Keir MacLaren’s Myth Cracks in Public
Callum can’t move.
Anger floods him first, hot, immediate.
How dare she?
How dare she stand there and reduce Keir to his worst failure?How dare she dismiss everything Keir was, everything he gave, everything he saved?
And then?—
Something else cuts through.
Because she isn’t lying.
Keir loved music more than sobriety.More than stability.More than showing up when it mattered most.
Callum knows that truth intimately.
Isla turns and walks back to her seat without looking at anyone.Not the officiant.Not her mother.
Not him.
He could feel the anger rolling off her, the rage, the hurt.He could see the tears brimming in her eyes.Pulling her shoulders back, she sank down and released a shaky breath.
The service limped forward, but it never recovered from her performance.People are shaken.The sanctimony is gone, stripped bare by one woman and a piano.
Callum remains seated long after it ends.
Long after people rise and whisper and rush outside, phones already out, grief already being monetized.
He stares at the piano.
At the space where Isla’s hands had been.
He wants to hate her.
Instead, he feels wrecked.
Because she didn’t just expose Keir.
She exposed the lie Callum has been living inside.
That love makes up for absence.
That forgiveness erases damage.
That some truths are better left unsaid.
Her song was devastating.
And beautiful.
And it proved something Callum was not ready to face yet.
Keir may not have loved being a father.
But his daughter?
