The decision did not take long after that.
By the time the next morning came around, it already felt settled.
Mandy had the apartment listing open on the laptop again before Lip was fully awake, and this time she was not studying the photos like she needed convincing. She was looking at it like she was making sure nothing had changed overnight, as if the place might somehow disappear if they left it alone too long. Lip sat beside her with the lease details pulled up in another tab, reading through the email the landlord had sent late the night before.
Five hundred fifty a month.
Heat included.
Security deposit equal to one month.
Nothing hidden in the wording. No weird extra fee tucked into the bottom. No paragraph that made it sound better until the very last line told you why it was actually a bad idea. Just a straightforward lease for a small, old studio in a building that had clearly seen enough years to stop pretending it was anything other than what it was.
Lip read through it once more and closed the tab.
"That's clean."
Mandy leaned over his shoulder. "So."
He looked at her.
"Yeah," he said. "We're doing it."
That was enough.
She did not make a speech out of it. She did not need to. The smile that spread across her face was smaller than he expected and somehow more real because of it. Not some dramatic, wide grin. Just something bright and private and impossible to miss.
The lease got signed that afternoon.
The landlord did not make a production out of anything, which helped. No long talk. No suspicious pause. No nonsense. Just a small office that smelled faintly of stale coffee and old paper, a desk that had seen better days, a stack of forms, and a pen that barely wrote unless you held it the right way.
Lip signed first. Mandy signed after him, her handwriting quicker and cleaner, the pressure of the pen just heavy enough to leave a clear mark on every page.
When the last paper was done, the landlord slid the keys across the desk like he was handing over something ordinary.
And maybe he was.
But when they stepped back outside and the door shut behind them, it did not feel ordinary at all.
Mandy stopped on the sidewalk and looked up toward the second-floor window.
The building looked the same as it had the day before. Same old brick. Same worn front steps. Same narrow windows. Same plain little patch of city street around it. Nothing had changed.
Still, something had.
"That's ours now," she said.
Lip followed her gaze upward.
The window caught the afternoon light and held it for a second.
"Yeah."
For a little while neither of them moved.
The weight of it sat there quietly between them, not dramatic, not loud, just real enough that neither of them seemed in a hurry to step around it.
Then Mandy clapped her hands together once.
"Alright."
Lip looked over at her. "What."
"Furniture."
That was how it started.
They found Ian a couple hours later leaning against the hood of a car outside a small rental lot a few blocks away, hands shoved into his pockets, looking like somebody who had been dragged into the beginning of a story he had not agreed to but was curious enough to stick around for anyway.
He looked at both of them and then at the way they were standing, too focused to pretend otherwise.
"You two look busy."
"We signed the lease," Mandy said.
Ian blinked once. "Already?"
Lip shrugged. "It made sense."
Ian's eyes moved from one of them to the other, then toward the rental office behind them. "So now what."
Mandy pointed at the row of trucks parked along the side of the lot. "Now we get a truck."
That got an actual laugh out of him.
"Okay," he said. "Yeah. I want to see this."
The rental place was exactly what it should have been. Small office. Faded posters about weekend moving rates taped to the walls. A guy behind the counter who looked like he had explained insurance options too many times and stopped believing anyone really listened by the second sentence. Outside, a row of worn trucks sat under a gray sky that looked undecided about whether it wanted to brighten or stay flat.
Lip handled the paperwork.
Mandy and Ian waited outside near the truck they were getting, standing close enough to the building to stay out of the worst of the wind. Mandy had her arms folded, one foot tapping lightly against the pavement every few seconds.
Ian noticed.
"You're nervous."
She gave him a look. "No."
"Yeah, you are."
"It's a truck."
"Exactly."
She exhaled through her nose and glanced at the vehicles lined up beside them. "It just feels weird."
Ian tilted his head. "How."
She took a second before answering. "Like actual grown-up shit."
That made him smirk.
"You signed a lease and now you're renting a truck to move furniture into your apartment." He pushed off the hood he was leaning on. "That is actual grown-up shit."
Mandy nudged him with her shoulder. "You're annoying."
"I'm right."
Before she could answer that, Lip came out of the office holding the keys.
"We've got it till tonight."
Ian looked at the keys, then at the truck, then back at Lip. "This suddenly feels real."
"It was already real," Mandy said.
"Yeah," Ian replied. "But now it's ugly and practical. That's how you know."
The first stop was a used furniture place a few blocks over, the kind of shop that always looked dim no matter how many lights were on inside. There were couches lined up in mismatched rows, wooden tables stacked too close together, lamps with no shades, chairs that did not belong in sets pretending they did, and the smell of old fabric and dust that came with every store like that.
Mandy walked through it slowly.
She did not rush or pretend the first thing she saw would work. She looked at each piece the way she looked at product pages now—quickly, but with enough attention to know what was worth stopping for and what was not.
Ian and Lip followed behind her.
Ian ran a hand over the back of a couch and made a face. "This one looks haunted."
"That's because it is," Mandy said, already moving past it.
Lip laughed quietly and kept walking.
Then she stopped.
"This one."
She was pointing at a dark gray couch, nothing fancy, but solid enough to matter. The cushions looked used without looking destroyed. The fabric was plain. No weird pattern. No fake leather cracking at the corners. Just an actual couch that looked like it could belong in a place without embarrassing them.
Ian dropped onto it before either of them could say anything.
He bounced once. "Alright."
Lip looked at him. "That your expert review."
"That and it doesn't smell strange." Ian leaned back. "Good enough."
Mandy folded her arms. "That's more useful than most reviews online."
"See," Ian said, getting up again. "I'm helping."
The owner wrote up the receipt while Lip and Ian carried it out.
Getting the couch into the truck took more effort than it should have, mostly because the legs kept catching and Ian kept trying to turn it the wrong way on principle alone. By the time the back door shut, Lip's hoodie was sticking slightly to the back of his neck and Ian looked deeply offended by the existence of furniture in general.
"This better look good inside," Ian muttered.
"It will," Mandy said.
He glanced at her. "You say that very confidently for somebody who isn't carrying it."
She smiled, unbothered. "And yet you're still carrying it."
The bed frame came next.
Then a mattress.
Then a small kitchen table with a scratched surface and two chairs that did not quite match, but were close enough not to matter. A lamp. A narrow shelf. Nothing expensive, nothing pretty enough to show off, just the kind of things that turned one room into a place someone could actually live in.
By the time they finished loading everything, the truck was nearly full.
Ian stood with both hands on his hips, breathing a little harder than he wanted anyone to notice.
"You know what this is," he said.
Lip looked over. "What."
"The most responsible Gallagher day in recorded history."
Lip shut the truck door. "Low bar."
The sun had started dropping by the time they parked outside the apartment building again.
Getting everything upstairs took longer than buying it.
The couch alone took three tries because the stairwell was narrower than it looked, and Ian nearly dropped his end once when he tried to turn too fast and caught the wall instead. The bed frame scraped. The chairs banged against the railing. Mandy kept moving ahead of them, opening doors, clearing space, standing back when needed and stepping in when they had to angle something the right way.
By the time the last piece was inside, the room looked different.
Still small.
Still plain.
Still not much.
But no longer empty.
The couch sat against one wall. The bed frame stood near the window. The little table fit into the corner beside the kitchenette almost better than it had any right to. The shelf leaned waiting to be filled with whatever they decided mattered enough to bring.
Mandy dropped onto the couch without hesitation and let herself sink into it.
"This was worth it."
Lip stood near the wall catching his breath, one hand braced against it. Sweat cooled too fast against his back now that he had stopped moving. Ian looked around the room with that half-skeptical, half-impressed expression he got when something turned out better than he was prepared to admit.
"You know," he said slowly, "this actually works."
Mandy stretched her legs out across the couch and looked around too.
"It's home."
That shut Ian up for a second.
Lip walked over to the window and looked out. Across the street, lights were starting to come on in other buildings, one by one, turning the whole block into squares of yellow and pale blue. Cars moved below in a slower evening pattern. Somewhere farther off, somebody laughed too loudly and then stopped.
Behind him, there was the soft sound of the laptop opening.
He turned.
Mandy had already dragged it onto the little table and was clicking back into the dashboard.
Ian saw that and looked at both of them like he genuinely did not know whether to laugh or give up.
"You two can't even wait till the furniture's in place."
Mandy refreshed the page. "No."
Ian shook his head. "I don't get the internet."
The numbers updated.
"Six," Mandy said.
Lip looked over. "Clothing store?"
She nodded.
Ian stepped closer despite himself, like curiosity had finally beaten mockery. "That's from what. Today?"
"Yeah," Lip said.
Ian stared at the screen for another second, then at the room around it—the couch, the bed frame, the tiny table, the three of them standing in the middle of a place that had been empty an hour ago.
Then he let out a soft breath.
"Alright."
Mandy looked up. "What."
"I still don't understand what you do." He shoved his hands into his hoodie pockets. "But this is pretty good."
That was more approval than either of them expected from him, which was probably why neither of them made a joke out of it.
Another notification appeared.
Mandy saw it first. "Seven."
Lip leaned back against the wall beside the window.
The apartment was quiet.
Actually quiet.
No fighting in another room. No Frank passed out in the next space over. No Fiona moving through the kitchen. No television bleeding through the walls. Just the low sound of the city outside, the faint hum of the laptop, and Mandy sitting on the couch in the middle of their new place watching the numbers climb one order at a time.
It was still small.
Still bare.
Still only the beginning.
But it was theirs.
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