She wasn’t really suspicious by nature. She’d never really worried about having a guy cheat on her before. True, she had done a little cheating herself—and that might have been why it never occurred to her that she might be on the other end of an infidelity. But Jim had put her in a whole new place, and she was definitely sure that she didn’t enjoy that.

            So when he left for a sales call on a random Tuesday afternoon, she decided to take advantage of the chance to do a little investigating. She meandered over to his empty desk, ignoring the sharp glance from Pam, and opened the top drawer. Pencils, pens, some old receipts from Starbucks. Nothing interesting there. She moved over to the next drawer. Files. Crap, this wasn’t helping at all.

            She opened the bottom drawer and felt that drop in her stomach that she’d been expecting from the moment she sat down in his chair. The drawer was practically empty, and if she hadn’t been looking for something, she might not have even noticed the picture in the corner. It was lying facedown, but she knew whose picture it was without turning it over. Taking a deep breath, she grabbed the photo and slammed the drawer, then walked back to her own desk without a word.

            When Jim got back from his sales call, she gave him a tight smile and tried to pretend that she wasn’t hiding anything. But when he came over at 4:57 to see if she was ready to head out, she told him that she was just going to take the bus home. He knew something was wrong—she hated public transportation—but he didn’t say anything about it. He just nodded, told her he’d see her at her place that night, and walked away. She noticed that he stopped to say something to Pam, who smiled a little and waved as he left.

            She stared at the picture the whole ride home, gripping the edges and trying to resist the urge to rip the damn thing up. She didn’t know when this picture was taken, or where they were, but she knew that she had never seen Pam so happy as she was here, grinning up at Jim, ignoring the camera altogether. And even though his goofy smile was directed at the photographer, she knew that all of his attention was really focused on Pam.

            He knocked on her door that night to pick her up for their date, and she let him in without a word. He sat down on the couch while she went to get her purse; she took longer than she needed, hoping that he would notice the picture on the coffee table in front of him. When she wandered back into her living room, he was sitting at the edge of the couch, his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands.

            “So,” she said. “I guess we need to have another talk.”

            There was a ticking noise coming from under the desk.

            At first, he had been convinced that this was just one of Halpert’s stupid pranks. It was probably just an alarm clock. He had spent all morning mentally preparing himself for the alarm to go off, willing himself not to show any signs of surprise when the moment arrived. But then lunch had come and gone, and nothing had happened.

            This was going to require careful investigation.

            Strange. It seemed like Halpert heard the noise too. Every once in awhile, Jim glanced around him, even opening the drawers of his desk to see if he could find the source of the noise. And Pam seemed to be listening carefully, her head tilted in their direction.

      Perhaps this wasn’t a prank after all.

       And that was when it occurred to him: terrorist attack.

      He would have to proceed carefully in order to avoid throwing the entire office into panic mode. He glanced at Angela, who ignored him. Good woman. He knew that, should the need arise, she would be able to guide their coworkers to safety.

    But now—now it was time to be a hero. He would finally have a chance to put all of his training to work.

      He tried to act nonchalant as he nudged the pencil off his desk.

       “Oops,” he said, making eye contact with Jim. “Dropped something.”

     He dropped to his knees and made himself as small as possible, examining every surface under his desk. The ticking was definitely nearby. He ran his hands slowly under the drawers. Nothing.

    Then he remembered—Jim was number two now. Anyone who was trying to take out the office would obviously go after Halpert. He smiled to himself and shifted his attention to Halpert’s desk.

      And there it was, taped under the bottom drawer. Definitely a bomb. He ran his fingers over it, feeling the wires attaching the timer to the dynamite. No doubt about it.

     Okay. Time to act. He took a deep breath and went into action, hitting his head in his hurry to escape from the death trap under the desks.

      “Everyone remain calm,” he said in a loud voice, rubbing the bump that had started to raise on the side of his head. “There is a bomb under Halpert’s desk. I repeat: There is a bomb. Please leave the office in an orderly fashion while I call in the bomb squad.”

      Only Angela sprang into action, calling out orders and moving quickly towards the front door. Meredith and Creed continued to stare at their computers, while Phyllis rolled her eyes at him. Jim and Pam were exchanging glances.

      “Did you not hear me? There. Is. A. Bomb. Get out of the office!”

      “A bomb?” Stanley asked. “At Dunder-Mifflin. Right.” And he went back to filling out his crossword puzzle as though no one’s life was in peril.

       “Fine,” he said, clenching his teeth. “I have risked my life for you ungrateful people one too many times. That’s it.”

      And he stalked out of the office.

    The next morning, he returned to work to find the office intact. Clearly, the bomb squad had been able to find and disarm the bomb. He felt a strong sense of satisfaction.

  Then, when he sat down at his desk, he saw it. Four candles wrapped in construction paper, tied with twine, attached to an alarm clock with duct tape.

            Michael really shouldn’t have given him a key, especially since he was still just a temp at the time. But that didn’t mean he didn’t take advantage of it from time to time.

            Kelly had begged him to pick up some coffee for her on his way to her apartment, but he wasn’t in the mood to pay ten bucks for a couple of designer drinks that night. So instead he stopped by the office, let himself in, and fired up the coffee maker. She would probably whine that he’d brought the cheap stuff, but he would just remind her that she was the one who hated the smell of brewing coffee so much that she wouldn’t keep any in her house.

            He was bored, so he decided to check his email. Jim was the only one who left his computer on over the weekends—Angela had gone on an energy conservation kick lately, and half of the people in the office wouldn’t want anyone seeing what they looked at on the internet anyway. But Jim was careless that way.

            His email was mostly forwards from Michael and reminders from Kelly, but there was one email from a friend of his with the phone number of a cute girl they’d met at a bar the other night. That was important. He should write that down. He glanced around the desk for something to write on, then opened the top drawer to see if there were any Post-it’s there. Instead, there was a couple of sheets of paper, blanks filled in with Jim’s most careful writing. A job application.

            Holy crap. Jim was going to try for that job in corporate. He didn’t realize that anyone else in this office even knew about that opening. He glanced over the sheet, skimming over Jim’s address and focusing on his previous work experience. Jim would definitely have the upper hand on this one.

            He put the paper on the desk and searched through Jim’s desk for the pen that had filled out this application. Quickly, without even stopping to think about what he was doing, he made some careful corrections to Jim’s salary expectations and contact info. Then he put the paper back in the drawer, exactly as he had found it.

            The coffee was ready. He left with two Styrofoam cups and a smug smile.

There wasn’t much left to steal in this place. Once upon a time, people had left all sorts of crap in their desks—CDs, earrings, sometimes even money. He had like the office a lot more in those days.

            Now, when he went from one desk to the next, he found nothing but office supplies and old snack food. Not that he was complaining about the snack food. People didn’t realize how much better Doritos get with age.

      But the tall kid sometimes left things, and he was starting to think that it was on purpose. Like that one time, he found a couple of old sandwiches from the corner shop. And sometimes there was a magazine, something that claimed to be about sports but only had pictures of girls in bikinis.

   Tonight he found a couple of rolls of pennies. Now he was convinced—the kid was messing with him. No one would leave rolls of coins in their desk unless they were trying to annoy a thief.

     “Oh, crap,” Jim said, just as they reached the elevator. “I forgot my iPod.”

            “I’ll grab it,” she said. “Hold my purse.”

            “Really? Are we actually going to be that couple?”

            “Absolutely. Consider this practice for when we go to the mall this weekend.”

            “Can’t wait.”

            She grinned at him, his arm held out slightly awkwardly from his body as her purse bumped against his knee.

            She hurried to Jim’s desk and pulled open the top drawer. His iPod was on top, surrounded by the tangle of rubber bands and paper clips he’d been stealing from Dwight all week. She grabbed the iPod and started to close the drawer, but the headphone wires got caught on something. She tugged on the wires until they broke free of the object that had been holding them—a small, square, velvet object.

            She almost dropped the iPod when she saw it. That was, no question, a jewelry box. The kind of jewelry box that engagement rings came in. She stared at it for a moment before she picked it up, trying to convince herself that she should probably not open it, and that she should probably not be shaking like this, and that it was probably nothing anyway.

            And that’s when Jim cleared his throat.

            She glanced up and gasped. “I didn’t open it,” she said, feeling a strange mixture of guilt and stupidity. “I promise.”

            “No, go ahead,” he said. “It’s for you.”

            “Jim…” She ran her thumb across the velvet. “Are you sure?”

            He nodded, barely smiling at her.

            Taking perhaps the deepest breath of her entire life, she opened the box.

            “Um.” She exhaled. “It’s…empty.”

            “Yes.”

            “So you bought me a box?”

            “Oh, no. I bought you a ring.” He reached up and loosened his tie.

            “And then you gave it to Dwight?”

            He laughed. “No. You’ll see.” He slipped his hand behind the collar of his shirt and pulled up what looked like a shoestring. “I bought you a ring, and I wanted to keep it somewhere safe.”

            She stared at the cord around his neck. He lifted it over his head and handed it to her.

            “Here.”

            She almost started crying, because there was something so moving about the simple way that he said it and placed the makeshift necklace in her hand. She closed her eyes as the warm metal of the ring hit her palm.

            “Pam. Could you maybe, um, look at me while I say this?”

            She opened her eyes to find Jim down on one knee. She swallowed hard.

            “I’ve been calling you Beesly for almost six years now. I’d kind of like it if we could take things in a new direction.”

            She glanced down at the ring in her hand, a perfect circle of white gold and diamonds.

            “So I was thinking that maybe it would be a good idea if, sometime soon, I could start calling you Halpert for a change. Mrs. Halpert, to be specific.”

            They stared at each other for a second.

            “What do you think?”

            She stared at the ring on its shoestring, at the man she loved on his knees in front of her, and she burst out laughing.

            “So? Is that a yes?”

            “Yes,” she said, slipping the ring onto her finger without even taking it from the string. “Yes. You are such a dork. Yes.”

            And when she kissed him, she put her hand over his heart, where the ring on her finger used to be.