The orders didn't explode overnight.
For the first few days, it stayed small enough that the dashboard still felt a little unreal every time they checked it. A new order in the afternoon. Nothing for a few hours. Another one later that night. Then a stretch where the page sat unchanged long enough for Mandy to start looking at it like the numbers might have gotten offended and stopped moving on purpose.
But even without anything dramatic happening, the pattern was there.
That was what mattered.
The store was not dead. It was not some one-time fluke built off one lucky click from one bored stranger on the internet. People were finding it. Slowly, but they were finding it. And once Mandy fully realized that, she started watching the dashboard with a level of focus Lip usually only saw from her when she hated somebody.
They were on the floor of his room again late one evening, the laptop open between them, notebooks spread out in a loose mess around the bed. A couple of empty soda cans sat near the leg of the chair. The Gallagher house moved through its usual nighttime noise downstairs—television low in the living room, Fiona still awake, Debbie's voice drifting up once and then disappearing again. Nothing unusual. Nothing that mattered enough to pull either of them out of the room.
Mandy refreshed the page.
Another notification appeared.
She leaned in immediately.
"That's eight."
Lip looked over from the notebook in his hand. "Nine."
She frowned and refreshed it again, then stared at the number like she was waiting for it to change back just to be difficult.
"Nine people," she said after a second, slower this time. "Nine actual people somewhere out there who found a store we made in this room and gave us money."
Lip leaned back against the wall, one knee up, the notebook resting loosely across it. "That's the internet."
Mandy let out a small laugh. "I know. Still weird."
She kept looking at the screen anyway.
Across the room, one of the beds creaked.
Both of them looked over.
Ian was lying on his side, one arm tucked under his head, watching them with the sort of mild interest he reserved for things that were obviously strange but not yet strange enough to interrupt his night over.
"You two do know you've been staring at that laptop for like an hour."
Mandy's mouth curved faintly. "Business."
Ian raised an eyebrow. "That thing you keep making sound more suspicious every time you explain it."
Lip lifted one shoulder. "You'd be bored."
Ian thought about that for maybe half a second. "Yeah, maybe."
Then he rolled onto his back and pulled the blanket higher over one shoulder.
"Just don't start some weird startup cult in here."
Mandy snorted quietly.
Ian closed his eyes. "Some of us are trying to sleep."
Lip waited until it looked like Ian was done paying attention before glancing back at Mandy.
She was still looking at the screen.
Then at him.
Then back at the screen again.
He reached over and shut the laptop.
Mandy looked up immediately. "What are you doing."
"We should talk."
The words were barely out before her whole expression changed.
Not wildly. Just enough. Her shoulders went a little tighter. Her face sharpened.
"That sounds bad."
"It's nothing bad."
"That's what people say before they say something bad."
Lip let out a quiet breath and dragged one hand over his face. "It's not that kind of talk."
Mandy kept watching him for another second, clearly deciding whether to believe him.
Then she settled back against the wall a little, though not fully. "Alright."
He set the notebook aside and leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees.
"This thing," he said, nodding once toward the closed laptop, "if we keep pushing it, it's going to get bigger."
"That's kind of the point."
"I know."
She waited.
He could tell she already thought he was doing a bad job of getting to whatever he was actually trying to say. Fair enough. She was probably right.
Lip looked down for a second, then back at her.
"I mean bigger than just us messing around with one store in my room."
Mandy's eyes stayed on him. "Okay."
"More products. More ads. More money going in. More money coming back. More chances to screw it up if we stop paying attention."
She tilted her head slightly. "You say that like you've already mapped out the next five steps."
He did not answer that part.
Mandy noticed, but she let it sit.
After a moment, he said, "If we keep doing this together, it stops being you just helping me out whenever you feel like it."
That got her attention a little more sharply.
For a second she said nothing at all. Then she folded one leg under herself and looked at him properly.
"So what are you asking."
Lip leaned back a little, then forward again, clearly not doing a great job of making any of this sound less serious than it did in his head.
Mandy noticed that too.
Her eyes narrowed. "Lip."
He looked at her.
"What."
She held his gaze. "Say it normal."
That got a short laugh out of him despite himself.
He tried again. "I'm asking if you're in this with me for real."
The room went quiet for a second after that.
Not awkward. Just still.
Downstairs, somebody moved through the kitchen. A cupboard door shut. The television dipped lower, then rose again.
Mandy looked at him for another beat before the corner of her mouth lifted.
"That's what you were working yourself up over?"
Lip frowned a little. "I wasn't working myself up."
"You absolutely were."
He opened his mouth to argue, then shut it again because there was nothing useful to say to that.
Mandy gave him a small look, half amused now. "Lip, I've been sitting on the floor with you for days looking at phone cases and ad budgets. I think we passed casual already."
That made him laugh quietly.
She nudged his knee with hers. "And for the record, you made that sound way worse than it was."
He looked at her. "How."
"Like you were about to say something awful."
"I said it wasn't bad."
"Yeah, and somehow that made it worse."
Lip shook his head once, smiling a little now despite himself.
Mandy leaned back against the wall again, easier now that whatever tension had crept into the room was gone.
Then she looked at him and said, much more simply, "I'm here."
That landed harder than the longer version would have.
Lip looked away first, mostly because he did not want to make a thing out of a sentence that had already said more than enough.
Downstairs, something crashed in the kitchen.
A second later Fiona's voice cut through the whole house.
"Frank!"
Mandy exhaled through her nose. "That sounded expensive."
They both got up.
The kitchen looked about how either of them could have guessed it would.
Frank was leaning against the counter with a half-empty bottle in one hand and the useless, cheerful confidence of a man who had already decided none of this was his fault. Fiona stood a few feet away with the expression of someone who had been dragged into the same stupid scene too many times to waste fresh energy on it. Debbie was at the table, one hand on Liam's shoulder while he sat there with a plastic toy and looked mostly unbothered by the whole thing.
Frank noticed Lip the second he walked in.
"Phillip," he said, lifting the bottle like he was making some grand announcement. "My most financially promising child."
Lip stopped in the doorway. "What do you want."
Frank grinned like the question itself was generous. "Five dollars."
"No."
Frank shrugged and took another drink. "Worth trying."
Mandy leaned one shoulder against the doorway, watching the whole exchange with a look that was almost bored.
Frank spotted her next and squinted. "When did we adopt the Milkovich."
"Go sit down," Fiona said, without even looking at him this time.
Frank muttered something about disrespect and wandered back toward the living room in the unsteady way he always did when he was not drunk enough to fall over but drunk enough to make it everyone else's problem.
The house took a while to settle after that.
Frank eventually passed out on the couch. Liam got taken upstairs. Debbie disappeared. Carl stopped making noise, which meant he was either asleep or planning something. Fiona stayed up the longest, still moving around the kitchen after everyone else had started dropping off.
Later, when the house had finally gone quiet for real, Lip stepped out onto the back porch with the laptop and the envelope of cash.
The air outside was cooler than the house, fresh enough to wake him up a little after the long day. The yard behind the house looked washed out in the weak porch light, every shape flattened into shadow and pale wood and chain-link. Somewhere farther down the alley, a dog barked once and then gave up.
He sat on the back step, opened the laptop, and clicked to a page he had been checking for weeks.
Not the store.
Something else.
Numbers refreshed on the screen.
Bitcoin.
Still cheap.
Still mostly ignored.
Still exactly where he wanted it.
He looked down at the envelope in his hand. Part of the Alibi money. Part of what they had already made from the store. Not enough to matter to anyone else. Enough to matter to him.
He entered the amount and confirmed the purchase.
A few seconds later the transaction went through.
A small piece of Bitcoin appeared in the wallet.
To anyone else it would have looked pointless. Random. Maybe stupid.
To Lip, it felt like setting down another piece on a board no one else knew he was playing on yet.
He shut the laptop, tucked the envelope back into his hoodie pocket, and went upstairs.
Mandy was back on the bed when he got into the room, the laptop open again in front of her. The screen lit her face in the dark.
She looked up immediately. "Well?"
Lip came farther into the room. "Well what."
She pointed at the screen. "Check it."
He sat down beside her and looked at the dashboard.
The numbers refreshed.
Mandy leaned in closer right away.
"Ten."
Lip looked at the total and let out a quiet breath through his nose. "Yeah."
She sat back slowly, one hand still on the edge of the laptop. "Ten orders."
It was not a huge number.
Still small. Still early. Still fragile.
But it was enough to make the whole thing feel different again.
Mandy looked around the room once, the scattered notes, the bed, the chair with clothes half hanging off it, the old walls and weak light and everything else that had been normal for so long it barely registered anymore.
Then she looked back at him.
"You know what."
"What."
"If this keeps moving like this, this room's going to start feeling tiny."
Lip followed her glance around the space.
"Yeah."
She turned back toward him. "You ever think about getting our own place."
He looked at her for a second.
Not because the idea had never crossed his mind. It had. More than once. But hearing her say it out loud made it sit differently, more solid somehow.
A place of their own.
Not tomorrow. Not yet.
But possible in a way more things were starting to feel possible now.
A small smile tugged at his mouth. "Could happen sooner than you think."
Mandy studied his face for a moment, like she was trying to decide whether he meant that as a line or a plan.
Then she shook her head once.
"You're ridiculous."
But the smile she gave him after that made it clear she did not mind at all.+
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