The next morning started quietly, but it didn’t stay that way for long.

Lip woke before the alarm had the chance to go off, which wasn’t unusual anymore. Somewhere over the past few weeks, his sleep had shifted on its own. Too many late nights at the laptop, too many mornings checking numbers before the day properly started, too much happening all at once for his body to keep pretending it still belonged to the version of him who used to sleep until the house noise forced him up.

For a few seconds he stayed where he was, staring at the ceiling.

The apartment was still dim, the early light coming in pale and weak through the window. Outside, traffic was starting to build, but from up here it sounded distant enough to blur into the background. Mandy was asleep beside him, half on her stomach, one arm draped across his chest like she had rolled over during the night and settled there without thinking.

Normally he would have let himself sit in the quiet a little longer.

But the hospital from the night before came back too fast for that.

Liam.

The cocaine.

The doctor.

CPS.

Lip dragged a hand over his face and carefully eased himself out from under Mandy’s arm. She made a small annoyed sound in her sleep and shifted onto the pillow, but didn’t wake.

He sat on the edge of the bed for a second, elbows on his knees, staring at the floorboards.

The apartment looked different in the morning. Smaller. Barer. The couch by the wall. The little table with the laptop still shut on top of it. The two mismatched chairs. The shelf that still looked half temporary. It was a good kind of bare most of the time. Clean. Quiet. Manageable.

This morning it just felt too still.

He got up and walked to the table almost automatically, opened the laptop, and waited for the dashboard to load.

Orders had come in overnight.

Of course they had.

The graphs rose in the same calm, indifferent way they always did. Phone cases. Clothing store. New notifications stacked at the top. Numbers moving while everything else in his life got messier by the hour.

He refreshed the page.

Forty-seven.

Then the clothing store.

Twenty-six.

Lip leaned one hip against the counter and looked at the totals for a moment longer than he needed to.

The stores didn’t care that Liam was in the hospital.

They didn’t care that Fiona might lose the kids.

They didn’t care about police reports, social workers, or the way his stomach had been twisted since last night.

They just kept going.

The bed shifted behind him.

“You’re up already.”

Mandy’s voice was rough with sleep.

Lip looked back over his shoulder. She was sitting up now, hair a mess, one hand pushing it out of her face while she blinked at the room.

“Yeah.”

She glanced toward the window. “What time is it?”

“Just after seven.”

Mandy got up slowly and crossed the room in bare feet, still not fully awake. She came to stand beside him and looked at the screen.

“Forty-seven.”

“Phone cases.”

“And twenty-six.”

“Clothing.”

That woke her up a little more. She leaned one hand on the edge of the table and studied the dashboard.

“That one’s still climbing.”

Lip nodded once. “Yeah.”

For a minute they stood there without saying much.

The room was still cold enough from the night that Mandy moved closer without really noticing she was doing it, her shoulder brushing his arm while she kept looking at the numbers.

Then she said, quieter now, “We should go back.”

Lip already knew what she meant.

“Yeah.”

They got ready without much conversation after that. Quick shower. Coffee thrown together in the little kitchen. Mandy pulling on a hoodie while Lip looked for his keys and nearly walked out without them. The sort of rushed morning that would have felt normal at the Gallagher house and somehow stranger here, in a place that was supposed to be quieter, steadier, separate.

The hospital looked exactly the same as it had the night before.

Same lights. Same washed-out walls. Same stale coffee smell in the waiting area. Same sense that time moved differently there, stretched thinner and meaner than it did anywhere else.

But the mood had changed a little.

Debbie was sitting in one of the chairs with her phone in her hand, not really scrolling, just looking at the screen because it gave her somewhere to put her eyes. Carl stood near the vending machines with a bag of chips he clearly wasn’t eating, one foot tapping restlessly against the tile.

He looked up first when Lip and Mandy came in.

“You came back.”

Lip gave him a look. “Yeah.”

Carl shrugged like maybe that had been obvious and maybe it hadn’t.

“Any news?” Lip asked.

Carl tipped the bag lightly against his leg. “They moved Liam out of recovery.”

Debbie looked up then. “He’s sleeping.”

Lip nodded once.

“And Fiona?”

Debbie pointed toward the hallway. “Talking to someone.”

He didn’t need to ask who.

A minute later Fiona came back into the waiting room. She looked worse than she had the night before, not because she had cried more, but because it was morning now and none of them had really slept. Her face had that washed-out, hollow look people got when panic wore off just enough to leave exhaustion underneath it.

She stopped when she saw Lip.

“They’re sending somebody from CPS.”

Lip nodded. “Yeah.”

That seemed to throw her off a little.

She looked at him harder. “You’re taking this calmer than I thought you would.”

Lip leaned against the wall. “Losing it isn’t gonna help.”

Fiona let out a short laugh that wasn’t really a laugh at all. “That’s new for us.”

He didn’t answer.

A few minutes later, the social worker showed up.

She was somewhere in her forties, dressed neatly, carrying a clipboard and wearing the kind of expression that looked neutral until you looked at it long enough to realize it was actually just distance. Not cruel. Not warm. Just practiced.

She introduced herself, sat down with Fiona, and started asking questions in a voice that never changed no matter what the answer was.

Where had the party been.

Who had been there.

How long had Liam been unsupervised.

Whose drugs were they.

Had anything like this happened before.

Every question made the room feel smaller.

Debbie stared at the floor. Carl crumpled the chip bag in one hand until it made a low crackling sound Fiona normally would have snapped at him for. Mandy stood beside Lip with her arms folded and her face unreadable.

Lip kept quiet.

Not because he didn’t have anything to say. Because he already knew where this kind of conversation led, and interrupting it now would only make it worse.

Eventually the woman turned her attention to him.

“You’re Philip Gallagher.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Older brother.”

“Yeah.”

She looked down at the clipboard. “Do you still live at the residence.”

“No.”

That made her pause.

“You moved out recently?”

“A couple weeks ago.”

Fiona glanced over at him at that, like hearing it phrased out loud in this room made it sound more final than it had in the kitchen.

The social worker wrote something down.

“Where are you staying now?”

“Apartment.”

“Address.”

He gave it to her.

She wrote that down too, slower this time, then looked back up.

“You live alone?”

Lip glanced once toward Mandy.

“With my girlfriend.”

The woman followed the look and took Mandy in properly for the first time.

“Do you work?”

Mandy answered before Lip could. “We both do.”

“What kind of work.”

Lip said, “Online business.”

That answer didn’t exactly satisfy her, but it gave her something to write down, and at the moment that was all that mattered.

The questions moved on after that, but the shift had already happened. Lip could feel it. The apartment now existed in the conversation. A separate place. A possible option. A detail on paper.

When they stepped outside later, Fiona stayed in the waiting room to finish whatever forms they were putting in front of her.

The air was colder than it looked. Mandy leaned against the railing and pushed a hand through her hair, exhaling slowly.

“Well. That was awful.”

Lip stood beside her, hands in his pockets. “Yeah.”

“She was already measuring the room in her head.”

He glanced over. “The social worker.”

Mandy nodded. “Who can take who. Where they can go. Who looks stable enough on paper.”

Lip looked out across the parking lot.

Cars. Exhaust. Gray sky. A couple people smoking near the side entrance. Hospital life going on like theirs was just another story cycling through the building.

After a second Mandy said, “You’re thinking the same thing I am.”

He knew she was right before she finished.

She turned toward him.

“If they don’t leave them with Fiona…”

Lip stayed quiet for a second too long.

Mandy watched his face change a little. “You’d take them.”

He let out a slow breath. “If it came to that.”

She looked back toward the building. “In a studio apartment.”

“Yeah.”

“That would be chaos.”

“Yeah.”

Mandy nodded once like she had already decided where she stood. “Alright.”

Lip looked at her. “That’s all?”

She met his eyes. “They’re your family.”

Something in him loosened at that, even if the situation itself didn’t.

“Yeah,” he said.

They went back inside after that and stayed until there was nothing left to do but wait on other people deciding what happened next. By the time they finally got back to the apartment, it was evening.

Mandy dropped onto the couch with a tiredness that looked deeper than just a long day. Lip opened the laptop on the table more out of instinct than interest.

The orders had kept coming.

Of course they had.

He refreshed the dashboards.

Fifty-two.

Then the second store.

Twenty-nine.

Mandy leaned forward from the couch. “Fifty-two?”

“Phone cases.”

She shook her head slowly. “That store’s unreal.”

Lip looked at the clothing dashboard for another second. “And this one’s still climbing.”

“Yeah.”

For a while he just sat there staring at the numbers, not because he was excited this time, but because they looked so clean against everything else. Ordered. Measurable. Cause and effect. Spend this, earn that. Change an ad, watch the graph move. It was easier than family. Easier than hospitals. Easier than waiting for somebody with a clipboard to decide whether your brother and sisters still got to live where they always had.

Mandy was watching him now.

“What’s the plan if CPS actually pushes this?”

Lip closed the laptop halfway.

He stood up and reached for his jacket.

Mandy frowned. “Where are you going.”

“Gallagher house.”

“Why.”

He shoved his arms into the sleeves. “Want to see how things are over there.”

She was already standing before he finished the sentence.

“Well, you’re not going by yourself.”

He looked at her and the corner of his mouth lifted despite everything. “Wasn’t expecting to.”

Mandy grabbed her hoodie from the chair, pulled it on, and reached for her shoes.

The apartment felt too quiet behind them as they got ready to leave again.

Not in a good way this time.

More like it was waiting.

Lip paused just long enough to glance once at the half-closed laptop on the table, the numbers frozen there until the next refresh, then turned away and headed for the door with Mandy right behind him.