Kate Middleton is dead. Kate Middleton is recovering from a BBL. Kate Middleton is getting a divorce from her husband, Prince William, who killed one of his relatives with a shotgun the other day. All of these are rumors that have circulated online in recent weeks because Kate Middleton has not been seen in public for months, following an abdominal surgery. Nonsense, sure. The kind of thing that is easy enough to ignore if you don't suffer from conspiracy brain and don't care to keep up with the business of the royal family.

But a photo released Sunday by the palace of Kate and her three children, supposedly taken by William, means that I now feel duty bound to wade in, teeth gritted, to try to explain what the hell is going on with William and Kate. Because it has gotten very, very weird, ever more by the day.

So: a very brief précis of events up until yesterday. (If you want more detail, you can get it in my colleague Heather Schwedel's thorough explanation here.) In January, the palace announced that Kate Middleton would be having a planned abdominal surgery and that she would then spend the next few months recovering at home and absenting herself from royal duties. Since then, she hasn't been seen in public. This is not incredibly weird, although it is a little surprising—not so much as a snap of her leaving hospital, and you can bet that if the press were able to get those pictures, they'd have got them. These people are surveilled by the media up to the nines. This, in conjunction with William canceling events at the last minute and showing up in public with what seem to be bruises on his neck shortly after another member of the royal family was found dead, has been a perfect feast for people online to start going loco with conspiracy theories about what is going on in William and Kate's marriage and in the royal family in general.

Then, on Sunday, an Instagram post went up on William and Kate's official page, for Mother's Day (only in the U.K.—don't panic). The picture shows Kate sat down outside, flanked by her three children, and they're all beaming in a way that suggests that nobody is dead or divorced.