She waited on the roof, wishing that she could find a way to stand or a place to sit that didn’t make her feel like an awkward moron. Instead, she just huddled against the wall, hugging herself in her puffy jacket and thinking that she probably didn’t look at all cool and collected.

            He had been avoiding her, and it had been driving her crazy. At first she wondered if something had happened between him and Karen at the wedding, something she’d missed when she left so early with Roy. And then she remembered: She’d left early with Roy. Maybe someone had noticed; maybe someone had told Jim. But she couldn’t quite convince herself that Jim would care enough about something like that to ignore her for two solid days.

            She had cornered him in the break room as he bought himself a bottle of water.

            “What’s going on?” she’d asked softly. “Are you okay?”

            “Yeah,” he’d said, looking at a point over her right shoulder. “Perfect.”

            And he’d tried to walk out, as though there was nothing else to say. She’d reached out and caught his arm, and even though he turned back towards her with a weary sigh, he still hadn’t looked at her.

            “Roof,” she’d hissed. “Five minutes.”

            She hadn’t waited for an answer. She’d just walked purposefully back to her desk, grabbed her coat, and disappeared into the stairwell. It wasn’t until she found herself on the roof that she started to realize that this might have been a stupid, stupid idea.

            She heard the echo of steps behind the door, and her body tensed. She bit her lip as the door opened and Jim stepped out.

            “Hey.” She didn’t even try to smile. Whatever was going on here, it was too big to be smiled away.

            “What do you want, Pam?” he said, and she almost gasped at the anger in his voice. She’d never heard him use that tone before, never known that he could sound that way.

            “Why are you avoiding me?” she forced herself to say. She was shivering, but only partly because of the cold. Jim finally looked at her—finally gave her what she’d been wanting for the past two days—and she found that she couldn’t hold his gaze. He had never looked at her like that before.

            “I just don’t have much to say, that’s all.” He kicked at some loose gravel.

            “That’s crap,” she said, suddenly feeling some anger of her own rising up in her stomach. “You clearly want to say something, Jim. What?”

            “Nah,” he said, shrugging. “It’s none of my business.”

            “What? What is none of your business? Quit acting like this.”

            “Okay, sure.” He found her eyes again. “Did you have a good time with Roy this weekend?”

            She stepped back. So it was about that.

            “You’re right,” she said quietly. “That really is none of your business.”

            “Fine. Fine. I mean, I thought you had moved on, but if you want to go back to Roy—” He put his hand on the door knob.

            “I’m not going back to Roy.”

            “Really? You guys looked pretty cozy at the wedding. I mean, you left together, right?”
            “Who told you that?”

            “I saw you, Pam.” His voice had dropped, but it hadn’t lost any of its anger. “You left with him, after he treated you like shit for, what, ten years?”

            “No, I left with him after he paid attention to me for two hours.” Her own voice was sad. She knew how pathetic it was, but she didn’t feel like lying to him about it. “I left with him after he asked the band to play our song, and I left with him after—” But she stopped. She didn’t want to lie to him, but that didn’t mean she had to tell him everything. She didn’t have to tell him that she had never been as sad as she was when she watched Jim dancing with Karen, watched him smiling down at the woman in his arms that wasn’t her.

            “So that makes it okay? How he used to treat you?”

            “No,” she said. “Give me some credit.”

            “Why should I? Do you even know what that felt like, watching you hold his hand and just walk out like that?”

            “Yeah,” she said, “I think I probably do.”

            They stared at each other for a moment. He seemed to just be realizing now what he had said, what she had said, and the look on his face started to shift slowly from anger to confusion.

            “Pam. Are you saying—”

            She nodded, slowly, wishing that she knew a way to stop this conversation here, before things got worse.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

            She shook her head. “You’re with Karen.”

            “So?”

            “What do you mean, so? You’re with another woman. I wasn’t going to try to get in the way of that.”

            “Didn’t you think I had the right to know?”
            She stared at him. “The right? Is that how you think about these things?” She almost laughed. “Is that why you thought it was okay to tell me you loved me three weeks before I was supposed to get married?”

            He didn’t answer.

            “Do you want to know why I didn’t tell you? It’s because I never wanted you to have to feel like that. I had no idea what to do when you told me, no idea. I couldn’t sleep for three days.”  She paused. No one knew about that, not even Roy. She’d told him she was coming down with something, and he didn’t question the fact that she spent the next three days curled up in the armchair in their living room.

            “I’m sorry,” Jim said, but she could tell he was still feeling a little defiant. Before he could say anything else, she cut him off.

“And I didn’t think it would be fair to do that to you. I don’t even want to be doing this to you now. I should never have come up here.”

“What did you think was going to happen?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Not this.”

“No, I mean—what did you think was going to happen, big picture? Did you think you’d just wait until Karen and I broke up? What if we had gotten engaged? Would you still feel like it wasn’t fair to tell me?”

“It would be even less fair then.”

“So you would just let me keep living my life, no matter how you felt about me?”

She nodded.

“Why?”

“You really don’t get it, do you?” She took a deep breath. “I can’t stand that I hurt you last year. I can’t stand it. But you hurt me, Jim—and I know you didn’t mean to, I know that’s not why you told me, I know all of that. But I figured, this time, I would know how much I was hurting you if I told you…how I feel. And I couldn’t hurt you like that, not on purpose.”

And before he could speak or move, Pam walked past him, opened the door, and made her way back inside. With the same sense of purpose she’d had fifteen minutes ago—oh, god, had it only been fifteen minutes?—she took off her jacket and sat down at her desk.  

           Jim stood on the roof, listening as the door clanged shut and Pam’s footsteps tapped slowly down the cement stairs. He shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned heavily against the wall next to the door. This sucked.

            He knew he had been acting like a pouty teenager for the past few days—and not just with Pam, here at work. He’d tried to keep a smile on his face for Karen at the wedding, but by the time they got into his car to drive home, he couldn’t do it anymore. He’d faked a headache and dropped her off at her apartment, almost forgetting to kiss her as she got out of the car.

            Sunday had been one of the worst days he’d had since he came back to Scranton. He’d spent hours just lying on his couch, flipping the channels on the TV until all the pictures and sounds turned into one long blur. Three times, he’d picked up his cell phone to call Pam, desperate to know if she was still with Roy. Once, he’d gotten up and thrown on his coat, determined to drive to Pam’s old apartment and look for her car in the parking lot. But he had become a master of talking himself out of things, and eventually Sunday night turned into Monday morning, and he had forced himself to shower, shave, and come to work.

            He had these moments, lately, where he thought he had things figured out. They never lasted long, and he couldn’t really enjoy them as they happened. Any time he started to feel like maybe he and Karen weren’t such a bad idea, he’d glance at Pam and catch her looking at him. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make Jim wonder how many things he’d gotten wrong.

            And at the wedding, he’d actually started to think that there were things he’d had right all along. He’d been dancing with Karen but thinking of Pam, and when he looked up and found Pam watching him, he’d felt the strongest urge to pull his hands from Karen’s waist and walk off of the dance floor. So when he’d seen her leave with Roy—

Just thinking about it now, again, like he’d been thinking about it all day on Sunday, made him want to punch a wall. And Jim had never punched a wall.

            He watched his breath turn into mist in front of his face as his heart gradually started to beat normally again. The worst part, he realized, the part that had gotten him so angry in the first place, was that Pam was right. He hadn’t ever really thought about the possibility of hurting her; he’d actually worked pretty hard at not thinking about it, because part of him had always known that he was guilty.

            Standing here on the roof, he thought, was probably the worst possible place to have any kind of revelation about Pam. He couldn’t be up here without thinking of folding chairs and grilled cheese and the night that had finally convinced him that he had to do something. It had taken him awhile to actually get the nerve together, but he wouldn’t have been able to say anything, ever, if he hadn’t spent one perfect evening up here with Pam, looking for fireworks.

            He opened the door slowly and took the steps one by one, hearing Pam’s voice in his head so loudly that it seemed to be echoing through the stairwell. She hadn’t wanted to hurt him. He had probably always known that. But all this time, while he had been congratulating himself on moving on and getting over her, he’d been forgetting about the fact that, even if he hadn’t meant to, he’d hurt her too.

            He made his way back to his desk without looking at anyone. He settled into his chair and stared at his computer screen. This was going to be a very long day.

Karen hated the feeling that she was spying on her own boyfriend.

It hadn’t started this way. At first, when she looked over at his desk, it was to flirt, and to see if she could figure out whether they were ever going to get past grabbing a drink together after work. Then it turned into something more clandestine and romantic, the sort of thing she secretly loved. When she caught his eye, it was because she was his, and he was hers, and the rest of the office might as well not exist during those moments, for all she cared.

            But there had been a shift, and even though Karen couldn’t exactly remember when it was that she noticed Pam staring at the back of Jim’s neck, she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something she was missing. And when Phyllis had dropped that comment about Jim getting over Pam, Karen had felt for a few minutes like she might never be able to breathe normally again.

            Conversations are good things. Karen has always believed that it’s always best to talk about your problems. And Jim had been so cooperative that she had started to think that maybe she didn’t have anything to worry about after all. But she couldn’t help herself from glancing over in Jim’s direction—not to make eye contact with him, but to see if he was making eye contact with Pam.

            At Phyllis’s wedding, Karen had started to relax back into the relationship. It began to feel like it had a few weeks earlier, before she confronted Jim about his feelings for Pam. She had wondered, from time to time, whether things might not have been better if she had just left it all alone. She could have gone on just fine without thinking that her boyfriend might still have a crush on another woman. She could have pushed all those little worries out of her head. She had done it before, in other relationships. Karen had gotten pretty good at convincing herself that she was the right girl for whoever happened to be the right guy at the moment.

            But things were different with Jim, and they always had been. He hadn’t thrown himself at her or tried to impress her or made an ass out of himself in front of her. Jim had acted like she was just another normal person, and that had made it so much easier for her to fall for him. The weirdness had started when she realized that it didn’t seem like Jim was falling for her. This was new for Karen, and in some small way, she appreciated it. She’d had to work for Jim. She’d earned him.

            She just hadn’t understood that she was competing with someone else all along.

            And it would be easier, too, if Pam wasn’t so nice. Out of all the women in this office, Pam was the only normal one, the only one Karen could see herself talking to and being friends with. So when she’d had to work for Pam’s friendship almost as hard as she’d had to work for Jim’s affection, Karen had again felt a little bit triumphant. She’d won. She may have pulled up her entire life to move to Scranton, but now she had a boyfriend who was tall and funny and definitely had the cutest smile she’d ever seen, and she had a friend who was clever and gentle and genuinely nice.

            Things were supposed to keep going like that. Things were supposed to stay good. She wasn’t supposed to notice Jim’s hand brushing Pam’s as they pulled pranks, or Pam’s smile growing three sizes whenever she talked to Jim. She wasn’t supposed to ask questions point blank that basically accused the only two people she liked in this city of carrying something on behind her back.

            And she wasn’t supposed to see Pam grab her coat at 10:17 on a Tuesday morning, and she wasn’t supposed to see Jim slip into the stairwell two minutes later. She wasn’t supposed to sit at her desk, unable to focus on anything but the fact that Pam and Jim were somewhere, together, doing something.

            Things didn’t get better when Pam came back, looking flushed but steady. And when Jim followed, looking flushed and confused. Karen tried to catch Jim’s eye, feeling guilty even as she knew that maybe she wasn’t the one who had anything to feel guilty for, but he refused to look away from his computer screen. And Karen’s eyes drifted over to Pam’s desk, dreading the idea that Pam was probably going to be looking at the back of Jim’s neck, like she often did.

            Instead, Karen found herself looking right into Pam’s eyes. Pam blinked but didn’t look away. Then, slowly but sincerely, Pam smiled a sad smile and shrugged. And Karen returned the gesture. Whatever was going on here—whatever had been going on here—Pam seemed to be just as unsure of what to do about it as Karen was.

            That, at least, was a comfort.

           He wasn’t sure where things had gone wrong. All he knew was that something had happened; something had made Pam decide that she couldn’t go home with him even though they were practically at the apartment already.

            He had called her three times on Sunday, and she hadn’t answered the phone. He had gone to her apartment and knocked on the door, and even though he could hear the TV playing in the background, she pretended not to be home. There was a part of him that wanted to knock the door down and make her talk to him, but he knew he had to stay calm or it would make things worse.

            He forced himself to wait until lunchtime to go up to the office. He figured, what the hell? It would be kind of like old times. He wasn’t sure which old times, because he never really visited her at her desk during the day until after they broke up—and that had been a mistake, he got that now. But he was learning from his mistakes. Pam needed to see that.

            “Roy,” she said, and the surprise in her voice just barely distracted him from the fear in her eyes. Why would she look scared to see him?

            “Have lunch with me?” He smiled a little, knowing which smile worked best on getting Pam to go along with whatever he wanted. “Come on, Pammy.”

            She stared down at her desk and shook her head. “Roy. No.”

            He took a deep breath and ran his hands through his hair, glancing around the office to see if anyone had noticed. And, of course, there was fucking Halpert, with those puppy dog eyes that always seemed to be pointed in Pam’s direction. Roy fought back the urge to pull Halpert’s skinny ass out of his chair and punch his stupid enormous nose.

            “Roy, please go away.”

            “You can’t just be like this.” He was trying so hard to keep from yelling that his voice barely came out as a whisper. “You can’t make me think I have a chance with you and then pretend like it never happened.”

            “Nothing did happen.” Pam’s voice wasn’t as quiet as his. Roy noticed that the office had gotten quieter. This was getting embarrassing. “Please go.”

            Out of the corner of his eye, Roy saw Jim shift in his seat. Pam must have noticed too, because she glanced at Jim and shook her head—just a little, but Roy noticed.

            “What’s that, some sort of stupid freaking secret code?” He didn’t feel like keeping his voice down anymore. If she had just gotten up and gone to lunch, none of this would be happening. “Huh, Halpert?”

            Pam didn’t look scared anymore. Now she just looked pissed.

            “Get out. Now.”

            “Do you have something to say to me, Jim?” Roy crossed his arms over his chest and stared down at Halpert. He didn’t look scared either.

            “Jim, stay out of it.” Roy glanced up to see the new girl, the hot one, standing at her desk. “It’s none of your business.”

            But Jim ignored her. He stood up and walked up to Roy.

            “Pam asked you to leave. I think you should just go.”

            “And I think you should listen to your girlfriend and stay the hell out of it.”

            Everyone was staring. Roy tried not to care. Man, he hated this guy.

            “Listen, man. I don’t any trouble—”

            And that’s when Roy punched him.

            Suddenly there was noise everywhere, and Roy couldn’t tell where any of it was coming from. He found himself on top of Halpert, getting ready to throw another punch. He could tell that someone was pulling on his arm, and someone else was grabbing his hair, but he was strong. He didn’t care.

            And then he heard a loud whistle, the kind coaches use to get attention during practice. Roy looked up to see the old guy standing over them.

            “Get the hell up, asshole,” he said. “I just called the cops.”

            Roy stood up, feeling clumsy and stupid. He looked at Pam, trying to figure out how he could apologize for this—how he could make her stop glaring at him. But she just gave him one last look, one last angry look, and he knew that he had screwed up too bad this time. He stumbled to the office door.

            He turned around, just in case. Sometimes girls changed their minds, he knew that. But Pam was holding a Kleenex to Jim’s nose and whispering something in his ear. And—shit, shit, shit—she was crying.

            As the door closed behind him, Roy had a feeling he wouldn’t be coming up to the office again anytime soon.

           Karen sat back down in her chair, watching as chaos took over the middle of the office. She watched as Roy pulled himself off Jim and left the office. She watched as Creed surveyed the mess at his feet and then, without a word, walked back to his desk. And she watched as Pam kneeled next to Jim and pulled him up, brushing his hair out of his face and pressing a Kleenex against his bleeding nose.

            Part of her thought that she should be the one on the ground, taking care of Jim. But a bigger part of her knew that it wasn’t her place. She wasn’t the one he’d been fighting over.

            And so she took a couple of deep breaths, stood up, and went to the break room. She put some ice in a towel and made her way to Jim and Pam.

            “Here,” she said, handing the towel to Pam. “This might help.”

            “Thanks, Karen,” Pam said, and she sounded really grateful. Karen thought that Pam would say something else, maybe try to explain, but she just went back to murmuring to Jim and gently holding the cold towel against the side of his nose.

            “This should stop the bleeding,” Pam said quietly. Karen stood silently for a moment longer, waiting for Jim to open his eyes and look at her. But he didn’t, and she went back to her desk.

            A few minutes later—or longer, maybe; she’d been staring at her computer without moving for she didn’t know how long—she heard someone say, “Hey, Karen, want to go get some coffee or something?”

            She looked up to see Toby standing next to her desk. She wasn’t sure she’d ever spoken to Toby alone for more than a few seconds at a time, when their paths crossed near the coffee machine. And she had opened her mouth to say no, a sort of automatic reaction, when she noticed that Jim hadn’t gone back to his desk. She glanced over to the reception desk to see Pam and Jim, talking quietly and not quite looking at each other. Jim was in Pam’s normal seat and she leaned on her desk next to him—close enough to seem comfortable, kind of intimate, even, but not close enough to be touching him.

            “Um, yeah. That sounds really nice, actually.”

            She followed Toby out of the office, not even stopping to say goodbye to Jim because she was so afraid he would ignore her. She followed Toby out of the building and down the street, huddling against the chilly wind and enjoying the fact that he wasn’t trying to talk.

            It wasn’t until they settled into a corner table and she was warming her hands on her coffee cup that Toby said, “So, hey. I figured you might need someone to talk to. You know.”

            Karen nodded. He was probably right. But, as nice as Toby was, she didn’t see herself telling him everything that was going on in her head right now. It might feel okay-- good, even-- to get some of this stuff off her chest while they were sitting in a Starbucks, but then they’d get back to the office and Toby would know these things that she was thinking, and she just didn’t want to have that fact floating around for now on.

            “Can I ask you something?” she said. She didn’t want to talk, but it occurred to her that maybe Toby would have some things to say himself.

            “Yeah, of course.” He fiddled with the empty Sweet’n’Low packet she had left on the table. “What’s up?”

            “Did Pam used to date that guy? Roy?”

            Toby looked like he was trying not to look surprise. “Um, yeah. For awhile, actually. A long while.”

            “How long?”

            “Ten years. They were supposed to get married last summer.”

            Karen almost choked on her coffee. “What?”

            “I… can’t believe you didn’t know that. Yeah, she called it off.”

            “When? Why?”

            “Oh, um, I don’t really know. It was pretty close to the wedding. June, I remember that.” He wouldn’t look at her. There was more to this. Karen just wasn’t sure how much more she wanted to know.

            “Did Jim— Nevermind. I don’t care.”

            She sat silently, sipping her coffee, barely acknowledging the few attempts Toby made at small talk. She wasn’t stupid. Even if she didn’t have the details, she had enough pieces to put together a pretty good picture of Jim’s life now.

And that was the problem: she wasn’t really in it.

          He closed his eyes and settled under her hand, enjoying the fact that, even though his face was broken, he was close to her and she wasn’t pushing him away and she wasn’t saying no.

            “I’m sorry,” she said, and her mouth was close enough to his ear for him to feel her breath. He wasn’t sure he could stand it. He tried to focus on the pain in the middle of his face instead of the complete joy tingling around his earlobe.

            “Not your fault.” He didn’t open his eyes as he listened to the rustling around them, people going back to their chairs and answering the phones. “Did Creed really call the cops?”

            “Oh, God, I don’t know,” she murmured. Then she sighed. “I don’t actually care. Does this hurt?”

            He winced as she put a little more pressure on his nose. She apologized again as he moved his hand over hers, repositioning it so that it hurt a little less.

            “Here,” he heard Karen say. Shit. Karen. “This might help.”

            “Thanks, Karen.” She moved the Kleenex from his nose and replaced it with something cold and dry. He kept his eyes shut. He told himself it was because he didn’t want to stare straight into the fluorescent lights, but he wasn’t a very good liar. “This should stop the bleeding,” Pam said. “Can you stand up?”

            Jim really, really didn’t want to stand up. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been quite as comfortable as he was right now. But he let Pam pull him up and guide him toward her desk. He slipped an arm around her shoulder as though he needed the support, and she only hesitated a second before putting her own arm around his waist.

            “Sit down,” she said. “Hold that ice pack over your nose.”

            She deposited him in her chair, squeezed his hand—don’t let go, he thought, surprising himself a little with the desperation in his inner voice—and then disappeared into the break room. He watched her for a few seconds, then forced himself to glance over at Karen. She was staring at her computer. He wasn’t sure she was even blinking. Now would maybe not be a good time to talk to her.

            Pam came back and leaned against her desk, holding out a mug of something hot.

            “So,” he said. “It was nice seeing Roy again.”

            She met his smile with a giggle.

            “You didn’t have to,” she said quietly, still smiling but somehow managing to look sad at the same time. He had always wondered how she did that. “I mean, thank you, but maybe you shouldn’t have.”

            “I don’t know if you know this, Pam,” Jim said, using his best confidentially-speaking tone. “But I’ve never really liked Roy. I’m not that upset if we’re not friends.”

            “I’m not talking about Roy.” He followed her eyes to Karen. Wow—Pam was actually worried about Karen. He knew it was sick, twisted, maybe even evil to feel this way, but he suddenly wanted to kiss Pam more than he’d ever wanted to before. “Drink your tea.”

            They sat silently for a couple of seconds as Jim tenderly touched his nose and Pam casually drank her own cup of tea.

            “How does it look?” Jim asked, partly to have something to say and partly because he just really wanted to feel Pam looking right at him again.

            “Not too bad. It’s only swelling a little bit. The ice really helped, I think.”

            “Good, because you know how vain I am.”

            She giggled again, and he never wanted her to stop. He smiled up at her, then stopped smiling when he noticed Karen and Toby slipping out the door.

            “So—I hate to bring this up again,” he said as the door clicked shut. “But you and Roy--”

            Pam sighed. “I thought maybe I could go home with him, and I thought maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, but I was wrong. And I told him to take me back to my place, and I practically slammed the door in his face, and I spent my Saturday night crying by myself in my bathroom.”

            “Wow, Beesly,” Jim said, trying to sound normal but knowing that his voice was shaking. He had to get used to this whole honesty thing she was trying out—she kept catching him off guard with it today. “That’s…pretty pathetic.”

            “Oh, I know.”

            “Want to know what I did Saturday night?”

            Pam shot him a look that clearly said, “Not particularly.”

            “I faked a headache and dropped Karen off, then spent the next 24 hours not watching TV.”

            “And you think I’m pathetic?”

            Jim let himself sit at Pam’s desk for a few more minutes, but eventually it seemed silly to keep pretending like they were on some kind of private island or something. The rest of the office was back to work, and he didn’t really have a good excuse for keeping Pam from answering the voice mails that were blinking angrily on her phone. So eventually he forced himself back to his desk, and he forced himself not to turn around, and he forced himself not to talk to Pam. And when Karen got back, he forced her to make eye contact with him—and it looked like both of them had some things they needed to say.

          Pam didn’t know what to do with herself for the rest of the day. She had no energy, no idea what time it was, no motivation to answer the phone or send faxes. So she sat, drinking cold tea, and steadfastly refusing to look up from her desk. If it hadn’t been for Toby, who stopped to say goodbye on his way out, Pam wouldn’t have known that it was after five o’clock already. A quick glance around the office told her that the only other people left were Jim and Karen, sitting silently at their desks, not looking at each other.

            She wasn’t ready to leave. Part of her thought Roy might be waiting in the parking lot, desperate to talk to her again. The longer she waited, the more likely it was that Darryl would talk him into going to grab a beer. So she opened a game of Free Cell and occasionally moved a card or two, willing the time to pass more quickly.

            Jim and Karen left—together—a few minutes later. She felt the tears start to fill her eyes before she could do anything about it, and since the office was empty now anyway, she decided to just let herself go ahead and cry.

            It had been stupid of her, completely ridiculous, to let herself think that today had changed anything. After all this time of trying to force things back to the way they used to be, Pam hadn’t been sure that she was ready for anything to change anyway. But today, when Jim had stood up for her and taken a punch for her and joked with her—she thought maybe, maybe, telling him how she felt had been the right thing to do after all.

            So, she thought, this is how it feels to tell someone you love them and watch them walk away.  She let herself sob, let herself remember how close she had come to staying with him when he kissed her that night, let herself wonder how much better her life could have been if she hadn’t tried to walk away.

            She wished she could hate him. She had wanted to hate him, so much, when he told her that he was in love with her. She had wanted to hate him for leaving Scranton. And she wanted to hate him now for throwing her feelings in his face. She hurt so much right now that she thought she deserved to hate him. But it hurt so much more to know that she never could.

            She finally took a deep breath and made her way to the bathroom to splash her face with water. Her eyes were still red and puffy, but she didn’t see how that could possibly matter at this point. She wasn’t going to see anyone tonight. She was going to get in her car and drive to her empty apartment.

            Maybe she should get a cat. She smiled at her sad reflection and resolved to consider the possibility. It might be better than living alone.

            She almost screamed when she walked out of the break room and saw someone standing in front of the reception desk. It took her a second to realize that it was Jim, and that he was holding her coat.

            “Hey,” he said, taking a few steps closer to her but stopping a safe distance away. “Can we talk?”

            She nodded, suddenly very aware of her red, puffy eyes. She took her coat from him and slipped it on as he led the way to the stairwell.

            By the time they made it to the roof, Pam had steeled herself for the conversation she was sure they were about to have. Jim was with Karen. Karen was nice, and pretty, and he deserved to be with someone like that. And he didn’t want to hurt Pam, of course not, but the timing was just bad—

            “Do you remember our first date?” she heard him ask. His voice was soft and unsure, and she knew he was thinking of an angry moment, a long time ago.

            “Do you think I could forget?” She sighed. “Any of it?”

            It was freezing, much colder than it had been this morning. Pam tucked her hands under her arms and breathed a long slow breath, enjoying the way that the cold turned her sigh into a cloud.

            “Karen and I are done,” he said.

            She almost said she was sorry, because she almost was, but it felt too much like a lie. So she just nodded.

            “I think she was tired of me,” he said. Pam shook her head.

            “No one gets tired of Jim Halpert,” she said.

            “Then she was tired of us.” He didn’t clarify which “us” he was talking about, and Pam didn’t ask him to. She just breathed out another sigh, another cloud. “I think I thought I was getting kind of tired of us, too.”

            Pam looked up at him, at his clenched jaw and wrinkled forehead. He was staring up at the sky as if he were looking for something. Feeling brave and cold and terrified and ready, Pam reached out and took his hand. She stood close to him, enjoying the way that he wrapped his fingers around hers, and she stared up at the stars.

            “What are we looking for?” she asked.

            “I don’t know,” Jim said. “Fireworks?”

            Pam nodded. That sounded about right.