By the time 2017 rolled around, life had settled into a shape that no longer felt temporary.

Not calm. Nothing connected to the Gallaghers ever stayed calm for very long. But there was a difference between constant disaster and a life that had finally taken form, and Lip could feel that difference now even on the days when everything still threatened to tip sideways.

A lot had changed over the last year.

Monica had come back again for a little while, appearing the way she always did, like she had simply wandered out for a cigarette and decided to return months too late. She slipped into the house, into old rhythms, into old wounds, and for a short time everyone let themselves fall into the same familiar confusion she always brought with her. Then she collapsed from a brain aneurysm and died so suddenly it left the whole family stunned in a way none of them knew how to talk about.

Frank had handled it like Frank handled everything important. One day he seemed almost human, moving through the house with that rare, unnerving kind of focus that made everyone suspicious. The next he was right back to chasing money, chasing schemes, chasing whatever lie felt easiest to live inside that week.

Ian had found something closer to balance than Lip had ever seen him have before. It wasn’t simple and it sure as hell wasn’t easy, but it was real. He worked long shifts as an EMT now, came home tired in the straightforward way normal people got tired, and little by little he had stopped fighting the fact that bipolar disorder wasn’t something he could outrun.

Carl was somehow at military school, which still felt ridiculous if Lip thought too hard about it. If anyone had said years ago that Carl Gallagher would end up in a uniform making his bed properly and following orders, nobody in the house would have believed it for a second. But there he was, spending most of his time away and somehow looking more stable for it.

Debbie was raising Franny while still barely figuring out adulthood for herself, which meant every time Lip saw her she looked either exhausted, stubborn, or both.

And Fiona, somehow, had started building something that belonged to her. The laundromat had started small, just another thing she grabbed onto because standing still had never really been her style, but she was making it work. Slowly, stubbornly, the same way she made everything work.

Life kept moving.

It always did.

Across the city, the warehouse looked nothing like it had the day they first opened it.

Back then it had felt too large, almost embarrassing in how empty it was. Rows of metal shelves, too much concrete, too much echo, one pallet near the back and a few boxes that made the whole thing look like they were pretending at something bigger than they were. Now the place looked the way he had known it eventually would.

The shelves were full.

Boxes lined the aisles.

A printer near the packing station ran almost nonstop, coughing out shipping labels that one of the workers peeled off and slapped onto outgoing packages without looking twice. Inventory bins filled the back half of the building. The loading area smelled faintly of cardboard, cotton, and the plastic wrap from incoming shipments. Everywhere you looked, there was the same name printed across the packaging.

GALLAGHER.

The transition away from supplier clothing had taken time, but once it started, it had moved exactly the way Lip wanted it to. He never tried to rip the old structure apart all at once. There had been no point. The supplier products had carried them long enough to build something better, and he let them fade the same way they had arrived in the first place—quietly, one piece at a time.

Whenever an outside item sold out, he didn’t reorder it.

He replaced it.

A hoodie became one of theirs.

Then a shirt.

Then joggers.

Then caps.

Month by month, the storefront changed until eventually there was nothing left in it that didn’t belong to them. The supplier pages disappeared from his bookmarks. The old product spreadsheets got archived and forgotten. What had once been an online clothing shop turned into a brand in a way that felt so gradual he didn’t notice how complete the shift was until one day Mandy was scrolling through the site and stopped in the middle of it.

“There’s nothing left,” she said.

Lip had looked over from the other side of the table. “That was the goal.”

Now it was all clothing.

All brand.

All theirs.

The phone case business didn’t survive much longer after that.

It had done what it needed to do. It gave them their first real cash flow. It taught them how to test ads, how to deal with customers, how to scale something ugly into something useful. Without it, nothing else would have happened. But eventually it stopped making sense to split attention between two businesses when one of them had clearly become the future and the other had become training wheels they no longer needed.

Closing it felt less like losing something and more like clearing a room they had already moved out of.

Now it was all clothing.

All brand.

All theirs.

Lip walked through the warehouse floor one afternoon while two employees sealed up a line of outgoing orders at the shipping station. A radio was playing low somewhere near the office, half drowned out by tape ripping, boxes sliding, and the constant background motion of people doing work that no longer required his hands on every step of it.

The order volume had climbed again over the past year.

What used to feel huge at one hundred a day had slowly shifted upward. One twenty on an average day. One forty when a product hit right. Some days pushing two hundred if traffic was good and the ads landed where they were supposed to.

None of it had ever exploded in one big, clean jump.

That wasn’t really how the business worked.

It just kept growing.

Mandy was standing near one of the worktables with a stack of new samples in front of her, flipping through them one at a time while a worker pushed a cart of packed orders past her toward the loading area.

She held up a hoodie without looking at him.

“You’re not gonna like this.”

Lip walked over. “Why.”

She turned it around and pointed at the chest.

“The logo placement.”

He looked at it.

Too high.

Not by much, but enough.

“Yeah,” he said. “No.”

Mandy dropped it back onto the table on top of the others.

The brand had reached a point where they weren’t just throwing the same print on basic blanks anymore. That phase had worked, but they were past it now. Fabric mattered more. Fit mattered more. Small details mattered more. They were testing cuts, colors, stitching, materials, and how the logo sat on different silhouettes. They were talking to manufacturers instead of just suppliers. Their own line no longer looked like a temporary label slapped onto someone else’s clothes. It looked deliberate.

Mandy picked up another hoodie and held it against herself for a second.

“This one’s better.”

Lip looked over the shoulders, the hem, the drawstrings. “Yeah.”

She turned it in her hands, feeling the fabric between her fingers.

“We’re actually designing things now.”

Lip smirked a little. “Was coming eventually.”

That got a quiet laugh out of her.

The staff had grown too.

Three warehouse workers had turned into nearly a dozen people spread across different parts of the operation. Shipping. Inventory. Customer support. Someone helping manage the ads. Someone else handling returns so Mandy didn’t have to read the same complaint email ten times in different fonts. The business finally ran like an actual company instead of two people trying to fake one with a laptop and too much caffeine.

Outside, their Audi Q5 sat parked near the loading bay where Mandy had left it that morning. She ended up beside it later, leaning against the hood while another batch got moved into a van.

The late afternoon light hit the warehouse windows at an angle that made everything look flatter and cleaner than it really was. Boxes stacked near the bay doors. Employees lifting shipments without looking rushed. Their logo stamped across everything leaving the building.

Lip stood beside her and followed her gaze.

She smiled a little. “That’s better.”

He didn’t bother asking better than what.

By the time they got home that night, the house felt almost too quiet.

Not empty. Not cold. Just different from the apartment in the way only a bigger place could feel. More space between sounds. More room for silence to sit without turning into tension. The house had filled in over time the way the apartment once had. Furniture that actually matched. Shelves. Framed things on the walls. Clothes put away instead of draped over chairs. It no longer looked like they had just moved in. It looked lived in.

Lip sat at the kitchen table with the laptop open while Mandy went to the fridge and came back with two beers, setting one down in front of him before leaning back against the counter.

The dashboard refreshed.

Another solid day.

She watched him for a moment while he checked the numbers.

Then she said, “You ever think about where this ends?”

Lip looked up. “The business?”

“Yeah.”

She took a sip of her beer. “We’ve got a warehouse. Employees. The house. Our own line. It’s not exactly two idiots with a laptop anymore.”

He leaned back in the chair, beer still unopened in his hand. “Still growing.”

“That’s not really an answer.”

“It is.”

She watched him for another second, quiet now, turning whatever was in her head over before she said it.

Then she straightened a little and said, “Alright. Random question.”

Lip raised an eyebrow. “That’s rarely good.”

Mandy ignored that.

“If someone hypothetically asked you to marry them someday…”

Lip slowly looked up from the laptop.

“…hypothetically?”

She took another sip like she hadn’t just said anything strange. “Just asking.”

He watched her for a second, then leaned back in the chair.

“That’s real subtle.”

A smirk pulled at her mouth. “Didn’t think subtle was the point.”

Lip let out a quiet laugh and shook his head once.

Mandy looked at him over the neck of the bottle. “Well?”

He held her gaze for a moment.

Then he said, “You didn’t exactly ask.”

She smiled properly at that, small but satisfied.

“You didn’t say no.”

And that was where it stayed for the night. The laptop stayed open on the table. The numbers kept moving. The house stayed quiet around them. And after a minute Mandy came over, took the seat beside him instead of the counter, and looked at the dashboard like that conversation hadn’t shifted anything at all. Even though it had.