By the end of the week, the numbers had stopped feeling like luck.
That was probably the strangest part of it.
The first order had felt like a fluke. The second had felt like a good sign. The third had been enough to keep both of them checking the dashboard every chance they got, half expecting the whole thing to stall out the second they believed in it too much. But it had not stalled. It had kept moving in that quiet, steady way that mattered more than a sudden spike ever would have.
It was late when Mandy refreshed the page again.
She and Lip were sitting on his bed with the laptop open between them, the screen casting a pale glow over the rumpled blanket, the notebooks pushed into a loose stack near the wall, and the clutter that had taken over the room without either of them noticing exactly when it happened. Pens. Loose pages. A hoodie half hanging off the chair. One empty soda can on the floor and another still balanced on the windowsill from earlier.
Across the room, Ian was stretched out on his mattress with one arm hanging off the side, scrolling through his phone with the expression of someone only half invested in whatever he was looking at. The room had settled into that tired nighttime quiet it got when the rest of the house was still awake but no longer loud enough to matter. The television downstairs ran low. Pipes knocked once in the wall. A floorboard creaked in the hall. Then nothing.
Mandy hit refresh.
The number changed.
She stared at it for a second before speaking. "Twenty-two."
Lip looked over from where he was leaning back against the wall. "Today?"
She nodded slowly, still looking at the screen. "Today."
For a second, neither of them said anything.
Twenty-two orders.
Not one. Not three. Not some tiny number they could talk themselves out of being impressed by. Twenty-two strangers, somewhere out there, who had clicked through, looked at what they put together, and bought something.
Mandy sat back a little, one hand still near the keyboard. "You know that's more than you make dragging boxes around for Kev."
A small smile touched his mouth. "That's kind of the point."
Across the room, Ian lowered his phone enough to look at them properly.
"You two still running that internet thing?"
Mandy glanced his way. "That's one name for it."
Ian nodded toward the laptop. "I'm still stuck on the part where you make money without touching the stuff."
"We are touching the store," Mandy said. "We just don't touch the products."
Ian stared at her for a beat. "That somehow helped less."
Lip laughed under his breath and reached over, folding the laptop partway shut without closing it completely.
Ian watched him for another second. "So what's next. Matching turtlenecks. A shared office. You changing your name to something else"
Lip ignored most of that. "Can't do it here forever."
That got Mandy's attention fast enough that she turned toward him.
"What do you mean."
He tipped his head once toward the room around them.
"This."
Ian let out a soft snort and went back to his phone. "I could've told you that when I was ten."
Mandy was still looking at Lip. "You mean the store."
"I mean all of it." He looked around the room. "If it keeps moving like this, we're gonna need somewhere quieter."
She studied his face for a second. "You've already thought about it."
He did not bother denying it.
Mandy shifted closer almost without noticing she was doing it. "How much."
Lip reached over, reopened the laptop, and switched tabs.
Apartment listings filled the screen.
Old buildings. Tiny kitchens. Worn floors. Bad lighting. Low rent. The kind of places that looked unimpressive enough to be possible.
Mandy stared at the screen for a second and then looked back at him.
"You were really already doing this."
Lip shrugged one shoulder. "Looking."
"Mm."
He clicked into one of the listings. "Studios around here go for five, maybe six hundred if the building's old enough."
Mandy leaned in closer to read. The apartment looked narrow, a little ugly, probably smelled like old pipes and somebody else's laundry detergent, but it had a door that shut, a kitchen no matter how small, and enough empty space to imagine filling.
"That's not too bad," she said.
Ian lowered the phone again. "Wait. You two are talking about moving out?"
Mandy looked over. "We're talking about eventually."
Ian sat up a little on one elbow. "Because of phone cases."
"Because of money," Lip said.
Ian let himself drop back onto the mattress again. "Honestly, I respect it."
That was about as supportive as Ian ever got without being asked.
They stayed up a while longer after that, not doing anything especially dramatic. Just looking. Comparing listings. Dismissing the ones that were too expensive, too far, too broken down even for them. Every now and then Mandy would point at something in a photo and Lip would tell her it was a bad idea for reasons that made annoying amounts of sense. Bad street. Bad building. Too far from everything. Rent low enough to hide some other problem waiting underneath it.
Eventually the room got too stale and the screen started hurting Mandy's eyes.
They went downstairs.
The kitchen looked exactly like it always did that time of night. Fiona was at the counter with a stack of bills and some folded paperwork spread around one elbow, one hand holding a pen, the other wrapped around a mug of coffee that had probably gone cold half an hour ago. Debbie sat at the table with a notebook open in front of her, though whether she was doing homework or pretending to do homework was impossible to tell from her face alone. Liam sat on the floor near the table stacking plastic blocks with the sort of complete concentration only little kids ever managed. In the living room, Frank was stretched across the couch in the posture of a man who had given up being useful long before anyone else gave up expecting it.
Mandy leaned against the counter like she belonged there, which at this point she more or less did.
"Random question," she said.
Fiona glanced up immediately.
Mandy almost smiled. "What's rent like around here."
That got more of Fiona's attention than Mandy asking anything else might have.
She looked between both of them once before answering. "You asking for fun, or are you two actually looking."
Lip took a soda out of the fridge and shut it with his hip. "Just looking."
Fiona leaned back against the counter and thought about it. "Studios go for around six hundred if the building's old. Less if the place is a dump. More if the landlord's delusional."
Mandy looked at Lip without saying anything. It matched what he had already found.
Fiona caught that look too.
"Wait," she said. "You're serious."
Lip opened the soda. "We're thinking about it."
For a second Fiona only looked at him.
Then something in her expression changed. Not surprise exactly. More like recognition. Like she had always known he would be the first one of them to think in that direction and had just been waiting to see when he'd finally say it out loud.
"Well," she said after a moment, "if anybody in this house was gonna figure out how to get out first, it'd be you."
From the couch, Frank spoke without opening his eyes.
"Take Carl."
Debbie grabbed the nearest napkin and threw it at him. It hit his shoulder and slid off. He did not move.
"Or Debbie," he added.
"No," Fiona said at once.
Liam knocked over his plastic tower and laughed softly to himself, entirely in his own world.
Mandy looked down to hide the smile that had crept over her mouth, and Lip had to look away for a second because the whole thing felt too normal to comment on.
Later that night, the house finally settled for real.
Frank passed out on the couch. Liam got carried upstairs. Debbie disappeared to bed. Ian stopped moving around. The kitchen light went off. The television stayed off too.
Lip stepped out onto the back porch with the laptop and the envelope of cash.
The air outside was cooler than inside the house, enough to wake him up a little after the long day. The yard behind the house sat in pale shadow under the weak porch light, flattened into fence lines and old wood and patches of dirt. The neighborhood had quieted into the usual late-night sounds—something rattling far off, a dog barking once, somebody's television too loud through an open window and then not loud enough to make out anymore.
He sat on the back step and opened the laptop.
First the store.
Twenty-four orders now.
He looked at the number for a second, then switched tabs.
Bitcoin.
The page loaded.
Still cheap.
Still early.
Still sitting there like a secret nobody around him was paying attention to.
He looked down at the envelope in his hand. Part of the Alibi money. Part of the store money. Not much, not yet, but enough to keep doing what he needed to do.
He entered the amount and confirmed the purchase.
A few seconds later it went through.
The wallet balance ticked up.
Tiny. Meaningless to anyone who did not know what came later. Exactly enough for him.
He shut the laptop and headed back upstairs.
Mandy was on the bed when he got back, sitting cross-legged with the computer open again in front of her. She looked up the second he came in.
"So."
Lip closed the door behind him. "So."
She turned the screen toward him. "This one's close to the bar."
He came over and sat beside her.
The apartment listing was narrow and old, with a kitchen barely wider than a hallway and cabinets that had probably been painted over too many times. The rent was cheap enough to matter. The location was better.
"Yeah," he said. "That works."
Mandy leaned back against the wall again, still looking at the screen.
"You know what's weird."
"What."
She glanced at him. "This whole thing started with you not doing what everybody expected."
He looked at her for a second, then back at the laptop.
"And now you're shopping for apartments," she finished.
A small smile touched his mouth. "Not bad."
He refreshed the dashboard more out of habit than expectation.
The numbers updated.
Another order.
Mandy noticed it immediately. "Twenty-five."
Lip looked at the screen for a beat, then shut the laptop.
"Yeah."
The room went quiet after that.
Not heavily. Not in some dramatic way. Just quiet enough for both of them to sit with what it meant.
Things were moving.
Not all at once. Not fast enough to scare him. Just steadily enough that the idea of leaving the Gallagher house no longer felt like something far off and abstract.
It felt close enough to measure.
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