Pam Beesly loved her family. She loved Scranton, Pennsylvania, where she’d grown up, lived, and worked her whole life. She loved the winter holidays in the eastern US, with the potential for snowfall, the cups of hot cocoa, the way that little whisps of breath made their way up from people’s faces and made her want to pull out her watercolors and paint their souls floating free.

Really, she adored December at home, and she enjoyed spending the holidays with her family.

It’s just…sometimes she couldn’t help but wish that she could be somewhere warm. Somewhere fun, and not in the “you make your own fun” way but in the actual factual fun that was already programmed in way. Somewhere like California.

So when she got an alert on their shared credit card that Roy had bought two tickets to Santa Monica (well, two tickets to LAX and a hotel for eight nights in Santa Monica), she was excited.

Finally, all those years of hinting and wishing and waiting for her fiancé to notice that she wanted something new and exciting in December had paid off. Sure, it was short notice, but she had no doubt that she could get Michael to approve vacation time (he signed pretty much anything she stuck under his nose if she timed it right, and Toby wasn’t the kind of person to make waves at someone getting out from under Michael’s thumb for a bit). And Chanukah! In Santa Monica! How romantic!

At least, it was until she mentioned it to him when he got home and he had no idea what she was talking about.

Oh, it wasn’t credit card fraud. No, he knew exactly what she was talking about regarding the flight and the hotel room. He just wasn’t planning on going with her.

“Well, Kenny had a bad breakup, and I just figured he could use a break. And he and I always meant to check out Santa Monica Pier, go on a rollercoaster, maybe ogle some girls at the beach, you know?”

No, she did not know. First of all, Kenny had had a “bad breakup” with Sandy, who he’d been dating for three weeks. Second, while she was aware that any human being with eyes could look, there was a difference between being intellectually aware that there were other women in the world besides her who were attractive and actively going searching for Californian girls to ogle, Roy. It was like Katy at the office all over again. And third, it was for the entirety of Chanukah!

“So?”

“So my family’s Jewish, Roy!” Not like Chanukah was actually that much of a big deal in Jewish culture. Honestly, it was mostly a defensive holiday, both in topic and in application: a celebration of a prior refusal to assimilate (to the Hellenist Greeks under Antiochus) rolled into a modern-day refusal to do the same (to American Christianity, if not American capitalism). But still; she wanted Roy with her when they went over to Bobe and Zayde’s for latkes and she had to watch her first cousins with their wedding rings on top of their engagement rings and listen to Mom ask for the third year in a row when the actual wedding was going to happen.

“Wait, what? I thought you were Presbyterian!”

“Wait…what did you think we went to at my grandparents’ house every year?”

“I don’t know, I never really thought about it!” And that was Roy in a nutshell.

She forced herself to explain for what she realized was too many times to count at this point that yes, her dad was Presbyterian and she’d grown up going to church socials and youth group and so on because it was where all her friends were anyway and her dad was on the session for a couple of years and they’d needed people to actually go to youth group events to justify the cost of the program. But her Mom was Jewish (Helene Greenbaum; her Bobe and Zayde found it in a baby book and liked it, it wasn’t a family name or anything) and that made her Jewish. They hadn’t really been big synagogue-goers or anything, but they did the basics.

Speaking of which…

“Roy, is that why you never come to the Seder when I ask you to?”

“Come on, baby, I don’t even know what Seder is.”

“It’s that big party my grandparents throw every spring.”

“Oh, the one during March Madness?”

And that was Roy in a nutshell. She loved him. She really did. But unless something was actually important to him, she could tell him a million times and it would go through one ear and out the other.

“So…you’re Jewish. And Presbyterian? But also Jewish?”

“Yes, Roy.” She didn’t even bother to mention the chuppah she’d asked his opinion about last week; then again, by now she’d mostly given up on him ever actually agreeing to plan a wedding with her.

“And why is this a problem with my trip to Santa Monica again?”

“Because you’re leaving me alone for the whole week of Chanukah! And because I thought we were going together!”

“Why would we do that?”

And then Kenny called—she was pretty sure she heard him call Sandy “Sharon” as he sobbed over the phone when Roy picked up, which either meant he’d forgotten her name already or his ‘bad breakup’ was over even less of a relationship than she’d thought—and the conversation ended before it could really begin.

And as was typical of Roy, he had absolutely no idea why she was mad at him by the next morning, to the point where he followed her up the stairs to the main office asking why she was giving him the cold shoulder.

Which was how she managed to yell “because you forgot I was Jewish” at him in front of all their coworkers at nine o’clock in the morning.

“You’re Jewish?”

Oh no.

Oh no.

Michael had heard her. And for all that she was angry at Roy, this was not what she wanted to come out of it.

The plus side was that in the furor that Michael started up over her being Jewish, Roy ended up throwing up his hands and leaving her alone, stalking down to the warehouse to work.

Or maybe that wasn’t a positive, since it meant that the two of them hadn’t actually worked anything out, and he was scheduled to fly out to California that night.

Which was also the first night of Chanukah, of course.

On top of that, it meant that she was at the tender mercy of Michael with a new piece of knowledge in his grasp, and doing his usual over the top reaction to any kind of news, particularly any news about someone in the office who was anything other than a straight white Anglo-Saxon Protestant man.

He called an emergency meeting of the party planning committee, which had the effect of pulling Angela out of what she said was a very important spreadsheet reconciliation meeting with Kevin, which in turn meant that the meeting went from the usual Michael-led disaster to a compounded one where Angela kept glaring at her every three seconds.

It wasn’t her fault that Michael had decided that they needed to transform the Christmas party and Secret Santa into a combined Chanukah/Christmas party! It definitely wasn’t her fault that he had apparently Googled “Chanukah” exactly once and decided that the best way to do this was to have seven additional Secret Santa exchanges, one for each day of Chanukah, “only we can get someone to dress up as Judah Maccabee and hand out the presents!” It definitely definitely wasn’t her fault that he wanted to put an Israeli flag on the top of the little office Christmas tree.

None of that was Chanukah content, and she didn’t want any of it to happen either! She was on Angela’s side for once! But that didn’t seem to matter. Instead, it just meant that Michael was sulking at her too while Angela was still glaring daggers.

Then Michael went and made it worse by demanding that they put it to an office-wide vote, instead of just the planning committee, which had Pam thinking that she just ought to change her name and move to Kentucky in order to avoid the inevitability of Angela hunting her down, murdering her, and feeding her to her cats.

All in the spirit of Christmas, of course.

Fortunately, no one in the office was willing to back up Michael’s plans. Even Dwight took one look at the steam that was metaphorically coming out of Angela’s ears and hid in the bathroom instead of voting. One more point of evidence in her theory that Dwight and Angela were a thing, but that didn’t exactly feel like a triumph after Michael stomped off into his office insisting that “you’re all anti-Semitic! And that goes double for Pam!”

She slumped into her desk. Just how she wanted to start her day.

And it only got worse from there, somehow. Jim was out of the office that morning on a sales call, so there was no one to buffer her from Dwight when he emerged from the bathroom and came over to chat about her Judaism—or even for her to roll her eyes at when he did.

At least he was being kind, she thought, as he offered to bring in a menorah for the office if she wanted. Before she could refuse—she really, really didn’t want her religion to be an issue in the workplace, thank you very much—he casually mentioned that his grandfather had picked it up “sometime in the 1930s, from his neighbors the Gottliebs, when they moved,” and she suddenly found herself with an overwhelming need to run to the bathroom herself.

Unfortunately he seemed to take this as a yes, somehow, because when she came out he told her that Mose would be dropping it off in the afternoon, “assuming that he doesn’t get hit on the interstate when walking over.”

Then Michael called her into his office and proceeded to ask her a series of unnecessary and frankly inappropriate questions about whether she thought Jan was maybe Jewish too and whether that meant she would give him extra money in the budget to do Chanuchristmakkah Secret Maccabees without Angela’s help.

Pam seriously considered whether she could get away with unplugging his phone from the desk before he called and asked Jan himself.

In the end, she pointed out that he’d have to involve Toby and HR if he wanted to find out any other employee’s religious affiliation or act on it in any way, and breathed a sigh of relief when he just shouted “oh God no!” instead of remembering that Jan wasn’t a branch employee and thus it would be corporate HR, not branch HR, who would be in charge of her records.

Not that the company actually kept any religious records, but she wasn’t going to point that out either because then he would call Jan and they would have another sensitivity training, which she had less interest in than she did in discussing circumcision with Michael, which he also tried to bring up.

It was a massive relief when Jim finally walked in after lunch. Of course, she couldn’t just explain everything he’d missed to him—she really didn’t want to know what he’d have to say about her argument with Roy—but it was simply a relief to see a friendly face.

Then Michael went ahead and blurted it all out anyway, hollering at Jim about his Chanuchristmakkah idea and insinuating that Jim, as a reasonable, rational person, would definitely support having seven more Secret Santa exchanges.

Jim’s eyes widened and she wondered which part of that he found most objectionable.

She wouldn’t find out, though, because Angela happened to be dropping off more files in the front office at that moment and she just screamed when she realized that Michael was bringing it up again.

Pam had to admit that Angela actually had pretty good pitch, and a surprisingly high singing voice given her speaking voice.

At exactly that moment, Mose walked through the doors as she was screaming, carrying a beautiful glass hanukkiah that Pam really, really didn’t want to acknowledge the probable provenance of.

She would never know for sure, however, because it was immediately smashed into a million little pieces on the floor. She couldn’t be sure, looking back, if Angela’s scream had actually smashed the glass, or if Mose had simply clapped his hands over his ears, ignoring what he was carrying, and let the menorah hit the tile at full speed.

Either way, she walked straight out of the office, shoes crinkling on priceless historical glass, and made her way home.

Or tried to make her way home. Because when she got out to the parking lot, the truck was gone.

Apparently Roy had decided he needed to get to the airport early for his flight.

Pam broke down.

Well, first she hid, because she had a feeling that if she just broke down right there in the parking lot, someone was going to come and find her, and right now she didn’t want to be found.

No, not someone. Jim. Always Jim, who had been in the office for approximately fifteen seconds and had already noticed that something was wrong with the situation upstairs when Michael wouldn’t have figured it out if she’d gotten the party planning committee to put up a big sign (in anything but green, of course) that said “this is a big problem” with sparkling lights. Hell, she could have started a grease fire in the kitchen and Michael would probably not have noticed something was wrong until Dwight dragged him out through the smoke yelling about how his superhuman strength allowed him to walk as fast carrying Michael as anyone else could alone.

Neither of them, of course, would notice the real problem with a grease fire in the kitchen, which is that there wasn’t a stovetop to cook grease on.

But Jim probably would.

And she really didn’t want to be seen right now. The heavy weight of being perceived was just…not something she could stand until she’d gotten her feet back under her (literally, since she was currently curled up in a side corner of the foyer, thankful that Hank was on a union-mandated smoke break even though he didn’t smoke. Since Hank was a building employee, not a Dunder Mifflin employee, he was unionized, the lucky bastard). So she needed to avoid Jim. And she also needed to get out.

That left one option.

“Mom? I know we weren’t planning to celebrate Chanukah together until later in the holiday, but could you or Dad come pick me up?”

She was right, she noticed, about Jim—he didn’t find her, but she did see his shoes pace back and forth in front of the coat closet she’d found to hide in after Hank came back from his break, and there were several texts on her phone that she supposed that she ought to respond to once she had the bandwidth to do so.

But it wasn’t him she needed right now. Right now, she needed the beat-up old Honda pulling into the parking lot and her dad behind the wheel, the stupid candle-themed hat that her mom had knitted for him sitting on his head like every Chanukah (even the one when it had been in late November and 75 degrees—thanks climate change).

The great thing about her dad picking her up was that he was comfortable with silence. More comfortable with silence than with speech, if she was honest, but right now that was a relief. He didn’t ask where Roy was, or why she needed to be picked up. He didn’t ask why when she asked (in a brief break in the silence) to swing by her house on the way. He didn’t even ask when she bundled a huge package the size of a human being into the back of the car before they headed towards her childhood home.

Well, now she knew how her dad would act if she ever needed to bury a body.

Of course, the silence couldn’t last. They arrived home soon enough (even though she usually thought of it as a long drive, long enough that she rarely went home without a major reason) and her mom and Penny surrounded the car, doing exactly what she’d been afraid Jim would do: asking how she was doing, worrying about her, fluffing their feathers like chickens pecking at the problem.

She smiled at her dad, who reached over and squeezed her shoulder. Bill Beesly wasn’t a very vocal man, but sometimes that was exactly what she needed.

“Mom, Pen, I’m fine.” She tried her best to make it sound true. “Roy’s just being an idiot.” OK, that was true.

“What did he do now?” Penny grabbed the life-size package and yanked it out of the back. “Ooh, is this his body? Did you finally off the oaf?”

“No, Pen.” She rolled her eyes.

“Hmph. I suppose you didn’t.” Penny squeezed the package. “No rigor mortis anyway. Roy’s probably not this squishy.”

“Give me that.” Pam grabbed the package back and hugged her sister with the other arm. “It’s good to see you.”

“Good to see you too. Now come in and give us the hot gossip while Mom finishes the latkes. She grated a whole extra potato for you, you know.”

“I’m honored.”

But even the familiar routines of lighting candles, saying blessings, and scarfing potato latkes as fast as they could be fried couldn’t fully put the situation out of Pam’s mind, and having put Roy’s idiocy into words for Penny meant that she could no longer deny just how angry she was with him.

After dinner, she decided it was best to bite the bullet.

“So you’ve probably noticed Roy’s not here.”

“Yeah, but you said you didn’t dump him, so whatever it is going to be boring.”

“Penelope Beesly!”

“Fine, fine, I’m so sorry Pam, please, do tell us what’s going on.”

“Penny.”

“What? It’s not my fault it sounds sarcastic.”

Ah, sisterly love.

“Where is he, then, dear?” Her mom looked around as if Roy was simply hiding in the wainscotting, ready to pop out at any time.

“California.” She immediately corrected herself. “Well, probably the airport right now, but Santa Monica soon. With Kenny.”

“And let me guess, he didn’t tell you beforehand?” Penny raised a hand to forestall their parents. “Sorry, I’ll be good.”

“No, you’re right, though I don’t think he thought it through beforehand either.” She told them the story about how she’d only found out from a transaction alert on their credit card, how Roy had reacted, and how she’d reacted to his reaction and so on. It all came out, and she found herself feeling almost as if she were a hanukkiah of complaint, with one day’s worth of frustration lasting for eight. When she finally wound to a halt, she found herself worrying that she had, after all, overreacted, because for a long moment her family was entirely silent.

And then…

“That asshole forgot you were Jewish?”

To everyone’s shock, even his own, that was the normally silent Bill Beesly.

One of the things Pam loved about her family is that, unlike Roy’s, they could let something go (Roy was phenomenally good at this when it is his wrongdoing that is under question, but quite the opposite if it was something she did, or anyone other than his own family really). So after some properly demonstrative anger on her behalf (Penny threatened to make “Off the Oaf” t-shirts for them all if Roy didn’t apologize before the end of the holiday), they moved on to the gift-giving portion of the evening.

Now, the Beeslys had a tradition of giving silly gifts for Chanukah. Pam wasn’t sure when it had started; possibly when she and Penny were too young to fully understand that they could ask for specific things, and her parents had decided to take advantage of that by giving them what amused them. But she did know when her own particular personal brand of silly gift had begun: it was the year that she started dating Roy, as it happened.

See, Pam’s first date with Roy had been a disaster. In fact, until tonight that might have been the angriest she’d ever seen her dad be at Roy, when she’d told him the story of how Roy and Kenny (it was always Roy and Kenny, she realized) had left her at a hockey game without even noticing she hadn’t left with them. And he’d stayed annoyed at it, too, even after Roy had groveled and she’d forgiven him; he’d started calling Roy “hockey boy” when they were alone as a family. And Pam had played along with at first, but after a couple months—right around the time of Chanukah that year, since it had been an early-season hockey game that Roy had left her at—she’d gotten sick of it. She was with Roy; she was planning on staying with Roy. And so she didn’t want to hear any more shit about him.

She’d decided that if her dad was going to bring it up every time hockey got mentioned, she was going to get back at him through hockey.

Now, Bill Beesly, like any self-respecting Scrantonian hockey fan, was a Philadelphia Flyers fan. All the more so because Bill had actually gone to Temple, in Philadelphia, and gone to as many games as he could on a student’s income (which back in those days was actually quite a few). And he had a wall in his den dedicated to Flyers memorabilia.

He was also, as any good fan of the Flyers was, whatever the opposite of a fan was of the Pittsburgh Penguins.

All this resulted in an unsuspecting Bill unwrapping a signed Penguins hockey stick on Chanukah that year, and grumbling through his laughter as his beloved daughter hung it on the wall of his den among the various Flyers merch for which it had been intended.

He laid off Roy at that point, and the two of them actually became quite close over the years. But nevertheless, every Chanukah Pam brought home at least one piece of Penguins paraphernalia for him. At point it had its own cabinet, which he jokingly called the Cage of Rage, in the corner of the den.

And tonight Pam got to unveil the piece de la resistance.

Bill’s eyes went wide as she lugged over the giant wrapped present and deposited it on the floor before him. He reached out a hand and tugged on the paper, then ripped and shredded until it all came free.

Standing before him was a lifesized—no, more than lifesized, a human-sized—Pittsburgh Penguin.

Complete with jersey (Sidney Crosby, #87).

Pam wasn’t sure if it was licensed, or if anyone had ever made another one. She explained that she’d found it at a flea market in Lancaster County when she and Izzy had gone on a girl’s trip down to the chocolate factory in Lititz, and she’d been constitutionally incapable of not bringing it back.

Roy had angrily asked her when she came back how much she’d spent on that stupid thing, but right now the look on her father’s face was priceless.

She spent the night at her parents’ and borrowed a car to drive into work the next day. She still had some clothes there that she could fit into—teenage artsy Pam had loved big shirts she could disappear into, so they still fit after all these years, and her mom had always insisted that she dress “nice” so they were tasteful enough to qualify for work if she threw on a sweater over them—and there was something rejuvenating, in the literal sense, about spending the night there, alone.

She tried not to think about what that meant about how she was going to feel the next day, alone at the house she shared with Roy.

Technically, the car she borrowed was Penny’s, because she was home from college for break anyway and “the oaf’s truck is probably parked at the airport anyway, isn’t it?” She hugged her sister and promised to return it as soon as she could.

Work was strangely tolerable, probably because everyone was walking on metaphorical glass after she’d walked on literal the day before. Even Dwight never brought up the shattered hanukkiah, and Michael had apparently taken a personal day.

She chatted with Jim, trying her best not to vent about what had happened yesterday, and pretended things were normal. They noticed that Dwight had brought a nutcracker with him and developed the new and annoying habit of loudly announcing exactly which nut he was planning to crack before doing so at his desk, which on the one had impeded everyone’s workflow to a surprisingly significant degree, but on the other allowed her and Jim to exchange eyebrow raises and private giggles throughout the day without actually talking about anything, which was ideal from her perspective.

Or it seemed ideal, until it got better.

When Dwight left for a client meeting in the afternoon, Jim waved her over to the break room. There, he plugged the vending machine for all the little bags of mixed nuts that the company had decided to include as a “healthy snack” option alongside the candy bars. They spent the next twenty minutes sorting out all the cashews, peanuts, almonds—everything that was not, botanically speaking, a nut.

Then they switched those for the nuts that Dwight had brought in.

When he started up again, Jim began objecting.

“That’s not a nut! You can’t use a nutcracker on a non-regulation nut!”

“Hmph.” Dwight sneered and discarded the first peanut.

Then Jim did it again.

And again.

Eventually Dwight looked down at the nut collection and realized what had happened, whereupon he chased Jim around the desks for a while until realizing that he could just grab his original nuts off Jim’s desk without actually catching him.

When he put the first walnut between the jaws of the nutcracker, Jim did it again.

Dwight corrected him.

Jim pulled out a printout from a botanical article on nuts and nutlike substances, specifically drupes, the group that includes peaches and cherries—but also walnuts—and slapped it on the desk.

She could hear Dwight’s teeth grinding from her desk.

By the time she went home, she almost forgot that she was coming home to an empty house.

But the day had given her enough energy that she decided to fix that. She texted all her high school friends—which was, admittedly, a smaller circle than she would have liked to admit, but it wasn’t nobody—and declared that tomorrow was going to be a Chanukah party, at her place.

Then, because, well, she really did only have like three friends from high school she was in touch with, and one was her sister, who was (in a feat of ridiculousness) going to borrow her parents’ car to come because Pam had already borrowed hers, she also texted Jim.

Then she realized that she needed actual party supplies, including potatoes for the latkes and dreidels and gelt for afterwards, and the rest of the night was occupied running to and fro to get everything and then tidying the house.

It was ironic that it took Roy being out of town for her to agree to the one thing he’d always claimed to want: a party at their place.

That said, since 90% of the mess she had to clean up was his, maybe it wasn’t ironic at all; maybe he’d never really intended to share the space with anyone.

The Chanukah party was a good idea, she decided, even if it took the whole day for her to clean up the house and make it habitable even for the pitiful number of adult friends she had invited over. Fortunately, she had the entire day, because Jan had apparently heard about the Chanuchrismakkah debacle and decided that Michael needed “a day off to figure out what the hell he was doing,” which (in typical Michael fashion) led to him closing the entire branch for the day because “if I’m not there, what’s the point?”

Honestly, they probably could have gotten a lot more done without Michael there, but Pam was never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so she took the day off and spent it turning the house she shared with Roy from a pigsty to…well, not a palace, which would have been pleasantly alliterative, but at least a place that she could be unembarrassed by in front of her friends.

She wondered how much elbow grease Jim had put into his and Mark’s apartment earlier in the year—and then forcibly suppressed any further thoughts about Jim until, when the clock hit seven and the party hour was upon her, he knocked on the door.

Of course he was the first one there, and of course he came bearing Tupperware. “Hey, I had a little bit of time today,” he grinned and she felt an answering smile on her own face “and I figured that since there was a Chanukah party there might be latkes, and since there might be latkes you might like some of the” he gestured towards the Tupperware lid “Famous Halpert Applesauce.” She could hear the capital letters. It was cute.

No, it was nice. Funny even. Not cute. Definitely not cute.

“Thanks.” She turned and bonked her head against the doorframe. “Oh no, I forgot to make the latke batter.” She’d been so busy cleaning the house she’d spaced on the food.

“Hmm…well, I’ve been told that I’m no good with anything in the kitchen that can burn anyone, but I have heard rumors that latkes require grated potatoes, and I’m very good with a grater.” Jim twinkled at her—how did his face do that, she wondered—and it was with real regret that she had to convey the fact that she had a food processor that could grate the potatoes in about two minutes.

She couldn’t tell if he looked disappointed, but she felt disappointed, so she added “I could use some help stirring the batter, though, if you don’t mind?”

Apparently he did not mind.

She did have to physically put her hand across Penny’s mouth when she came in five minutes later and saw Jim in the kitchen mixing latke batter, however, so perhaps that was not actually the best idea she’d ever had.

And then she had to do it again when Izzy came in five minutes after that.

Her other high school friends hadn’t been available on one night’s notice, which she supposed was fair—even though they were friends from way back, and she’d been dating Roy then, they’d drifted apart a bit as she and Roy had started spending more and more time with his buddies.

She just hadn’t noticed how much.

So it was a cozy party, or it would have been if Penny and Izzy hadn’t kept waggling their dang eyebrows at her every time Jim’s back was turned. It wasn’t like that between them, no matter what Penny, or Izzy, or Phyllis thought. Jim was her best friend! She was engaged to Roy!

Roy, who wasn’t here, and whom she hadn’t heard from since he left her at the office with no way to get home.

Feeling a bit guilty about the fact that she also hadn’t actually tried to contact him in the interim, she fired off a basic “how’s Santa Monica” text to him while waiting for the first batch of latkes to come off the stove.

Then she was distracted by the need to immediately eat the latkes while they retained their warm fluffy goodness—the Halpert Family Applesauce came very much in handy, and it was absolutely delicious—and then by a rousing game of dreidel (a concept she would have said was oxymoronic if she hadn’t had the experience of watching Izzy physically tumble to the ground in agony after another Shin while Jim cackled at the Gimel he rolled immediately after and Izzy asked if he wanted to take this outside), and then by…well, just by having her friends around her, she supposed.

She’d dug out their hanukkiah from the closet—she would feel vindicated that Roy ought to have remembered she was Jewish just from that if she thought he ever bothered to put anything away in the closet—and (in her own minor version of the Chanukah miracle itself) managed to find the right number of candles as well. They taught Jim the blessings, and even though it wasn’t the first night Pam tacked on an extra shehecheyanu anyway, because she did feel blessed to have this little group together for the first time.

Then it was time for presents. One thing she had remembered to do with her day out—when she was buying cleaning supplies, because they were out of pretty much everything up to and including paper towels—was to get some party favors, and she passed around little bags of gelt with as much pomp and circumstance as if they were real gold. To her surprise, her friends had brought her presents as well: Penny and Izzy had clearly collaborated on a sketchbook and watercolor pens, while Jim had a lovely little sampler of loose-leaf tea.

She didn’t know quite why she was so disappointed that he seemed not to have remembered that she didn’t have a teapot that could take loose leaf, but well, it was the thought that counted anyway, right? At least he remembered she liked tea; Roy had given her coffee last year for Christmas, because “we always have a pot on, don’t we Pammy?” despite the fact that he was the one who insisted on making coffee at home.

Speaking of Roy…

It was fortunately after her friends had all gone—even Jim, who had tried to offer to stay for the washing up until Penny had revealed that she had actually already filled the dishwasher and started the cycle while he and Izzy were playing their ‘rubber match’ of dreidel—that her phone started to buzz.

“PAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammy!” It was three hours earlier in Santa Monica, making it barely 6:30, but Roy was clearly already drunk. “You’re missing out! You’d love it here!”

Pam could not believe that Roy was calling her just to taunt her about the fact that he was on vacation without her, without even having asked if she wanted to come along—no, even after she’d expressed that she did want to come. It was just like him, too, she realized. He had probably been so focused on what he and Kenny wanted to do that her wishes hadn’t even occurred to him, and so he didn’t even bother to remember that he was on a trip she’d wanted to come on in the first place.

“What the fuck, Roy.” She didn’t yell it, but anyone who knew her well would know that the kind of flat, snappish affect she did say it with was much more dangerous than if she’d screamed. This was what she was like when she was truly mad. It didn’t happen very often: when Mary Worthington ripped her painting down off an easel in seventh grade art class; the first and only time a young Penny had poured her paints down the drain because she wanted to reuse the containers for something (Pam vaguely remembers it was a Halloween costume of some sort); that time Roy had sunk his entire holiday bonus from Dunder Mifflin into lottery tickets because “you said I couldn’t put it on the Sixers”; the day he’d begged for forgiveness after their terrible first date.

Since half of those had been with Roy, she would have hoped he would at least have noticed, even if he didn’t change his behavior.

But of course he didn’t. Instead, he rambled on and on about how amazing Santa Monica was, and how much she was missing out on. It almost sounded as if…

“Roy, do you think I’m not there because I didn’t want to come?”

“C’mon, Pammy, I didn’t mean it like that, it’s just that you never want to do this kind of awesome stuff…”

“Roy, I am not there because you brought Kenny instead.”

“Aww, don’t be like that!”

“Royson Allen Anderson, exactly how do you think I am being?”

“You know, all prickly and shit. You oughtta be more like the girls here! Everyone’s so laid back and friendly!” Before she could react, she heard Kenny in the background say something, and Roy responded, but he didn’t take his mouth away from the phone enough for her to miss herself being called a ‘fucking boring stick in the mud’ whose attitude was ‘ruining his fun.’”

“That’s enough, Roy.” Something inside Pam that had become brittle starting three days ago snapped. She felt it go; it was sort of sad, like the moment you put your arm into an old, familiar shirt and realize you’ve ripped a hole in the sleeve, or when you crack open a book from your childhood and the front cover slides right off because you’ve handled it one too many times. “If talking to me is ruining the vacation you wouldn’t let me come on, I free you from that obligation. Go have fun with Kenny.”

“Aww, thanks Pammy!” Once again he didn’t seem to have any idea what she was talking about, reacting like a kid who’d been told he could have another ice cream after he scarfed the first one while still in the store. She realized that that was how a lot of her interactions with Roy over the years went—even when she was mad at him, she called him by his full name like a mother scolding a child, even in this very conversation—and she was sick of it. That wasn’t what she wanted out of a relationship. It wasn’t what Roy deserved out of a relationship either. No wonder they hadn’t set a date in three years of being engaged. It wasn’t good for either of them, and they must have subconsciously realized it.

Speaking of which, she realized she was fiddling with her engagement ring, the phone wedged between her ear and shoulder, just like she so often did at work.

“Just know…Roy, I won’t be here when you get back.” She sighed, and smiled a little sadly to herself as she plucked the ring off her finger. “Consider it my Chanukah gift to you. Go have fun with Kenny.” She realized she was repeating herself, but she didn’t know what else to say.

“Wait, what?” Roy sounded puzzled. “What do you mean you won’t be there when I get back?”

“It’s over, Roy.” She put the ring on the kitchen counter, surprised when it didn’t make a louder sound. Something so important ought to be more noticeable. “I don’t think this is working, for either of us.”

“Pammy, I…” But Kenny must have been saying something in the background, because Roy cut himself off. “I gotta go. But this isn’t over!”

“It is, Roy. Take care of yourself.” She wasn’t sure how much of that he’d heard, because he hung up.

She wandered around the apartment aimlessly tidying up from the party until it hit her that that wasn’t what she needed to do right now.

Sure, this was her mess, but it was still nicer than what it had been when she’d started cleaning earlier in the day. And if she wasn’t going to be here when Roy came back, that meant she needed to get her stuff together to make it so.

She grabbed an old duffel out of the hall closet and walked up to their…no, it was going to be Roy’s bedroom. He’d lived in the house before they’d moved in together—with Kenny, who’d only moved out when she’d moved in because he’d briefly moved in with another of his temporary flings, and when they’d broken up he’d been lucky enough that she was moving cross-country and so he could keep the place—so she didn’t mind leaving him to it again. Kenny would probably move back in, and he and Roy could do what they liked.

Thinking about Kenny made her think about Penny—she was going to need help moving, and probably to go live with their parents for a while, so she might as well see if her sister was still on the road. After receiving a string of emojis and a reassurance that she’d been stopped for gas (and so wasn’t texting and driving) she called her parents, too.

She felt oddly calm about it, and somehow that must have gotten through to her mom as well, because she took the news surprisingly well. They’d talk about it when she got home, of course, but for the moment she was shocked at how easy it all was.

It wasn’t until she was unloading the dishwasher and put Jim’s Tupperware down on the counter next to the ring that she finally burst into tears.

Pam was very grateful that the next day after she moved out of her house that she’d shared with Roy was the weekend, because she didn’t think she could have born it if she’d had to go into work.

As it is, there were three increasingly angry voicemails on her phone (she’d turned the ringer off after Penny came to help her move out), all from an also increasingly drunk Roy, the last of which (when she forced herself to listen to them) was so sad that she cried for him even though she had (and will continue to have) no intention of getting back together with him.

The other two, after all, were just mean, so that helped as well with that particular decision.

She made the mistake of listening to the first of those with her family in the room, but on the plus side at least her parents became even more willing to let her move back in for a bit than they’d already been.

Although she actually wasn’t going to move in there long-term, unless something went very wrong in the intervening month: Penny was at college in Scranton, at Marywood, just far enough from the family home outside of town that she had her own off-campus apartment, and she was on break until Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which meant another month. Her roommate was going to be back in California the whole time, so she offered to let Pam just stay there while she was home for break—“housesitting” she called it, though Pam would have called it “charity” and taken it anyway—and figure out her own apartment situation after that.

After all, she’d pointed out, she didn’t have a job to go to during that month, and someone had to beat their dad at Mario Kart over winter break, and heaven knew Pam wasn’t any good at it.

She’d hugged her sister for a long time over that one, and she was still a bit teary-eyed about it.

She promised she’d spend a lot of time at home anyway over the break, shoved most of her stuff in the garage (the off-campus apartment didn’t have storage that wasn’t already being used anyway), took Penny’s keys and their parents’ spare car, and on Sunday night drove herself back to town with two suitcases and a clearly labeled handwritten map of Penny’s apartment with which bedroom was whose.

The roommate might not be in town, but she still didn’t want to invade the wrong room.

Work on Monday was weird and uncomfortable. At least Roy wasn’t in town yet, but she did have the sense that Darryl and a couple of the other warehouse guys might know what had happened, because of the way they avoided her when she pulled into the parking lot at the same time as them. Darryl looked a little sheepish, which probably meant they weren’t going to make any trouble for her, but still…it was awkward.

Also awkward was upstairs, where Michael was doing his own stupid little apology tour for the last day they’d been in the office, and she was just so sick of it.

Honestly, the only thing that made anything better was that Jim sauntered up to her desk, rapped on it, and leaned up against it like nothing had happened at all.

“So, Beesly, why no guilt?”

Her heart sank. OK, maybe that wasn’t good after all. How did Jim know? And why was he saying she should be guilty?

“Hey, hey, hey, I was just asking because I saw the big bag of it when we were playing dreidel and I figured you could take a break from the jellybeans for a little while!” He stood back up with his hands up and she realized with a start that she’d misheard him.

He’d asked not about guilt, but gelt.

“Oh. OH!” She stuttered. “Uh, I like the chocolate too much to give it away.”

He smirked.

“Didn’t seem like that at the party. You spun so many shins it was like a orthopedic office in there.”

“Jim Halpert, are you suggesting I’m bad at dreidel?”

“I’m just saying, Izzy and I had a lot of chocolate to eat over the weekend and the only reason you had any was that you brought the bag.”

“Oh yeah? You want to go there? Well, the only reason you had any was that I gave you my favorite green dreidel, the one that lands gimel more than half the time.” She clapped a hand across her mouth.

“Beesly!” He grinned. “Are you suggesting you cheat at dreidel?” Then he seemed to realize exactly what she’d said. “Wait, are you saying you cheat at dreidel for me?”

“I just wanted you to have a good time!”

“Oh, believe me Beesly, I was going to do that anyway. Gambling, fried potatoes, good company…what more could a party have?”

“Don’t forget the Halpert Family Applesauce.”

“I would never.”

“Good.”

He smiled at her, and she let herself bask for a moment in the glow of it. It was nice to remember that even when everything around her was falling apart, she had at least one person she could rely on to raise her mood. Maybe that’s what led her to play along just a little further.

“But now that you know I was cheating, even if it was on your behalf…I’m afraid I am going to have to insist on a rematch. With a fair dreidel this time.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Oh really.” He reached a hand over the desk. “You’re on. Name the time and the place, and I will absolutely kick your butt at dreidel, green dreidel or not.”

“You’re on.” She reached out and shook hands with him.

“So, when and where?”

“Tonight?”

He nodded. “Your place again? I don’t exactly have a large supply of dreidels at mine.”

“Sure…oh!” She pulled him closer, only realizing then that neither of them had actually let the other’s hand free. “I’ll have to give you my new address,” she whispered.

Not softly enough, as it turned out. Kelly had just walked into the main bullpen to give Dwight some paperwork and her ears were definitely tuned to gossip, because she gasped theatrically and ran over screaming.

Not much work got done after that, but—public embarrassment aside—at least everyone knew by the end of the day that she and Roy were no longer an item.

And Jim was still coming over for dreidel.

Playing dreidel with Jim was fun.

Hanging out with Jim was fun.

Frankly, pretty much everything she did with Jim was fun, and it was making her a little bit worried.

She had never really enjoyed basketball that much, but she was very familiar with the concept of a “rebound,” and she was worried that she was doing exactly that with Jim.

Ending things with Roy was still raw and fresh—he wasn’t even back in the state yet—and so it was too soon to start thinking about having feelings for someone else.

Wasn’t it?

She thought about the party at Jim’s, and the way that Phyllis had simply assumed that she and Jim were the secret office romance. Thinking of basketball, she thought about how it had felt watching Jim and Roy play in the office game, and how she’d had her heart in her throat when Jim had taken Roy’s elbow to the face—and that hadn’t been concern for Roy. She thought about jellybeans, and visits to her desk, and the way she and Jim had jumped apart when they’d been pranking Dwight with fake disease names and Roy had come up the stairs.

Maybe it wasn’t a rebound after all.

She didn’t like to think it, because it felt like she’d been emotionally unfaithful to Roy even though nothing had happened, and she wasn’t a cheater. If she’d suspected that she was…

Well, she had, hadn’t she? She’d jumped apart from Jim even though they hadn’t been doing anything wrong. She’d avoided bringing up Jim at home even though they’d been best friends (though to be fair, she’d mostly avoided bringing up most of her friends, hence the absence of people she could invite over for her Chanukah party). She hadn’t even really talked to Roy about the party at Jim’s place, even though all the people there were coworkers and he always liked a good story about Michael being stupid.

So she had done her best. She’d even kept it from herself, let alone from Roy, and she’d tried. She’d tried so hard with Roy. She refused to let that relationship make her feel guilty about having other feelings after it was done, no matter when they began.

So, not a rebound then.

But then, even if she wasn’t rebounding, was Jim even interested?

She’d seen the kinds of girls he dated, when he dated: the one closest to her as a “type” was Katy, and well, hadn’t Kevin told her Katy was Pam 6.0? Jim didn’t date girls for very long, as far as she could tell, and he didn’t really tell her about them, but she’d caught glimpses—times when someone had pulled up and driven off with Jim after work, a girl who’d dropped off things for him at the front desk when he wasn’t there, one memorable time he’d been greeted at the door by an enthusiastic brunette with a tackle-hug and slung her around giggling.

That last had turned out to be his sister Larissa, but still: Jim hung out with women who were way out of Pam Beesly’s league.

Could she stand it if Jim, her best friend, rejected her?

And could she stand the office if she didn’t have Jim?

But also, could she stand herself if she just…didn’t ask?

Probably, she had to admit. She could probably just drag this out forever, enjoying the part of Jim’s attention she got, looking over at his profile at his desk, filling her bowl with ever more interesting varieties of jellybean (and maybe gelt) in order to attract his sweet tooth like a moth to a flame.

She could be content that way.

And honestly, thinking about the last three years with Roy from a new perspective, content would be an upgrade.

She was doing her best to be strong in this until the day of the office Secret Santa exchange.

Michael being Michael, he did the most Michael of things and made it a Yankee Swap just because he’d gone absolutely ridiculous in his own attempt to woo (if that was the right word) the intern, Ryan.

And that meant that she didn’t get to keep the absolutely lovely teapot that someone—obviously Jim, her heart said, and then, miracle of miracles, he said something about there being more to it, which meant it was Jim—had given her. It meant that other people out there could steal it, did steal it, were holding her teapot from Jim in their grubby little hands (all right, she might have gotten a little bit overexcited).

And that meant it was time for her to go on the warpath.

Oh, she had the video iPod? Who cared. Someone needed to steal it. She was loud. She was excitable. She bragged. And it worked. Kelly stole the iPod.

And she got the teapot.

She grinned at Jim and danced towards her desk.

And then stopped.

Loose leaf tea for Chanukah.

A teapot for Secret Santa.

She might be wrong, but she didn’t think she was.

And if she was right, she was doing this at Jim’s desk.

He winked at her as she danced over.

“The great thing about this gift, Beesly, is that it comes with bonus gifts.”

She ignored him for a moment, though the idea of “bonus gifts” certainly made her thrill. There was a card. She was going to read the card.

She didn’t care about the teapot.

She didn’t care about the bonus gifts.

(OK, that was a lie, but…)

She did care about the card.

She leaned over the desk, interrupting Jim’s very cute explanation (which they would definitely return to afterwards) of why there was a golf pencil inside the teapot with a kiss.

Later, she would wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t broken up with Roy the previous week (and thank her stars that she had her own Chanukah miracle that she had).

Christmas was definitely a time to tell people what you feel, but it turned out Chanukah had been a perfect time to do the same—if in the opposite direction.