’t present for the store’s Friday night opening party for friends and family, a long list of fellow locals joined Meghan and Harry, including Jane Lynch, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, Ellen DeGeneres, and Portia de Rossi.

Town & Country added that Harry helped inspire the name for the space during a book party for his memoir back in 2023. While thanking Winfrey, Jackson, and Rudolph Walsh for their support during the book’s drafting, he called them his “fairy godmothers.” As plans for the bookstore came together, Winfrey apparently told the store’s owners, “There’s really only one thing you can name it: Godmothers.”