The idea of moving out stopped sounding distant almost as soon as they said it out loud.
Once it was there, it kept slipping back into everything.
Not in some huge, dramatic way. Nobody was sitting down every night and making speeches about the future. It was smaller than that. A listing Mandy pulled up without being asked. A comment about rent while they were walking home. Lip checking another apartment page in between product listings. The kind of thing that kept returning because both of them were already halfway committed to it before they admitted they were.
They needed their own place.
By late the next afternoon, Lip was back on the edge of his bed with the laptop open, scrolling through apartment listings while Mandy leaned against the wall beside him, one leg stretched across the mattress and the other bent, her attention moving between the screen and the notebook open near her hip.
Across the room, Ian was pulling on a hoodie, half listening while he looked for one of his shoes under the bed.
Mandy leaned in a little closer as a new listing loaded.
"That one's five-fifty."
Lip opened it.
The pictures looked exactly like five-fifty. Old hardwood. One narrow window. A radiator that looked like it had been there since the building was first standing. A kitchen barely bigger than a hallway corner with cabinets painted over so many times the edges looked thick.
Mandy stared at the photos for a second. "That's not even that bad."
Ian glanced over while tugging on his shoe. "You two still doing this?"
"Doing what," Mandy said.
"The apartment thing."
Lip clicked to the next photo. "Looking."
Ian shrugged. "Honestly, I thought you'd be out before this."
Mandy looked over at him. "That a compliment."
"It's an observation."
He stood up and grabbed his jacket off the chair. "Frank's gonna be a nightmare once he knows where you live."
Lip did not even look up. "He's already a nightmare."
Ian nodded like that settled it. "Fair."
He pulled on the jacket, then paused at the door long enough to look back once more.
"But if you two end up loaded because somebody bought a phone case online, I expect free drinks."
Mandy smirked. "You can get in line."
Ian pointed at her once like he accepted the deal, then headed downstairs.
Once he was gone, Mandy looked back at the screen, then at Lip.
Lip kept scrolling. "Checking prices."
He found another listing and opened it. This one was worse. Worse light, worse layout, worse everything except the rent.
Mandy wrinkled her nose. "No."
"Agreed."
He closed it.
For a minute they went quiet again, the only sounds in the room the low click of the trackpad, a cabinet shutting downstairs, Carl yelling something from another room, and Fiona answering him in the tone that meant she was already tired of whatever was happening.
Mandy tapped the notebook with the back of the pen.
"You know the place is the easy part."
Lip glanced over. "How do you figure."
"The apartment." She gestured at the screen. "That's easy. Pay rent, move your stuff, done."
He shut one listing and opened another. "And the hard part."
She pointed at the other tab still open behind it. "That."
Lip followed her gesture to the store dashboard.
Orders had already started coming in for the day. More than he would have expected that early, enough that the total looked clean and steady instead of lucky.
Mandy leaned in closer. "Thirty-four."
"Lunch crowd," he said.
She gave him a look. "You say that like this makes sense."
"It does make sense."
She sat back and folded her arms. "No, I understand the steps. I still don't understand why random people are buying phone cases from a store nobody's heard of."
"Ads."
He smiled a little and clicked into another tab.
Mandy noticed immediately. "That's not the phone case store."
"No."
She straightened. On the screen sat another empty storefront template, stripped down and unfinished.
Her eyes narrowed slightly. "What's this."
"Second store."
That got her full attention.
"Already."
Lip nodded once. "Same system. Different products."
He opened the supplier page he had been looking at earlier.
This time the listings were clothing. Hoodies. Oversized shirts. Joggers. Simple streetwear pieces in plain colors and cheap mock-up photos. The kind of thing half the guys at school wore already, even if theirs came from mall stores instead of nameless suppliers online.
Mandy leaned closer right away. "Oh."
Lip looked at her. "Yeah."
"People buy this all the time."
"Exactly."
She reached for the trackpad before he could, scrolling through the page herself now.
"Half the boys at school dress like this," she said. "And the girls too, honestly."
"That's the market."
She clicked into one of the hoodies and checked the price. Then another. Then another. Her attention sharpened in exactly the way it always did when something stopped being abstract and started becoming usable.
"So same setup," she said. "Find one product that doesn't look embarrassing. Put it on the site. Test the ad. See what sticks."
Lip looked at her. "You've been paying attention."
She didn't even glance up. "You've been forcing me to."
He laughed quietly under his breath.
Mandy stopped on one listing and pointed. "That one."
He leaned closer to see. The supplier price was low. The photos were cleaner than most of the others. Not perfect, but good enough to test.
"That could work," he said.
Mandy kept staring at the page. "Good colors. Better photos. Doesn't look like it'll fall apart immediately."
"That's a strong endorsement."
"It's more than most of these deserve."
She sat back again, one shoulder against the wall, and looked at him.
"You really are doing multiple stores."
"That was always the idea."
There was no show in the way he said it. Just a fact.
Mandy held his gaze for a second, then gave the smallest shake of her head.
"You've really had the whole thing in your head this entire time."
"Most of it."
She smiled faintly at that. "Of course."
By the time they went downstairs, the Gallagher kitchen looked exactly like it always did in that part of the evening.
Fiona stood near the sink with coffee in one hand and the sort of tired expression that suggested she was still upright mostly on spite. Debbie sat at the table with a schoolbook open in front of her, reading one page and clearly wishing violence on whoever wrote it. Liam was on the floor nearby, pushing a toy truck back and forth over the tile with full concentration.
From the living room came Frank's voice before they even saw him.
"You two leaving."
He was sprawled on the couch, eyes still closed, sounding only just awake enough to be annoying.
Lip went to the fridge and took out a soda. "Thinking about it."
Frank nodded slowly, still not opening his eyes. "Smart."
Mandy looked over at him. "That sounded almost helpful."
Frank cracked one eye open. "Means I know where to find you when I'm broke."
"There it is," Lip said.
Fiona glanced between them. "You actually find a place yet?"
"Just looking," Mandy said. "Mostly studios."
Fiona nodded. "That's your best shot."
Frank pushed himself up slightly on one elbow. "Get one with a couch."
Lip didn't even turn around. "No."
"So cold."
Debbie looked up from her book just long enough to say, "No one wants you visiting anywhere."
Frank sank back into the couch like that had been deeply unfair. "This house has no warmth."
Liam rammed the truck into a chair leg and made the crash noise for it himself.
Later that evening, Lip worked a shift at the Alibi.
It was busy enough to keep his hands full but not bad enough to turn Kev into a disaster. He stocked the back shelves, cleared tables, wiped down the bar twice, and checked the dashboard whenever he could get away with it without making it obvious.
By the middle of the shift, the number had climbed again.
Forty-one.
He stared at it for one extra second before shutting the laptop.
From behind the register, V caught the look on his face.
"You look entirely too pleased with yourself."
Lip slid the laptop farther under the bar. "Solid day."
Kev straightened up and wiped his hands on his shirt. "One day you're gonna tell me what you actually do on that thing."
Lip picked up a rag and started wiping down the counter. "Maybe once you stop asking like a cop."
"That hurts."
"It should."
Kev looked personally offended for maybe two seconds before someone at the bar called for another round and distracted him.
By the time Lip got back to the Gallagher house, Mandy was already in the room.
The laptop was open.
She looked up as soon as he came in.
"Forty-five."
Lip stopped halfway through taking off his jacket. "That jumped."
She nodded once and turned the screen a little so he could see it better.
"And the second store looks good."
He sat beside her and looked over the page.
The storefront was simple. No clutter, no fancy extras, just a few pieces laid out cleanly enough that the whole thing looked more polished than it had any right to for something thrown together in a Gallagher bedroom. A couple hoodies. A shirt. One pair of joggers. The layout was basic, but it worked.
"You launched the test page."
Mandy looked at him. "You were taking too long."
He let out a short laugh. "Fair."
She leaned back against the wall again. "I kept it simple."
"That was the right call."
"I know."
He looked at her, smiling a little. "You're getting confident."
"I've earned it."
That one he didn't argue with.
For a minute they stayed there side by side, the laptop open between them, the room lit by the screen and the weak light from outside. Somewhere downstairs the house was still moving around them, but faintly now, almost gone.
She looked at the screen, then at him. "We started out pretending to be together just to annoy Karen."
Lip snorted softly. "Feels stupid now."
"Yeah."
"And now."
Mandy tipped her head toward the laptop. "Now we've got two stores and we're looking at apartments."
He refreshed the dashboard more out of habit than expectation.
Another order appeared.
Mandy saw it at the same time he did. "Forty-six."
Lip stared at the screen for a second, then shut the laptop.
The room felt quieter after that.
Not heavier. Just settled.
Outside, the neighborhood had dipped into that late-night calm where most people were inside and the streets stopped demanding attention for a little while. The glow from the laptop still lingered in his vision even after the screen went dark.
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