Meghan Markle‘s father has released a personal letter she wrote to him in the wake of her royal wedding to Prince Harry last May, confirming her friends’ account in this week’s PEOPLE cover story.

“Daddy, it is with a heavy heart that I write this, not understanding why you have chosen to take this path, turning a blind eye to the pain you are causing,” Meghan, 37, begins the five-page handwritten letter dated August 2018, which Thomas Markle, 74, shared with The Mail on Sunday. “Your actions have broken my heart into a million pieces — not simply because you have manufactured such unnecessary and unwarranted pain, but by making the choice to not tell the truth as you are puppeteered in this. Something I will never understand.”

“If you love me, as you tell the press you do, please stop. Please allow us to live our lives in peace. Please stop lying, please stop creating so much pain, please stop exploiting my relationship with my husband,” Meghan continued. “I realize you are so far down this rabbit hole that you feel (or may feel) there’s no way out, but if you take a moment to pause I think you’ll see that being able to live with a clear conscience is more valuable than any payment in the world.”

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In the week before Meghan’s May 19 wedding to Prince Harry, Thomas decided not to attend after an arrangement with paparazzi to stage several photoshoots ahead of the big day was revealed. Since then, Thomas and Meghan’s half-sister Samantha, who claimed responsibility for arranging her father’s paparazzi photos before the wedding, have continued to speak critically of her to the U.K. tabloids.

In the emotional letter, Meghan wrote that she never heard from her father that he wouldn’t be coming — nor did she receive messages from him about his heart attack, which he said occurred just before her nuptials.

“You’ve told the press that you called me to say you weren’t coming to the wedding — that didn’t happen because you never called,” Meghan wrote, according to the letter published by The Mail on Sunday.

“I have only ever loved, protected, and defended you, offering whatever financial support I could, worrying about your health,” she continued. “So the week of the wedding to hear about you having a heart attack through a tabloid was horrifying. I called and texted…I begged you to accept help — we sent someone to your home…and instead of speaking to me to accept this or any help, you stopped answering your phone and chose to only speak to tabloids.”

Meghan also addressed her father’s relationship with her half-sister Samantha. “I pleaded with you to stop reading the tabloids. On a daily basis you fixated and clicked on the lies they were writing about me, especially those manufactured by your other daughter, who I barely know,” she wrote. “You watched me silently suffer at the hand of her vicious lies, I crumbled inside.”

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Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on their wedding day More