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Willing and Able, Noah Kahan (2026)
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When Oisin McKenna dies and his body is opened and inspected, it is finally confirmed that his heart was never split evenly.
Siobhan got the part that stopped beating first. She is his first daughter—or so she insists, despite the evidence dropped on their doorstep the day after her second birthday in the form of a four-year-old girl with dark hair and wary eyes. Still, Siobhan is the one who was there first. She's his first girl, the first hand wrapped around his finger, and she's so desperate for it to have counted for something. But her father left his love behind him like a trail to be followed, and every path led back to the life he'd had before Siobhan's mother, to the woman he never quite managed to let go of.
It's her half-sister Lily who got the bigger part of his heart, the aching, stubborn part that kept fighting to stay alive. Their father loved them both, but love is rarely the same twice. The way his face softened when he looked at Lily said enough on its own—it was impossible for Siobhan to compete with a ghost resurrected in flesh and bone, with the face and voice of his first love returned to him years after she vanished without explanation, leaving behind only a daughter he never knew existed.
Lily joined the family like it was a given, as though her presence was not stretching the limits of Fiadgh McKenna's grace day after day, knowing that the living proof that her husband was never truly hers was sleeping right besides their daughter. Siobhan gained an older sister she had never asked for, but lost the wholeness of her father's heart. It had become a thing divided between two different worlds, the one he always longed for but was never allowed to have and the one he got but never truly committed to.
Still, despite his vices and all the faults that came wrapped neatly in whiskey and hidden outbursts, Oisin McKenna had been, in the ways that counted, a good man. But addiction is a patient kind of thief and goodness means very little once you have taught your body how to die. It waits quietly after years of recovery and trying to do better, until one day it comes back to collect what it was always owed.
Lily sang May The Road Rise To Meet You at his funeral, with a voice so soft it nearly disappeared beneath the church rafters. She has always carried love like an open wound, offering it freely in a world that punishes her softness and demands for her to prove that she was born bad. Lily mourned their father like just another precious thing stolen from her too soon, like another life lesson thrown her way, as if grief had been breathed into her the same way life was. Angry little Shiv stood next to her, mourning their father like a man who had spent her entire life leaving in pieces long before he ever died.
