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He can’t help himself, he has to drive past it any time he's in the southside, maybe it’s the clawing guilt of selling his family home or pure curiosity to see what the new owner has done to his old family home.
Lip sits in the car across the street, the siding painted with a fresh white and the old metal fence replayed with a white picket fence, a real family’s home.
He can’t help but try to see through the curtains but he’s sitting too far away to see anything besides the hanging plants in the bay window and some kid's toys on the windowsill.
He wonders if the family knows what trauma went on in that house, probably not.
He thinks about how Debbie hasn't spoken to him since he moved to Milwaukee, but why live in a house that had brought so many horrors to the family, shit at one point there was a dead body in the backyard. Why still live there?
He remembers Ian's face when told him that it was sold, the face of him trying not to break and pretend he doesn’t care but lip could see the sadness of his family home no longer being theirs, he wonders if Ian drives past the home and watches as he does?
At least Carl took it the easiest, already running with 100 ideas of what to do with the money.
And then Liam … the fear of abandonment clouding over him, after Fiona left he wasn’t the same and then after Frank's death he became a shell of the boy he once was, Lip can see he’s not happy in Milwaukee but what else can he do? He saw Liam plan to get the house back, the kid had a book full of notes that almost reminds him of how Ian used to have manic journals or frank idiotic plans.
So maybe it is the guilt that is clawing at him.
But Freddie and the baby have a safe home, same with Tami and that has to mean something.
The family may be broken but not his new one at least.