In the end, Pam thought, it all started with that stupid old Mustang. She wasn’t sure how Roy knew the guy who owned it—cousin of a friend of a drinking buddy of a client, maybe, or maybe just a guy he ran into one night shooting pool at Poor Richard’s, it didn’t matter—but somehow he got wind of the thing, and it became something he couldn’t let go of, much like the Flyers chances of winning the Stanley Cup each year and just about as useful, in her opinion. At first she was cautiously optimistic about it; if Roy bought the Mustang from this whoever-he-was, it would be a car she could actually get up into from ground level, unlike the pickup, and her feet might reach the pedals, again unlike the pickup, so maybe it was a sign that Roy was finally ready to commit to her and their future together. Maybe this was Roy’s roundabout way of letting go of the fantasy that he was still the football-playing, hard-living, pickup-driving hero of the Wrangle commercials and country songs he’d grown up with, and driving an honest to god car that his fiancée had a chance in hell of getting home safely from the bar if he got drunk.

Then she remembered two things: first, it was a Mustang, and second, he was still Roy. The former realization came when she actually saw the thing when Roy insisted they go ‘try it out’; the latter when she found out he wasn’t planning to sell the truck to get the car.

No, in Roy’s mind they were both necessary purchases, both vehicles he needed to own and park outside their rented house (not yet bought, just like they weren’t yet married, even though they’d had an option to rent-to-buy and he’d proposed years ago).

Not only that, but in Roy’s mind the Mustang was a purchase they could make because of their savings. Savings they only had because Pam had been scrimping every dollar she could to save for a wedding that still hadn’t happened yet. Savings that would apparently cover the cost of a used Ford in a color she didn’t even like, but barely a penny more, and that once spent weren’t coming back easy. Especially not once she looked up how much gas it took, and considered that somehow Roy was stepping down in fuel efficiency whenever he didn’t drive the truck.

She would have liked, later, to be able to say that was when she walked away, head held high and half of that meager savings clutched in her hands, but it wasn’t.

And if she was as honest about when things started as she was about that, well, they started quite a bit before the Mustang.

But the Mustang was a catalyst (like the converters that were failing on the one Roy wanted to buy) in a way that the delays in setting a wedding date, and the loud jokes about her weight and appearance, and a whole line of other things leading all the way back to leaving her at a hockey game the first time they went out for a date ought to have been but weren’t. It made her start looking at things just a little bit differently, and it was that little bit differently that eventually made all the difference.

Not that she allowed herself to admit at the time that she was looking at anything differently at all. And that was because of another catalyst, one she was even less willing to admit to herself, her best friend Jim Halpert. Now, if Jim hadn’t been there maybe even the Mustang wouldn’t have been enough to get her to think differently; but with Jim there, she was damned if she was going to admit to anyone, herself included, that she was. Because Jim had this habit of pointing out the unreasonable things that Roy did, not directly, not aggressively, not so that anyone could accuse him of pointing them out, but in just a subtle enough way that she knew he was doing it all the same. It was the same technique that he used to great effect on their coworker, Dwight, to drive him into a rage without having anything specific or concrete that Dwight could bring to their manager, Michael—and Pam was more than familiar enough with it to recognize when it was being used on her, and more than stubborn enough to let that alone be a reason not to show that she had noticed whatever Jim was pointing out today.

Come to think of it, the sheer frequency with which Jim was pointing things out should probably also have been a red flag, but then again by that point Roy was plastered over with red flags so much that a colorblind man might have been forgiven for thinking he was on a green screen. And Pam must have been colorblind, because she saw that same color. Later on, she would tell herself it was just the lengthy investment in Roy that made her stay, but that truthfully wasn’t it. She did love him, and she did believe he was always on the verge of change. Just because it was wishful thinking, or that change was not in the direction that she wished for it, didn’t make her love any less real, or any easier to overcome.

And she was fairly certain, even after all of it, that Roy loved her to, or at least had loved her. Perhaps for him too the Mustang was a turning point—not that he realized it then, even less than she did—not from love to anything so moving as hatred or even so banal as indifference, but from a love that was worth orienting his life around to one that wasn’t. Or perhaps, like with Pam, that had actually happened much earlier. But in either case, one must start a story somewhere, and when Pam tells this one, it starts with the Mustang—and so it does here too.

Pam was always the one who kept track of their finances. Even before they were engaged, she was the one checking in with Roy about whether he’d remembered to actually deposit his paycheck from the garage where he worked part-time, reminding him that because the owner resolutely insisted on not paying him under the table he actually had to file taxes at the end of the year (well, April) to get a refund on what the government had withheld, gently prodding about whether he’d remembered to do what all those ads recommended and compare and save on his car insurance when the time rolled around.

Once they got engaged and moved in with each other, these responsibilities rapidly switched from things she reminded him about to things she did. In retrospect she probably (definitely, absolutely) shouldn’t have combined their finances as much as she did, but it was so much easier to have a joint account from which she could make sure their rent was paid without nagging Roy for his half, to do both their taxes and have him sign off on his side (since “married, filing jointly” required rather a significant movement towards that first word from the first-appreciated and then rapidly-frustrating “engaged”), to make sure the recurring bills were on a credit card and the credit card itself was set to pay itself (or at least enough of itself each month to avoid too many extra charges) each month as well from that same joint account.

Roy would have denied it if you had asked him outright about it. He was always a bit conservative about things like that—not conservative in the way that you wanted to go back to the days when women couldn’t get accounts without their husband’s or father’s say-so, or where everything, even an obituary, would refer to “Mrs. Roy Anderson” without even acknowledging that the woman had a name of her own, but conservative like “a man takes care of his own shit” and “of course I’m in charge of the money, I make it don’t I?” (even though she’d been working as long as he had)—and so if someone had come up and stated that Pam was the one who knew where their money was or how much of it they had, he’d have laughed and said something that would have made her annoyed in the moment but which she’d have gotten over eventually with no help from him.

But she was the one who kept track, no matter what Roy thought. She was the one who got the emails that told her when there were big expenses on their joint credit cards, or when the rent was due, or when someone made a deposit or a withdrawal from their accounts. And so she was the one who got the email about the bank draft.

The bank draft that corresponded to the same amount that the guy selling the Mustang had asked for; the one that made for a certified check, one that couldn’t bounce and therefore didn’t require that guy to trust Roy to be good for the money; the one that didn’t technically directly say that Roy had spent the money they’d discussed (she’d discussed, at length) saving for their wedding on a new-to-him, old-to-the-world car, but certainly would have been accepted as evidence of such in any court of law in the world. That bank draft.

At first she didn’t really realize what she was looking at, because it was such a big number that she assumed for a moment that somehow the bank had decided to just send her an email telling her how much money was in her account. But she was aware, in the back of her mind, that banks didn’t actually do that—that if someone who claimed to be a bank was doing something that looked like that, it was almost certainly a scam to get you to click on a link, and so this had to be something else. Specifically, it had to be a withdrawal, the issuing of a check that moved the money from their account into a financial instrument that could be given to someone else.

Again, in retrospect, this would have made for a good moment for a sharp break. A fight. A slap. At least an argument.

But Pam still thought of being reasonable as one of her core features, and so she didn’t yell and she didn’t snap. She asked Roy that evening if anything interesting had happened, if he had anything to tell her, and he didn’t read the room sufficiently to notice that she wasn’t exactly ecstatic about the question, and the rest of the dinner was full of him describing to her how amazing it had been to have the title of the Mustang passed into his hands, and how wonderful it had been to drive—all the way to the garage he used to work at, where he’d had to leave it with his old boss who was going to fix “a couple of things in the engine” for just the cost of parts as a personal favor.

And Pam couldn’t even deny that getting Ricky to fix the car for cheap was a good idea, the kind of good idea that Roy wouldn’t normally have come up with. Usually he’d have insisted he could do it himself, and it would have ended up costing twice the cost of a more competent mechanic working on it through all the issues he’d have caused while trying to fix what was originally wrong (ignoring labor—it was still worth it to let Roy work on their cars most of the time because labor was so expensive, which was part of why she had never put her foot down about it before). So she let that small piece of good news take over for the bad, and she said it sounded like a good idea, and they ate the spaghetti and meatballs she’d made while Roy was signing over their worldly goods to a guy with a Mustang and life went on as normal.

It wasn’t for several weeks, more than a month, after Roy bought the Mustang that Pam realized that something had, in fact, changed. No, not the actual presence of the Mustang in their lives; ironically, that did not change, because Ricky was having trouble finding the right parts, and he kept discovering one thing after another that was wrong with the car, and so the car itself was not at their house, nor was Roy driving the Mustang instead of the pickup. The part of their lives that was a matter of automotive transportation was utterly unaltered by the acquisition of the Mustang in a way that, looking back, Pam would find amusing, but which was mostly just not noticeable in the moment. Things went on as they had, car- and truckwise, and sometimes she could even imagine that Roy hadn’t ever bought that Mustang.

Except she couldn’t. Because Pam had gotten into the habit, over the months (years) of engagement that had never actually turned into a marriage, of clicking over to a new window in her browser (not even a new tab, because she needed to be able to minimize it quickly on the absolutely unlikely chance that Michael bothered to come behind her desk or the less than minimal chance that Dwight tried to catch her doing non-work activities on company time) and logging into online banking so that she could daydream about the little nest egg of marriage money that they’d accumulated, considering how many decorations you could buy or what venue they might be able to afford with the slowly-increasing number.

And while she was aware that Roy had drained that fund to pay for the Mustang, she couldn’t actually break the habit of still clicking over, and still looking at the now diminished number (so many fewer digits), only with an emotion very far from optimism in her heart.

She didn’t do it every day, or every two days, but it was more than every week, and she couldn’t stop herself. It was like licking your tongue over the rough patch where a tooth was scratched so it wasn’t quite smooth anymore, or checking a pimple that appeared in an inconvenient place on the forehead at an inconvenient time: not a pleasant sensation, by no means that, but one that became compulsive, almost obsessive, because of the dissonance between what was still, naively, expected and what was true.

And she found that when she had looked at the account, she wasn’t quite as willing to just go along with whatever Roy said they should do. Oh, it didn’t manifest itself in screaming fights or broken china, though perhaps things would have broken more simply and more easily if it had. It just meant that when he said he was going out with the boys to Poor Richard’s tonight she didn’t tell him to have a good time, and then the next time she asked him why, and then the time after that she asked if he was ever planning to spend any time with her instead of with the boys. It meant that when he walked into the living room and clicked Wheel of Fortune over to the basketball game she said “hey, I was watching that,” and then the next time she left the room, and then the next time she grabbed the remote back and changed it back to Wheel of Fortune (though they ended up watching the game after the ad break when the puzzle was solved). It meant that she got out her watercolors and when Roy complained that she was taking up too much space in the living room with her easel she just ignored him and didn’t move it (although she did pack up the paints and stop painting, so she wasn’t distracting him from the game).

It meant there was just a little more friction in their relationship, and she wanted to tell herself it was a bad thing—that she shouldn’t be doing this, that she ought to treat Roy like she’d always treated Roy, and it wasn’t fair to expect him to change—but then she’d click over to the bank website again and remember that he had certainly expected her to go along with something much larger that he’d decided without her agreement. And anyway, she reflected to herself, it wasn’t like she was being unreasonable. Maybe Roy had the right to go out with his friends, like he’d grumbled when she’d asked about it, but she had the right to at least ask when he was going to be home and why he went out drinking so much, if they were going to be married. And maybe she did know Roy was going to want to watch the game, but she watched Wheel every night he was out at the bar, so that was her tradition too—and the painting was her hobby, and it was her house too anyway (or as much as the rented house was anyone’s but the landlord’s).

She occasionally talked about this with other people—not directly, never directly, but obliquely. She’d mention to Izzy that they should have a girls night because Roy kept having guys’ nights out, though nothing ever really came of it. She’d complain to Penny that she hadn’t seen the latest Wheel final puzzle, though she wouldn’t mention why. She’d ask Jim whether she ought to get her old paints out, though she wouldn’t say that she already had and Roy had complained about it.

It might not have felt like much—it might not have been much, if she was honest about it—but it was something, and something was a lot more than nothing. And, as she later came to realize, her relationship with Roy had been built on a whole lot of nothing, so when she started bucking up against the strictures she’d voluntarily accepted on their relationship, there was a whole lot of nothing to keep her down.

The first real rebellion beyond mere pettiness of Pam’s newfound frustration wasn’t something big or bold. It was something completely in line with who she was and had always been, or at least she believed that firmly herself, though Roy’s reaction to it would perhaps have been a clue that it was at least not consonant with the self that she had been acting as for the past several years. It was, as so many of her tiny but less significant rebellions across the years had been, about art.

Not her art, in this case. While she was actually getting her easels out and painting, and she occasionally didn’t move them for Roy to watch his television, by and large her own art did not really upset any applecarts or related conveyances within their home life. No, this was about someone else’s art—and not, as Roy had insinuated a few times in the course of their relationship, about her interest in another artist as a person or a crush or anything like that.

After all, Thomas Gainsborough had been dead for over two hundred years.

The Everhart Museum was one of Pam’s not-so-secret passions. She had been going to it ever since she was a little child, when her father and mother had packed up the family into the car on many a Saturday and allowed a youthful Pam to wander the halls gaping at the works on display. It couldn’t be denied that her father had rather hoped she’d be more interested in the natural history and scientific wings of the museum, but he had had to settle for Penny’s interest in the “practical side of things” as he always jokingly called it; Pam had always been and would remain entranced by the art.

And now the Everhart was hosting a traveling exhibit of English landscape and portrait painting, with Gainsborough’s Blue Boy as the centerpiece.

Pam had never actually liked Blue Boy that much. She was legitimately more of a landscape and still life painter herself—she liked the shapes of nature beyond humanity—and that preference for drawing translated itself into (or perhaps was born out of) a preference in the art she consumed as well. But she liked the idea of having seen Blue Boy, in the flesh (or paint, as it were). She liked the idea of occupying the same space as a painting that had been in her textbooks—and not just her art history textbooks, but her regular social studies textbook from tenth grade European history. She liked the reminder that art wasn’t just for artsy-fartsy people like herself but for everyone; that it was “a central element in culture and society,” as that same European history textbook had proclaimed, and as she had adopted for her own senior quote (to snickers from many, including one Roy Anderson).

So she wanted to go to the exhibition.

The problem was that she didn’t want to go alone. She would do it if she had to, because, well, in her life, she wouldn’t really get to do anything if she wasn’t willing to go to art exhibitions alone. And while, yes, she mostly just didn’t go if there wasn’t anyone willing to go with her, sometimes she did go alone. Occasionally. Well, at least twice.

Anyway.

She didn’t want to go alone this time, but when she suggested it to Roy, he reminded her that he was planning to play golf that weekend.

She had, at least, told him which weekend she wanted to go, though she could have pointed out that the exhibition was going to be live for three months, so he could have just suggested another weekend. But then, she found she wasn’t exactly sad that Roy wouldn’t come with her. He liked the Everhart enough when it had a cool exhibition in the science wing, like “on airplanes or something,” but he always whined through the actual art. She didn’t want to feel rushed through the English landscapes, or have him dump on Blue Boy as “just some blue dude.”

Unfortunately, her schedule didn’t actually match up with Izzy’s when the museum was open, and Penny’s big annual presentation at work was the week after the exhibition ended, and she was going to be working long days for the whole three month period because her boss was a dick.

And she couldn’t think of anyone else to go with, which meant she was going to be going alone.

She complained about this to Jim one day at work, the week before the weekend she’d hoped to go, and he suggested that she could just make a cutout of Izzy or Penny and lug it through the museum with her for selfies, and the laugh it pulled out of her made her feel a little bit better about not knowing anyone cultured enough to go to an art museum for fun. Well, Oscar was going; she overheard him telling Kevin, but he was going on a day that Pam and Roy had already planned to go to Roy’s mother’s house, and Pam wasn’t going to get a bunch of questions about why she was skipping Anderson family dinner for art.

So she was about to suck it up and go to the art museum by herself when Jim swung by her desk and grabbed his third jellybean of the day.

“So, Beesly,” he drawled, rolling the bean between his fingers.

“Yes, Halpert?” She rolled her eyes at him.

“It happens that my sister, Larissa, was planning to go to the Everhart this weekend. And she just happens to need her big brother to drive her over from Marywood.” He popped the jellybean into his mouth, putting the poor thing out of its misery. “So, if you just so happened to want to go at around 2 in the afternoon on Saturday, I think I could promise you some company by Blue Boy.”

Frankly, even though she was glad to finally be out at an exhibition of Real Art™, Pam was still not especially impressed by Blue Boy. He just looked silly to her, even though she could appreciate the technical difficulty required to produce the effects. There was no denying Gainsborough was a skilled painter, but she just didn’t appreciate it properly, not even in person as it turned out. “Blue Boy” just felt more like it ought to be the name of a cartoon superhero, like Blue Beetle from DC Comics or Sharkboy and Lavagirl, a guilty pleasure movie that she thought Roy would like because of the action but he didn’t and so she rented sometimes when he wasn’t home.

She was busy sitting in front of the famous art and sketching out storyboards for “Blue Boy Takes on Manhattan” when Jim appeared in her peripheral vision, accompanied by a brown-haired woman that Pam had never technically seen in the flesh before but was undoubtedly Larissa Halpert. Pam’s evidence for this was twofold: first, she looked exactly like the picture Jim had on his desk of his family the year before (before it was an unfortunate casualty of a Dwight-prank-related incident involving a carton of printer ink,a sharp penknife [Dwight’s], and a cut-the-red-wire scenario Jim had invented out of thin air); second, she was the spitting image of Jim, except apparently when you took “Jim Halpert” and ran the female version she was more attractive than Pam would have let herself guess.

Well, there was a third piece of evidence, which was that Jim walked right up to her and introduced the woman as his sister, but that hardly counted.

Pam had been a bit worried that it was going to be awkward to meet Jim’s sister. Not for any particular reason she could name, other than the fact that she considered herself a generally awkward human being around people she had not previously met, and also around people she had previously met if they were anything like Roy’s friends. Not that she expected Larissa to be anything like Roy’s friends—not that there was any reason to compare the two, really, other than the general thought about feeling awkward—but the point remained that she had expected the interaction to be rather more awkward than it turned out to be. Larissa, it turned out, was there for a class—gen ed, she assured Pam hurriedly, she was not an art history major—that expected her to go to this very exhibition and draw one of the pieces. Pam hadn’t really doubted Jim’s assertion that Larissa had asked him to drive her to the museum, but it had seemed pretty convenient, and oddly timed, so she was slightly relieved to know that it was, however improbably, true.

Larissa was not lying about not being an art history major, art major, or, in Jim’s words, “anything like an art major at all.” She was apparently a budding math major—“a nerd,” in her words, to which Jim had retorted “don’t say mean things to my sister” and Larissa had pointed out that he was the first person to introduce her to that word—and planning to go into something something aerospace that Pam hadn’t entirely followed but sounded impressive. And as she put it, while aerospace design was design, and therefore involved drawing, it involved drawing on a computer, not with her hands. So her imitation of Blue Boy looked about as cartoony as Pam’s imagined storyboarding for her superhero did, which led to Pam showing her and Jim the storyboard, which led to Jim plotting out a whole season arc for her fictional superhero and Pam sketching quick scenes from each episode to Larissa’s vocal encouragement.

After longer doing that than she would have admitted to if asked (not that anyone was going to ask her), Pam convinced Larissa to move on to the landscapes she actually preferred. Jim trotted along with them without any need of convincing, and soon they were in front of…well, actually it was another Gainsborough, so maybe it was really just Blue Boy she disliked. Maybe she should have started here, Pam mused, since the little grouping of Gainsborough’s sketched landscapes, from Wooded Upland with a Bridge to Drover with Calves in a Country Cart, spoke to her both stylistically and Romantically (with that capital R). Or maybe it really wasn’t about Gainsborough as all, because there were also Constables and Turners in the gallery and they moved her even more. She wished secretly for even a tenth of Turner’s ability to produce light on canvas; whenever she tried to produce strong lighting effects in her work, it looked wrong, like she was a Morlock who had only just emerged to see the sun for the first time, while when Turner did it you could imagine exactly how the clouds had covered the sunlight on that day down to the littlest whisp of cumulonimbus.

Jim, it turned out, was equally besotted with Turner—and just as with him bringing Larissa at an oddly convenient time she would have thought that he was just doing what Jim was best at (making her feel better just because) rather than actually meaning it if it weren’t that he rushed through the gallery ahead of her as soon as Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway was visible at the end of a long hallway. Larissa filled Pam in on Jim’s train obsession as they moseyed on their way to catch him up, an obsession which had apparently begun with model railways at age six and expanded itself to anything connected with trains over the years, including this particular Turner painting and by further extension all of Turner’s works.

This was ample ammunition for future teasing at work, though Pam was not sure she would have the heart to do that after listening to Jim turn the tables on her and describe artistic details in a painting she hadn’t seen herself.

Pam, Jim, and Larissa ended up at a Dunkin Donuts down the street from the Everhart, partly because it was the afternoon and everyone needed a certain amount of caffeine to get themselves going (although Pam had to admit to herself that she needed it less than she usually needed something in the early afternoon—perhaps the excitement of viewing art was its own little high) and partly because none of the three of them seemed at all inclined to stop their conversations even though they’d finished touring not only the visiting gallery but large swathes of the main collection as well.

Pam was playing with the lip of her coffee cup, rolling and unrolling it. She vaguely remembered that some coffeeshop she’d heard of somewhere had prizes under the lip of the cup, and she wished Dunkin would get with that program since she would definitely have found it if they had. While she played with the physical stock of the cup, she listened to Jim and Larissa veering a discussion of “what it means to be English” off into directions she would never have anticipated. The conversation had started with Pam dutifully reading off the questions from the exhibit guide, which had included that one, but it had not stayed within the artistic confines of the museum, just as their conversation had not stayed within its four walls. Jim and Larissa had evidently been brought up in an Anglophilic household, or maybe just one that was really addicted to PBS shows borrowed from the BBC, because they had started spitting out character names and episode descriptions that Pam could not hope to follow with an ease that bespoke deep assumed familiarity with the subject.

As far as Pam could tell, however, the conversation had veered again while they were drinking their lattes, from BBC to JRR—Tolkien, that was. Now, this Pam could follow to a certain extent. Back before she’d gotten involved with Roy, she’d been exactly as artsy-fartsy as he’d always accused her of being, and being an artsy-fartsy kid back in *mumblety-mumble* (a Lady Never Tells Her Age, even if the people she’s sitting with are basically her age too), especially an artsy-fartsy kid who was the kind of artsy (not to mention fartsy) that involved a pseudo-hippie phase but not actually going full hippie, which was exactly where Pam had fallen, meant dipping at least a toe into fantasy literature. And while there was all sorts of fantasy literature out there (Jim had just mentioned that someone named Terry Pratchett had apparently been the best selling author in UK in the 1990s with fantasy literature, and of course JK Rowling had been the best selling author in the next decade with more of it), countercultural fantasy literature meant at least a passing familiarity with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Nowadays of course those were big budget Hollywood endeavors, but back when Pam had been growing up they’d still had a little bit of their 1960s cachet still clinging to them, all Frodo Lives stickers and hippie squalor (which was probably unfair but definitely how Pam’s parents had described it). And so Pam knew just enough lingering information to follow as Larissa and Jim got into a heated discussion about Mirkwood, of all places, in the middle of a Dunkin Donuts. And she was even capable of following the details of the argument enough to keep dipping her own oar into it, which in retrospect probably only fueled the flames of what was to come.

Somehow this escalated further and further—she could almost taste the sibling rivalry in the air—into some kind of argument about whether it was possible for the dwarves and hobbits to have bobbed downriver as far as they supposedly did in the book of The Hobbit and somehow that turned into testing some kind of barrel-like contraptions in the Roaring Brook in Nay Aug Park.

Well, they weren’t really like barrels, and if Pam were interested in getting two irate Halperts teaming up on her she would probably have mentioned that. But she wasn’t, and anyway her Dunkin cup had disintegrated after too much playing with the lip, so she didn’t have anything better to do than to help the Halperts lash flexible sticks around their undestroyed Dunkin cups and fill them with “materials of dwarf-like density,” in a new Jim coinage she was not soon going to forget. Her art skills came in handy, as it turned out, since neither Jim nor Larissa could actually get the sticks to intertwine the way they wanted and it ended up being Pam who finished both cups’ décor to her own satisfaction.

The supposed point of this was to drop the two cups into the brook and see exactly how quickly they broke apart, but after they got halfway out onto Paul Kanjorski Bridge, Jim started laughing uncontrollably while looking at his cup, and Larissa joined him only half a second later, and Pam found herself shaking with amusement too because for all that she was proud of how she’d wrapped the cups, they were undeniably Dunkin Donuts cups, not barrels, and frankly more suited to a new Dunkin fall drink campaign than any Hobbit- or dwarf-like activities.

But that didn’t mean they gave up on dropping them in the river. In fact, since somehow they didn’t get destroyed immediately (which Larissa was clearly itching to mention to Jim but somehow didn’t in Pam’s hearing) they ended up racing the two “barrels” against each other downstream for almost half an hour until Pam regretfully realized that Roy was going to be coming home soon and she needed to get back.

Her sides still hurt from laughing when she was cooking dinner that evening, and she knew she hadn’t laughed like that in a very, very long time.

It might have felt like things should have changed in some big, grand way after that visit to the museum. Perhaps Pam should have come home to a dirty house and a fiancé who hadn’t lifted a finger while she was gone and was loudly wondering where his dinner was as soon as she walked through the door, and just walked out. Or thrown something. Or some other vigorous, violent, vituperative reaction.

What happened instead is that she “made” dinner (Roy might be demanding, but he had at least an easy palate, and microwave dinners were not just acceptable but eagerly gobbled up) and settled down to watch a football game between two teams that were not the Eagles and therefore didn’t matter to her very much, and went to bed and got up in the morning as normal. It was, to all visible elements an outside observer might have noted, pretty much a completely normal night and morning. Even the day after was pretty ordinary.

But the day after that, when Roy went out with his buddies to Poor Richards and ditched her at home, she didn’t sit there feeling sorry for herself or call her mom to vent or any of her usual ways of dealing with the mild disappointment of her fiancé deciding that being home wasn’t worth it. She heated up the oven and whipped up a quick meal that she liked and Roy didn’t—he was going to eat at Poor Richards anyway, so why bother to make something he wanted to eat?—popped it in when the oven beeped, and pulled out her watercolors from the bottom of the dresser where she kept them so they wouldn’t end up crushed by any of the things Roy randomly threw into the closet, and started to paint.

It wasn’t a big grand statement, and it wasn’t a big grand painting. It was just some potatoes au gratin (which Roy always said gave him gas) and a little miniature of an oak tree, literally drawn from life outside the window of their apartment, only tiny. It was barely noticeable, because the only things she had to paint on were tiny little things like that, because they were easier to finish in a single setting and she so rarely got to leave an easel up or leave anything wet around the house without risking staining something important with the paint. But precisely because it was small, she could do it quickly, and it dried quickly, and she could bring it in to work and put it up by her computer by the reception desk without anyone saying anything.

It was nice, she thought the next day at work as she put the tiny miniature up underneath the desk overhang where only she could see it and the leftover au gratin in a Tupperware in the fridge with her name on it, that now she could look at the view out of her apartment window both at home and at work. It wasn’t that it was the best view in the world; she had long wished they had a higher story, with a real terrace, that she could look out from and see not just one tree but the whole neighborhood. She liked seeing nature but also the built environment around her, and it was a shame that the tree really blocked the neighbors’ buildings (not that the other apartments were that exciting anyway). But precisely because it did block the apartment building across the way, it had an oversized influence on her sense of home: the pin oak, with its waxy, slow-to-fall and slow-to-degrade leaves, its wide canopy, and its rough bark was perhaps the most identifiable element that distinguished the view out their window from the view out any other window in the world.

It was her link to nature; sometimes, when the world was busy and the TV was loud, she’d just stare out the window at that pin oak, backlit by the living rooms opposite and their similarly loud TVs, because the neighbors never actually closed their blinds properly, and let that little bit of communion with the larger world wash over her.

She’d painted it as lovingly as she could, therefore, in the little miniature. It had been the evening when she’d painted, so she’d been able to capture exactly that sense of the pin oak as the thing keeping the rest of the world at bay. A good thing, sometimes, and a bad thing other times, but in this painting she’d gone for whatever the positive opposite of ethereal was: grounded, perhaps, or rooted. Something hefty and hulking and yet not threatening; instead, its very solidity kept one from wafting away in the breeze, and held the rest of the world at bay.

Or at least, she thought that she’d caught it, and since no one else was looking at the tree at the time (from her side at least) and no one else was looking at the miniature on her desk, she could say what she wanted about it and there was no one to disagree.

It was small, in other words, but it was also work that she was incredibly proud of, and it was nice to be able to detach from Michael yelling or Dwight being the nitpicky ass that he was (sometimes to the company’s benefit, but usually to her annoyance) or Todd Packer calling for Michael on line 2 and being generally Todd Packer by glancing over at the little miniature and conjuring the power of the pin oak to preserve her sanity.

And frankly, it was nice to have something of her own in the space. She’d put doodles on Post-Its up before, and similar things that were ephemera, little monuments to her boredom and creativity, but nothing that she’d done deliberately and then brought in. It made it feel more like she belonged in this space, or rather that the space belonged to her. And anything that made the days a little easier to get through was well worth it.

The first real crack in Pam’s apparent equanimity came on what, to pretty much everyone including her, seemed like a perfectly normal day for her. She had gotten up; she had gone through the motions of a day, much like every other (get up, scarf breakfast, endure a day of low-level but not actionable harassment and frustration at the hands of an office run by Michael and employing the various people it actually did employ, and so on); she had come home. The only thing that was a little unusual was that the warehouse had gotten a half day, because they’d had to stay at work extremely late the night before to get a last-minute shipment out (and she believed Darryl about whose fault it was, which rhymed with neither barrel nor boy but did with cycle). Given the rhythms of the paper industry, however, that was not itself so absolutely out of the ordinary as to make her suspect anything was amiss or awry. It just meant that Roy had gotten a ride home with Darryl (after, she suspected, a few drinks and some pool) and she’d had to maneuver the massive vehicle he’d driven to work back home herself.

Just a small annoyance, nothing to really upset the applecart of the day, especially since it wasn’t like a day at the office really set up such a dandy wagon of produce in the first place.

And even when she got home nothing really seemed that off at first. There was Roy, yelling at the TV (she wasn’t even sure what sport was on at 5:17 pm, it wasn’t as if they were on the west coast or Roy followed European sports of any kind). And there were his socks, for some reason known only to him but probably not coherently explicable not on his feet but instead strewn in the entryway of their rented house. She grabbed the socks and headed for the hamper in their bedroom, trying her best not to breathe too deeply as she did so. Much as she loved Roy, she did not love the odor of his feet. But she wasn’t with him for that anyway (that would be a very strange thing to be with a person for, in her opinion, though she hadn’t realized she had such an opinion until that exact moment). So that was alright, if smelly.

No, the problem arose when she got to the bedroom and realized that Roy had somehow managed to bring his work bag into the bedroom even though his socks hadn’t made it—and that he’d thrown that workbag into her side of the closet instead of his, and done so so aggressively and thoughtlessly as to knock over her precious paints in the process.

She did her best to right the situation, but even with watercolors, which didn’t really pour out, you lost some paint when they were upside down and in contact with something absorbent—like, say, the bag. This was made worse because she’d actually been painting the day before, so the paints weren’t as completely dry as they might have been.

She grabbed the bag and headed down to confront Roy about it.

It did not go well.

Roy was not apologetic, as she’d hoped he would be, but angry that his work bag had her paint on it. “I can’t bring that into work,” he yelled when she showed him the mess he’d created. “The guys wouldn’t let me hear the end of it.”

“Maybe they should, if you can’t keep your stuff out of my painting supplies,” she replied. She would normally have backed down and placated him, but the annoyance was still fresh and the lack of an apology stung. “After all, I’m not the one who put the paint there, am I?”

“You’re the one who put your stupid paint in the closet. Why is it there, anyway, it’s not like you use it. It shouldn’t be out where it can get on things.”  

“I do so!” She was torn between arguing about the fact that she hadn’t had it out at all—it had been in the closet—and her frustration that he assumed she hadn’t been painting. Even if she did it while he was out, that didn’t mean that she wasn’t doing it, after all.

“Yeah, right.” Roy rolled his eyes at her, one of her least favorite expressions on his face. “Pammy, give it up. It’s not high school anymore; you don’t actually paint, and you don’t need to keep stupid stuff like that where it’s going to get in the way.”

“I. Have. Been. Painting.” She ground her teeth. “And it was in my closet anyway. It wasn’t in the way.”

Roy gestured at the bag in her hand and she shook it. “This was in my side of the closet. That’s not in the way; that’s carelessness.”

“If I don’t put it away in the closet, you get mad. I put it away in the closet, you get mad. What do you want from me, Pammy?” Roy grumbled and turned away and Pam tossed the bag onto the floor next to the couch.

“I want you to look where you’re putting things.”

“Whatever.”

They ended up eating freezer meals in icy silence, Roy in the living room and her in the kitchen (not that with their vague open concept of a house there was all that much distinction—another thing she’d like to fix if she ever got her dream house, along with the lack of terraces). Pam knew that usually she would be the one to make the first move here, to apologize or at least back down. But she didn’t feel like it. Maybe if Roy hadn’t yelled at her for his mistake, she’d have sucked it up and just gone along. But she didn’t. They went to bed angry, one of the things her mother had told her never to do, and she found, when she woke up, that she wasn’t any less annoyed.

Of course, Roy didn’t take her annoyance seriously. When had he ever? Pam was struggling to think of a time, other than the first date they’d gone on when he had, actually, been very apologetic about the whole “abandoning her at the hockey game because he and his brother had just…left her,” that he’d taken her annoyance seriously. And she wasn’t entirely certain that it had been her annoyance that had made him so apologetic, in retrospect. She rather suspected that her future mother-in-law had had a few choice words for her son after she’d heard what had happened—and hadn’t Roy’s apologies been much more intense the day after, when Mrs. Anderson had had a chance to talk to him, rather than when he'd come back to get her that day?

Be that as it was, she couldn’t think of another time that he’d taken her annoyance seriously, not in their whole relationship. Usually it was more a matter of time: she’d convince herself that, actually, it wasn’t that bad that Roy had [fill in the blank here], and that she should just forgive him and move on with things. Or he’d cajole her, or tickle her (though that one sometimes annoyed her more), or something more important would come up. But he wouldn’t sit down with her and take what was annoying her seriously, and try to address it. That just wasn’t Roy’s way, and at this point she was not exactly waiting for it to become his way.

Still, she’d hoped that even if he wasn’t going to take her annoyance seriously, he’d at least not move to aggravate it—in other words, that he’d notice it, even if he wasn’t going to address it. And so she was rather shocked when he announced the next day that he and Kenny were going hunting that weekend.

That in and of itself wasn’t actually shocking. She wasn’t a big hunter herself, nor did she enjoy hearing about or watching others hunt, nor consuming the results. But Roy was, and always had been, and honestly it was usually a relief to her when he and Kenny would head off and go hunting together without dragging her along. But the coming weekend wasn’t a weekend that she was expecting to be without Roy; in fact, she’d thought that he was going to come with her to hear Penny’s band play at a local coffeeshop. It wasn’t that her sister was a big musician, or an up-and-coming one, or really much into music at all; Penny’s roommate, however, was very into music, and Penny had learned the drums growing up (a perpetual trouble for Pam growing up, but much more acceptable once they weren’t living in the same house), and had discovered that Penny played the drums, and declared that her band needed a drummer, and so there they were.

And she’d thought, there would Roy be too, supporting her in supporting Penny in supporting Penny’s roommate.

But now, apparently, he and Kenny were going to be in the Alleghenies somewhere hunting deer, as he informed her literally while throwing his hunting stuff into the truck after dropping her at home from work.

To make things worse, he tried to cast it as a favor to her, with all the unmitigated gall in the world. “But Pammy, you don’t really want me there right now, do you? It’s not like we’re going to have a good time.”

“And why wouldn’t I want you there?”

“Ah, c’mon, you know.”

“I do?”

“Aw, Pammy, you know. That whole thing with the paint. It’ll do you a world of good not to have me there.”

Wait. Roy knew that she was annoyed with him, and that was why he was going? He was aware she was annoyed, and his reaction was to get out of town? Pam ground her teeth.

“I think you mean it will do you a world of good to be able to ignore ‘that whole thing with the paint.’ I, on the other hand, would like my fiancé to come with me to support my sister, perhaps as a way of showing that you are sorry that you broke my paints.”

“Aw, Pammy, you know how it is.”

“No, Roy, I really don’t.”

“Come on, Pam.” He rolled his eyes at her. “We can talk about it later. I’m gonna be late. Kenny’s waiting for me at his place, and we gotta get to the lodge before they stop check-in.” He swung up into the truck and started it up. “I’ll see you when I get back. Have fun with Penny. Love ya.” He started the truck back up the drive and she was left standing there, speechless, as it rumbled out into the street and down towards Kenny’s place.

She didn’t eat freezer dinner that night. She’d been accumulating a little stash of cash from odds and ends of change so that she could buy Roy a Christmas present without overdrawing her credit card or anything, and she marched right back into the house, pulled the envelope out of the drawer where she kept the cleaning supplies (which Roy never checked) and drove down to Alfredo’s Pizza Café. A large from there would keep her the whole weekend, and it wasn’t like Roy was going to notice that she didn’t get him a big Christmas present.

And if he did, he’d probably just go hunting with Kenny about it anyway.

She got a pizza with the toppings she actually liked (spinach, which Roy always said was too wilty, and feta, which he always complained didn’t melt enough) and ate a delicious but still angry meal in front of the TV she wanted to watch (Planet Earth, which Roy always said was too boring except for the bits where it was too loud) and went to sleep angry for the second straight night.

That weekend, as she sat at home painting and thinking about her situation, the problems in their relationship got harder and harder to ignore—and she became more and more aware that she had, in fact, been ignoring them for a while now. It hadn’t been, as she’d told herself, the mature behavior of a now-adult who simply didn’t let things fester and knew how to keep an even keel. No, it had instead been just the other side of the childish coin: sticking one’s head in the sand like an ostrich, rather than ranting and raving, but equally unwilling to accept that the world was a complicated place and sometimes people you very much liked were not as good for you as you wished that they were.

She was beginning to wonder how good she and Roy were, and indeed how good they had ever been together. She was trying her best not to pull a complete revisionist history and pretend they’d never ever been good together; that was just another pull towards childishness and a refusal to look nuance in the face. The fact that she was unhappy, now, and the fact that she had been unhappy, for a while, did not mean that she had never been happy. She did not have to let anger and sadness drive the bus; she could acknowledge her anger and sadness and still look back with some rationality.

And yet, even when she did her best to look in that kind of way, she couldn’t deny that what she had been telling herself for months if not years was a happy, mature relationship was suddenly splotched with more moments than she could count of anger, frustration, and bad emotional regulation, on both their parts.

That was the thing she kept returning to as she ate her way through her pizza that weekend. Much as she’d like to put this all on Roy (and much as many of the things she kept thinking about were Roy’s fault, starting most obviously with the paints and his reaction to them), it took two to tango. When had she ever actually sat down and had a conversation with him about what she was thinking or feeling? Not necessarily one in which he had to respond at the same emotional level that she was coming from, but just one in which she, herself, was emotionally honest?

If they ever had, it had been too long. Maybe even as long ago as the first time he’d left her in the ice hockey arena and she’d told him how much that hurt her.

And even then, she might not have told him in so many words; she might just have taken it as understood when he apologized so profusely and gave her flowers and all that.

This wasn’t blaming the victim, she realized as she finished the last of the pizza (late on the night of Saturday, because when Roy wasn’t there she actually ate as much as she wanted, which was a horrible thing to realize about yourself in your relationship). If she had truly been in an abusive relationship, it would be unfair to place blame on her for staying in it, given all the things she’d been taught over the years about how trauma and abuse warp your brain. But while there were definitely shitty things about her relationship with Roy, it was more about emotional neglect and inability to communicate, not about anything actually abusive. And if she hadn’t asked Roy to be any more than he’d become, how could he be blamed for thinking that what he’d become was enough for her, emotionally, romantically, personally?

Maybe asking him to change for her was difficult, and maybe even unfair—but it would be unfair in the sense that he had a right to be himself, not in that she didn’t have a right to express what she needed. If he wasn’t that, then they should break up, not just muddle onwards.

There.

She’d thought it.

They should maybe possibly break up.

It was strange to think that a week ago she’d have said you were crazy to think they should do anything of the sort, and now, without Roy even here, she was starting to think it might be inevitable.

Except…was that really any better than not communicating with Roy about her problems, just in a new, more break-up-y form? Shouldn’t she at least wait to talk to him, at least once, in order to make that kind of weighty decision? Didn’t she owe him—strike that, didn’t she owe herself—that?

She did.

She also owed herself another large pizza from Alfredo’s Pizza Café. This time she got toppings they both enjoyed—Roy was going to be home before she could actually finish this one, and it would be easier to make lunches on Monday if they had leftovers they’d both eat—but at least none of the ones Roy usually tried to get her to add that she didn’t much like. It felt like a reasonable compromise, if one could compromise with someone who wasn’t even present or aware of the situation, and it tasted just as good for lunch on Sunday as the one she’d consumed Friday night into Saturday had.

Maybe she didn’t have to be an entirely new and different Pam just to be Pam.

But also, no maybes about it, she was not Pammy, and she needed to assert that reality into the world.

It wasn’t until she was waiting up late on Sunday, with Roy not even home yet, that she realized she hadn’t texted or called with him all weekend—and that the thought hadn’t even occurred to her when she was thinking about not talking to him. And of course, he hadn’t texted her or called either, though that wasn’t all that rare anyway.

The little splotches of badness against the background of their relationship just kept growing, and she wasn’t sure she liked the coloration anymore.

She spent most of Sunday evening waiting for Roy to stumble in through the door, whether drunk or just dead tired after a weekend of hunting and partying with Kenny. She wasn’t sure how much actual hunting they did on these guys’ weekends; Roy never seemed to come home with any meat or anything, and his stories never had much to do with animals or blinds or shooting, or any of the other words she would have associated with actually hunting. Instead, they were mostly about the fact that Kenny always brought his X-Box out with him, and they seemed to spend a very large percentage of their time (or at least of their time in Roy’s stories) on that.

Why Kenny couldn’t bring his X-Box over to their house, Pam had never understood, but that wasn’t her problem right now.

No, her problem was that apparently Roy hadn’t actually come back on Sunday night, and she’d fallen asleep in the middle of watching Fantasia on her old VHS, a comfort watch from her childhood that she’d been watching in the hopes of reducing her creeping antsiness over Roy’s absence and her own self-discovery during the weekend. The last thing she remembered was the little black pegasus trying to catch up to its family—she’d somehow slept through Night on Bald Mountain, which undoubtedly said something about how exhausted she was—and apparently the VHS stopping hadn’t made enough noise to wake her, nor had Roy coming home because he just hadn’t.

That presented two problems. Well, three. One: she had a massive crick in her neck because she should not, at her age (even if she wasn’t that old) be sleeping on the couch, especially not without actually positioning herself to sleep on the couch in a sane and un-jumbled way. Two: Roy usually drove her to work, and she hadn’t really been paying attention to how much gas was in her little beater hand-me-down car but it was only about fifty-fifty that it was enough to get to work confidently. And, of course, three: where was Roy? Was he OK?

The last two were both alleviated by checking her phone, which had slipped out of her hand and onto the floor. First: it was much earlier than she usually got up, which was probably because her bad sleeping position had caused her to twinge awake in pain (thanks, neck). That meant there was plenty of time to fill the car with gas on the way to work. Second: Roy had sent a text at…three a.m. telling her that he was going to get Kenny to drop him straight at work and he’d see her in the afternoon.

“Not even for lunch,” she scoffed to herself before stopping—not because she was annoyed at herself for her sarcasm directed towards the supposed love of her life, but because scoffing was one of the myriad activities that apparently sent off her twinged neck.

“Ow, ow, ow.” She chanted it like a mantra as she took a boilingly hot shower (no need to hurry to get in—she could wait as long as she liked for it to get hot, since neither Roy nor the clock was urging her forward) and acknowledging the pain seemed to help a bit. Or maybe it was just the heat of the shower letting the muscles relax. Either way, by the time she got out she was pretty sure she could drive the car without her neck squeezed against her shoulder to keep it from hurting. The remainder of the workday would have to take care of itself, with the help of a couple ibuprofen she’d snatched from the medicine cabinet and gulped down along with a hot tea and some cold pizza before remembering she’d meant to take that pizza for lunch and not breakfast.

Oh well. That, like whatever happened when the ibuprofen wore off, and what to do about her realizations about her worsening relationship with Roy (or was it just her worse relationship with him?), was a problem for future-Pam. Hopefully that superheroine would be up for it.

Spoiler alert: she was not up for it.

The day was an annoying one in all the ways that a day at work could be annoying, from the mundane (thanks for forgetting until Monday that you needed four hundred photocopies of a sixteen page document for your sales calls for the month and insisting that they all be done at once, Michael) to the unusual (Jim was out of the office all day on his own sales calls, which meant there was no one to buffer her from Michael’s insistent querying about whether the 6400 pages had printed yet) to the sublime (if you wanted to view Todd Packer coming back for a ‘quickie’ as he always so helpfully called a quick check-in with Michael as the sublime absurdity of the universe attacking her personally, which Pam did). She did at least manage to squeeze in lunch (literally squeeze, in that the best thing she could find at the gas station where she filled up to make herself lunch was a box of go-gurt) and make it through the seven-reams-of-double-sided-paper-plus-inevitable-copier-jams of Michael’s new work without gutting anyone.

It was a close-run thing, and Pam did not consider herself a violent woman, most of the time.

But she was about to boil over when Roy pulled into the driveway five minutes after she did, walked through the front door with his hunting bag over his shoulder and calmly asked what was for dinner as if he hadn’t skipped town the entire weekend with Kenny and only contacted her at three a.m. Monday morning.

“I don’t know, Roy, what did you catch for us to eat?” didn’t quite slip out, but it came very close.

“I don’t know, Roy,” did come out, and she realized she sounded more tired than she expected—although not more than she felt—and less angry (definitely less than she felt). She didn’t feel up to the fight she knew was probably coming. She should have felt up to it, she knew, but she didn’t.

“Mac and cheese?” she offered instead. Roy was a devotee of Kraft Easy Mac, and, well, there were always boxes in the cupboard.

He cheered, she made the Kraft, and they somehow didn’t talk about the weekend at all as they settled in for Monday Night Football. Of course.

Tomorrow, Pam promised herself. Tomorrow she’d have a real conversation about it. A night when she hadn’t slept on the couch and Michael hadn’t been (as much of) a thoughtless fool and Jim had pulled some kind of prank on Dwight so she had something to laugh at.

Tomorrow.

Pam hated few things more than the gnawing feeling in her gut when she had to have a hard conversation with anyone, especially Roy. She’d made the mistake of telling Roy this one time, and he’d made a joke about how girls ought to be able to deal with stomach pain since they complained about their periods so much, which she thought was both inappropriate on several levels and inaccurate since she couldn’t actually remember complaining to Roy about her period—not because cramps weren’t unpleasant, but because what would be the point?

Perhaps that itself should have been a sign, but then most things were starting to look like they ought to have been signs and she wasn’t cataloguing them anymore.

For a long time, one of the few things she disliked more than the feeling in her stomach when she should have a hard conversation was an actual argument. That had made for some very bad family gatherings when, for instance, Roy’s grandma had asked when she was going to get to go to a wedding, and Pam had had to choose between wandering around the Anderson family home with a stone in her stomach or having an argument with either Roy or his sweet gran over how inappropriate that was.

But while she still didn’t like having an argument—never did, doubted she ever would, even though she did have them from time to time—she had matured in her time at Dunder Mifflin, because she had seen exactly what happened to people who had big arguments (Dwight and Michael especially) and noticed one crucial detail: the world did not, in fact, end.

Oh, for sure, big arguments were not her cup of tea, not by a long shot, but once you had the big screaming argument, she noticed, things didn’t always get better but they didn’t usually get worse. The worst that happened at work was that Michael didn’t change anything when someone yelled at him, and if the worst thing was the status quo, then why add to it with a stomachache?

She wasn’t totally fooling herself, of course. She knew that in an argument with Roy there were much worse stakes than Michael ignoring feedback or even losing a customer. But she was coming to realize that those stakes too might be smaller than she had always thought. Sure, if she and Roy had a hard conversation that went in a bad direction, they might not be engaged or even dating at the end of it. But if they didn’t, she’d be engaged to someone who she couldn’t actually talk to, and also who didn’t care about what she had to say. And was that really all that wonderful a thing, just to wear a ring?

Tuesday was a bad day because of the big gnaw in her stomach, because no end of telling herself that having a row would be OK actually fixed her stomach pains. But it wasn’t bad in other ways. Jim pulled a prank on Dwight that involved always predicting what he would win out of the crackerjack that was (for some unknown reason) in their vending machine at work—she thought by sleight of hand, but maybe he had an in with the vending machine guy—and betting Dwight increasingly absurd things on the outcome, culminating in Dwight having to take Jim’s next three sales calls but give all the commissions to Jim. Since that also meant more time with Jim in the office, unlike Monday when he’d been out all day, she privately considered it a double win. Michael was surprisingly tolerable, only asking her twice to photocopy something in black and white into color—and giving her a gift certificate to Dunkin’ Donuts he had laying around after she “did it” by opening Photoshop and editing the scan.

It was, all non-Roy things considered, a good day. And the fact that Roy and their impending need for a conversation made it a bad day was yet another sign that maybe she just needed to talk to him.

She really wanted to slide into it slowly, even though she didn’t quite know how to, but then Roy told her he was going out with the guys and, well, slowly was off the table.

As was calmly.

And gently.

“What the actual fuck, Roy,” is what slipped out of her mouth, and well, then things were off to the races. Roy tried his default move, which was to minimize everything and try to tell her she was blowing it out of proportion. This often worked, but not when she had had the whole weekend to remember exactly how he’d tried to do it before. He tried saying that she hadn’t reacted this way when he’d gone out with Kenny before, or when he’d broken her paints before, and she responded in great detail about exactly what she had said at those times, along with the point that if this was so common an occurrence that he could reference other times he’d done it, perhaps it was, in fact, precisely as big a deal as she believed it was, Roy. That devolved into a blow-by-blow discussion of a lot of their personal history that had, for a long time, lain dormant like a volcano overlooking a pleasant village. And if one took that metaphor seriously, their little relationship village did about as well as such pleasant villages tended to do when the volcano ceased dormancy, which was to say not at all.

Pam wasn’t sure when exactly she took off the ring, but she did know it took some effort not to throw it anywhere it couldn’t be found. She wasn’t sure exactly when Roy packed a bag—or if he had even unpacked his stuff from the weekend on Monday after his trip with Kenny—but it was in the back of the truck and he was driving over to Poor Richard’s and then Darryl’s, just like he’d planned but without the promise of a swift return. And then she was reheating cold pizza in the oven because she didn’t know what else to do when her stomach still felt better after a knockdown dragout fight than it had all day.

The next day was glorious. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been. Perhaps there should have been some part of her that was crushed by the end of a yearslong relationship and the oncoming difficulties involved in unwinding their affairs and talking to literally every person she had interacted with in the past however many years and told about her engagement in order to make sure that no one felt left out or uninformed, including the myriad ways in which she was likely to get asked some version of whether she was giving up—on life, on love, on ever marrying, ever having children, all the things that a twenty-something woman breaking up with her long-term boyfriend-stroke-fiancé definitely wanted to be asked, no question.

But there wasn’t, at least not today. She was still wearing the ring; she and Roy hadn’t agreed on much, but they’d agreed that this was their business and no one else’s. So her day wasn’t filled with Angela tsk-tsking or Dwight bellowing about the fertility rates of those who remained “unwed and unimpregnated” beyond a certain age or any of the other things she might fear once they did find out. Instead, it was just another day at the office, except the colors were brighter and the growling in her stomach was gone and everything just seemed more manageable.

There were a lot of small victories that day. The copier still accepted whatever eldritch sacrifice it had been offered at the last repair call and didn’t fight her when Michael demanded more photocopies of the same work that she’d been doing all week so far. The phones started glitching in terms of reception, but the only call that came through before they were fixed was spam anyway. Her mixed berry yogurt wasn’t expired yet at lunch, even though she had forgotten this one in the back of the fridge for a week after finishing all the others.

This last one she knew because she now religiously checked the expiration dates, ever since a certain Jim Halpert had told her a couple of years ago that her mixed berry yogurt was expiring. He had made her promise not to ask how he knew, and she still didn’t know, but he had been right and she had decided from that day forward to make sure that she always checked.

Speaking of Jim, she found herself sketching an outline of his head as the day came close to a close, with a blue pen that someone had left rolling around on the floor in the break room and she’d corralled as she went to drink mediocre coffee and wish, once more, that she had a teapot or something similar around to allow her to avoid the caffeine and the meh taste of it all. Finding the color of the doodle to be amusing, she started filling out the details not of Jim Halpert, Scranton salesman extraordinaire (or extra ordinary, as Dwight would have it, though she had to disagree) but of Sir James Halpert, variant edition of Blue Bloy.

In other words, she put as many ruffles as she could on his shirt and gave him a pose that might have been appropriate when Gainsborough first put paint to canvas, but was rather silly at the moment.

So of course that was the moment that Jim decided to pop up and steal a jelly bean—well, acquire, since they were undoubtedly there precisely for someone like Jim to steal, and that made it probably not actually stealing—and she wasn’t fast enough at shoving the potentially offending picture out of sight.

“Well, well, what have we here?” He popped a second jelly bean after the first and raised an eyebrow. She sighed and pushed it over. Better to get the mockery over with, she’d learned after years of having everyone from Roy to Michael to the other kids at her community college catch her drawing. Not that Jim had ever done it, but it was an ingrained reflex nonetheless.

“Beesly, this is amazing.” He didn’t touch it, but she could see his fingers twitch as if he wanted to, and then move to get a third jelly bean as if that was the only substitute he could imagine for grabbing the picture and bringing it up to his face. “Can I borrow this?” He flushed slightly and she wondered why. “Uh, just to photocopy. To show Larissa.” He swallowed, and there was a little burble in the way that made the next word come out. “She, uh, said she hadn’t actually seen much of your work, and, well, you know it’s not like I just had a gallery of your paintings available or anything, so…” He drummed on the table. “I though this might get her off my back.”

“She wants to see my artwork?” Pam blinked. “Why?”

“Uh, because she thinks you’re probably good at it?” Jim blinked back, and she could not quite tell if he was doing it deliberately to imitate her or not. “She asked a couple of times after we went to the museum. I think you made an impression.”

“Oh. Well, yeah, I guess you can send it to her.” Pam almost handed him the sketch and then remembered the copier and the eldritch sacrifice. “Actually, let me scan it for you. I think the copier only likes me right now.”

“Alas, I am no maiden fair to vie for its affections.” Jim imitated the pose she’d drawn him in and before she thought better of it she smacked him with the piece of paper. “Ah! Forbear, my arm is weaketh!”

“It should just be weak, which you are. -eth is the second person conjugation in traditional English and should only be used with verbs, not adjectives,” Dwight interjected from across the room. “Honestly, Jim, Think before you speak. What if a client heard you? If you don’t have a solid sense of linguistic roots of the language we speak, why would clients trust you to sell them paper to put that language onto?” He shook his head. “Pathetic.”

“Didn’t you just say that -eth should only be used with verbs?” Jim asked, turning to Dwight and winking at her as he did so.

“Yes, because it should be.”

“But you just said pethetic. Isn’t that an adjective with an -eth?”

“Pathetic, Jim, not pethetic. Do you even speak English?”

“I don’t know Dwight, that’s not what I heard. I think you’re on the record here as saying pethetic, and I don’t know that we can trust a salesman who uses incorrect language. Did you get that Pam?” He turned back to her, now mock-serious. “Make sure you keep our errors on record. You can mark me for weaketh, but make sure you mark down Dwight as pethetic.”

“Got it.” She nodded, not quite sure where he was going with this but willing to play along. “Jim, weaketh; Dwight, pethetic.”

“Right. Remember, I am weaketh, but Dwight is pethetic.”

“I am not pethetic! I am pathetic! You have to write down that I am pathetic!” Dwight yelled, and Pam giggled to herself as he and Jim continued to argue and she slipped away to scan the drawing and email it to Jim, remembering at the last moment to make sure it was a color scan so the Blue of her Blue Boy would be retained.

The high of having actually taken a step towards self-actualization through breaking up with Roy did not last as long as Pam would have liked it to, which is to say that it lasted about until the second day when she came home to an empty house and no one to talk to or do anything with. She would have added that there was no one to cook for her or help her clean up, but then Roy hadn’t really done that when they’d been together, so that wasn’t actually that different. But even though she didn’t regret not being with Roy, she did miss having at least someone to talk to in the evening and someone else to decide what to do so she didn’t need to think after a long day, even though Roy had almost always chosen the same things to do (namely, watch TV, or go out with the boys).

This did not result in a strong desire to get back with Roy, or really any such desire. But it did mean that she was dragging her way into the weekend by Friday, and looking for something, really anything, to do.

Perhaps that was what led her to the local cinema’s Marlon Brando festival. Or perhaps it was the way her parents had let her watch A Streetcar Named Desire at an impressionable age near puberty. Whatever it was, she saw the listing on a promoted Facebook ad and for once didn’t just scroll on by and ignore it. Instead, she bundled herself out of the house (God, she wasn’t going to be able to afford the rent on the house solo, was she? That was a problem for later) and out into the night.

The Appaloosa was perhaps not the movie she most wanted to see, since she did remember that it wasn’t exactly the best in terms of women’s representation, but then again which of his films were? And there were some pretty good shooting scenes, and a very excellent horse, and it was nice to do something she wanted to do, just for herself.

That said, she did start having to think about money, she realized, as she trudged home with a movie, small popcorn, and small soda’s-worth of a hole in her pocket. Sure, she had fewer costs without a Roy to feed (or buy alcohol for), but she also had a Roy-less amount of money coming in during the month, and to be honest Roy had always made more than she had anyway.

She spent the evening on a variety of websites that purported to have information on apartments in the Scranton area. And then the greater Scranton area. And then anywhere within a two hour commute radius.

Ugh. Apartments were expensive. Not so expensive that she could imagine that she should keep the house, but expensive enough that she would be giving some major things up when she left.

But she supposed she didn’t need to think of the apartment as a replacement for the house. The house was a house; it was a self-contained unit, and it needed to have space for two people and all the activities two people might get up to, up to and including the addition of more people (not that she was thinking about that anymore as an option, sadly—though not so sadly that it wasn’t with Roy, she thought, on reflection). An apartment was part of a larger unit, and it only needed to have enough for what she actually wanted and needed.

Did she need an in-unit laundry? Certainly she did if she was doing her and Roy’s laundry every week, or more often when he came home with major stains on his clothes. But if she was only doing her own, wouldn’t a laundry in the building be enough to avoid a bad Scranton winter? And sure, she wanted a place to cook, but couldn’t she trade some kitchen space for a bit bigger living room—enough to put up her easel permanently?

Not that that was always an option. But it meant she could look at things a little differently, so maybe there would be a place, if she looked at it the right way.

OK, that still didn’t mean that there were a lot of options. But it made there be a few, within what might be, if she squinted, a reasonable price range. And if she was willing to cut back on a few other things—like, for instance, seeing The Appaloosa, which wasn’t really a necessity even for a Brando fan—she might be able to make it work.

She wrote down a few places to call during her lunch break the next day, since she strongly doubted that any real estate folks were eager to talk to anyone on the phone at gone-ten p.m. And then she went to sleep, with visions of moving vans floating in her head.

There was a minor issue with looking for apartments, in that she hadn’t actually had to look for an apartment herself for years—and by herself, ever. It wasn’t that she wasn’t a strong, independent woman who didn’t need Roy Anderson anymore. If anything, that was a major motivating factor in actually making the phone calls and trying to arrange the viewing times that she wanted. But being a strong independent woman also meant, she thought, knowing your limits. And one of her limits was that she was pretty sure she didn’t know anything at all about what made an apartment that looked good on paper look good in practice.

She had thought she might get Penny or Izzy to help her apartment shop, and she probably could if she was willing to wait a month or so, but Penny was facing some kind of crunch at work that Pam didn’t quite understand but definitely involved very long nights and made her alternately snappish and apologetic about it (the latter being the sign that it was a real project, and not just Penny wanting to get out of doing it). Izzy, on the other hand, would totally have been up for it if it weren’t that she was facing her own long work hours, mostly as a result of a commute to and from New York every other weekend for some kind of dental certification that Pam didn’t quite understand but which apparently would lead to quite a bump in pay at the dentist’s office and was thus unavoidable, or at least not the sort of thing that Pam was going to ask her friend to forego for her sake.

She did ask her mom and dad to help out, and indeed visited her first couple of potential apartments with her dad, but it was a long drive and she could tell that he was flagging by the second viewing. Also, for all that she trusted him as a handyman and general knower-of-things, he also hadn’t gone apartment shopping, since they owned their house, so his experience was therefore also limited.

She was despairing of who she could ask, as well as despairing over whether the apartments were actually going to be worth moving into. There was Jim, of course. Jim would undoubtedly help, and she knew that he rented too, so he’d know something about how that whole process worked. But it had been a few days and she wasn’t sure how exactly to broach the whole “no longer engaged” thing, especially since she and Roy hadn’t really talked about how they were going to deal with that in their technically shared workplace (even though they worked in different parts of Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton office).

But when she thought more about it, well, not talking about what they were going to do at work wasn’t the same as explicitly talking about not talking about it at work. They’d said it was their own business and no one else’s, but also this whole moving out thing was also her business, and she needed help with it. So she was just going to do it.

First, she did what she should have done the first day she’d come in after breaking up with Roy, and formally notified HR-via-Toby that she was no longer in a relationship with a coworker. Then, she slipped into her normal seat next to Jim in the break room for lunch—she had timed it very carefully—and took advantage of no one else being in the room to ask if she could talk to him for a moment. He looked startled but agreed, and she just blurted it out. It was the first time she’d told someone that didn’t know her whole long history with Roy (though she was fairly certain she’d mentioned at least a few things over the years to Jim) and she wasn’t sure exactly how he’d take it. But he just nodded, swallowed a piece of his sandwich, and asked if she was OK.

She wasn’t, but she also was, and she did her best to explain that while Jim nodded at the right moments and made small noises that seemed to indicate understanding and agreement. She really appreciated him, she realized. She’d been really keyed up about telling anyone at work—specifically about telling Jim, if she was honest, because his good opinion of her mattered in a way that, say, Dwight’s did not, though he was also less likely to peck and poke at her about something like this than someone like Angela—and there was just something fundamentally calming about his presence and his reaction.

“So, uh, what do you need from me, Beesly?” he asked at last. “Not that you necessarily need to need anything from me, I suppose, but I figured you had to have a reason to have mentioned this right now,” he hastened to add, and she almost giggled. He sounded almost as nervous as she felt about telling him, for some reason.

“I need help finding an apartment,” she admitted. “And specifically I need someone to tell me if there’s something absolutely awful about an apartment that I’ve missed, or if the landlord is going to murder me in my sleep, or something.”

“Ah yes, we have had a real rash of landlord serial killers in Scranton recently,” Jim nodded mock-sagely.

“Shut up.” She knocked their shoulders together. “You know what I mean.”

“You’re worried that you might not notice when an apartment has, like, two kitchens and three dining rooms.” He nodded again, even more mock-sagely. “Important things, Beesly. I’m an expert at counting to one.”

“Shut up.” She leaned further into him, laughing. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know, Beesly.” He grinned. “You just need someone to double-check that you aren’t crazy about the whole thing, and that you haven’t made some kind of big mistake you ought to have avoided.”

“Exactly.” It was her turn to nod.

“It sounds to me like you need a squire.” He grinned again. “A Sancho Panza to your Don Quixote, as you go tilting at apartments.” He started whistling what she recognized after a moment as the main theme from Man of La Mancha. “Fear not, brave knight, I shall accompany you and save you from yourself.”

And well, since that was exactly what she had wanted, Pam couldn’t really object, even if the idea of Jim dedicating himself to her service made her feel oddly uncomfortable for reasons she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

Apartment shopping with Jim was…really nice, actually. She had been a little worried that, even though she knew he wasn’t like Roy in most ways, it would turn out to be a universal male attribute to be overly macho with real estate agents (or whatever you called the people who weren’t actually the landlord but showed you apartments: leasing agents? Sub-landlords? Apartment managers?). When they’d found the house she knew she couldn’t afford to keep renting, Roy had had to pose and posture and act like he knew better than the people who, you know, did this for a living, and Pam had just had to roll her eyes and try to make sure he didn’t tank their application for places they actually liked—or sign them up for a rental on a place that was totally unacceptable except that Roy and the guy showing it hit it off.

Jim was not like that. Maybe some of it was that he wasn’t actually going to live in the apartment, but he managed to fade into the background most of the time and then suddenly reappear with a question like “hey, what’s that stain on the ceiling” or “why does the next balcony over have a giant grill on it if you said that Pam can’t use the balcony” or “isn’t that the dog food factory next door? Are you upwind or downwind?”

Important questions, the answers to which (“uh, I don’t know, I’ll go check, I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about,” “oh, hm, I guess you can access the balcony if you want” and “I’m sure you can’t smell it most days,” respectively) were very useful in organizing her apartment search process. But he wasn’t pushing himself forward and taking attention; if anything, he did his best to avoid the salespeople addressing themselves to him (as the man) given that she was the one actually renting. It didn’t work all the time, and by the end of their visits Pam and Jim were well beyond rolling their eyes at rental agents (or again, whatever they were called) who insisted on acting as if he were there in any capacity other than advisor. But he was a calming presence and, again, the answers to the questions he did ask were pertinent to her search.

It was surprisingly relaxing, actually, looking for apartments with Jim, to the point where she almost found herself wondering—scratch that, she did find herself wondering, though she didn’t say anything to anyone else about it—what it would be like to go apartment shopping with Jim for real. To have him not lingering outside the bedrooms while she stuck her head in to see if there was enough closet space for her clothes and her paints (no more under the bed if she could help it!) but coming in with her and cracking jokes about the size of the bed they could fit in like Roy used to do (highly embarrassing in front of the estate-agent-or-whatever but, she had to admit, actually kind of fun when she wasn’t afraid of being overheard). To have the threat to his head from some of the lower-ceilinged units be significant for living purposes, not just for inviting her friend over to visit (though she could do that now! So she did in fact decide to pass on the basement unit where he wouldn’t be able to raise his arm above his head without knocking on the floor of the unit above). To…well, to have Jim moving in with her.

Which was silly, because they weren’t even dating, but she couldn’t get the idea out of her head.

Not that she thought Jim was thinking it, of course. He’d always been respectful of her relationship with Roy, with the exception of a few times he’d made comments that she’d been annoyed with at the time, but in retrospect were just…accurate. Roy had been convinced Jim had a thing for her when she’d started, but that was clearly silly, and he hadn’t really given any indications since…although, maybe going apartment hunting with her was an indication?

She wasn’t sure, and she wasn’t going to get more sure without asking (horrible, impossible, potentially-friendship ruining, and also would that make Jim a rebound from Roy? She didn’t want that) or getting an outside perspective on the situation.

So she did what she’d done every time she’d had something serious to think about since she was a girl (and…since when had Jim become something serious to think about? How long had this been simmering under the surface? Did she even want to answer that?).

She talked to her mother.

She did not expect her mother to laugh at her.

But what did she really expect? Helene Beesly was very much the older version of, well, Pam herself, and she wasn’t slow to laugh herself. And once her mother stopped laughing enough to explain why she was laughing, Pam had to admit that yes, a lot of that laughing had been with Jim over the last few years. And almost all of her stories had been about him. And she was always happier around him.

It was even more embarrassing to realize this than it had been to watch Roy posturing about what kind of range was on the stove in a rental house when he hadn’t stood in front of a stove to do more than reach on top of the fridge and grab the alcohol in years. And then to realize that her mother (her mother) had known this longer than she had. And that if her mother knew, Penny definitely knew.

Maybe her dad didn’t; she didn’t ask her mother, because she didn’t want to think about the implications if even he did.

But…did Jim?

And did she want him to? It wasn’t the same thing to spend all her time with Jim at work and care a lot about what he thought and think he was really cute as to…actually want to date him.

Did she?

And how could she go about exploring whether she really did without making everything go to hell if the answer ended up being no?

Fortunately for Pam, an opportunity to spend some time with Jim immediately presented itself in the form of his next (or perhaps one should simply say latest) prank on Dwight. This one apparently required a rather significant amount of setup, and would not pay dividends for a week or more, but that was OK by Pam—it wasn’t like she was in a particular hurry, and anyway plotting gave her time to think other thoughts about Jim and what she actually wanted out of that relationship (not necessarily relationship relationship, but relationship nonetheless, as she tried and failed to explain to Penny without her sister bursting into laughter).

Seriously, what was with her family and laughing at her recently?

Anyway, the prank was simple on the face of it, but difficult in the implementation. Much like the nickels prank Jim had played on Dwight (still a favorite of hers), it relied on three elements: open access to altering the interior of Dwight’s work phone, a slow roll that boiled the frog (to borrow a phrase her dad was inordinately fond of) by not revealing itself too quickly lest Dwight realize something was up, and last but not least Dwight’s tendency to overcompensate for everything in order to prove he was the best.

In other words, it was a sure thing, as long as they got the timing right.

The secret was a little device Jim had found at some joke shop or other that was basically just a sound dampener, but only for certain frequencies: basically, if you set it right, anyone speaking through the device would be inaudible, or at least difficult to hear, when they spoke at a certain pitch or tone. The idea for the toy, she and Jim agreed, was probably just to make your voice sound weird, just like people breathed helium or talked through a voice modulator. But because of the way it worked, it could also be used for mischief. Jim had come up with an ingenious plan, in Pam’s opinion at least. He asked her for one of the many old phones they had ‘replaced’ over the years and actually just stuck back in the supply closet (because Michael hated getting rid of any ‘office physical assets’ if he could avoid it). Then he’d taken the mouthpiece off of that phone, taken it home, and found a way to install the little sound dampener so that if someone talked into the phone they were talking through the device into the phone itself.

Then one night he stayed late, switched the new mouthpiece onto Dwight’s phone, and they were off.

But the key to the prank was that the device was adjustable. Jim started it at only the very smallest amount of dampening; enough that any miscommunication could just be attributed to the very old and untrustworthy technology that they were working with (the replaced phones in the supply closet were there, after all, because the phones kept breaking in the first place). Dwight had complained about the phones so much, in fact, that she and Jim were pretty sure that no matter how much he complained about this one, Michael wasn’t going to believe him.

And if he did manage to get Michael to replace his phone, well, Pam was the one whose job it was to get him a new phone, and to get rid of the old one (aka, put it back in the supply closet).

Which meant that Jim had made sure that she also knew how to switch the mouthpieces on the phones, so any new phone Dwight did get would, of course, come with the same sound-dampening mouthpiece and therefore the same problems.

But that was all contingency plan. The main plan was that Dwight would start noticing that people weren’t hearing him quite right, and (being the aggressive and determined salesman that he was, not to mention one of the pushiest people on the planet) he’d repeat himself over and over again, varying the way he spoke until they understood. And that would mean, as they turned the dampener up little by little, that he’d start gradually adjusting to avoid the pitches that it was dampening, until eventually he was speaking in only the most gravelly of bass voices and sounded like someone had turned on the old Flash Gordon movie with Brian Blessed as Ming the Merciless.

This choice to eliminate the high tones and force Dwight towards bass was Pam’s contribution to the prank. Jim had originally been planning to make Dwight go higher and higher but Pam had felt that that would make him more likely to notice the change. After all, Dwight sometimes had a very basic approach to masculinity, and so making his voice deeper and deeper would convince him that actually it was his very manliness that was coming across to the buyers and ensuring his success.

And so it proved. Pam had the distinct pleasure of hearing Dwight plunge deeper and deeper into his bass register while Jim popped jellybeans next to her and observed him with her, until Michael started to notice.

And when Michael noticed, Dwight denied that anything was different! He insisted that this was his natural manly voice, all while arguing an octave below his ordinary tones, and—wonder of wonders—Pam realized that he was right, as far as it went: the change in his phone voice had indeed resulted in a change in his ordinary voice, so he wasn’t speaking any differently on the phone.

Instead, Dwight had just turned into a basso profundo in all parts of life!

The next day after Michael and Dwight’s argument about whether Dwight was a natural bass (an argument that somehow involved Michael of all people insisting that “Barry White, Johnny Cash, and I are basses, Dwight, you are a baritone at best!”), Jim removed the dampener.

Dwight didn’t change his voice, of course, because (unlike with the nickels) there was no sign to him that anything had changed.

Well, what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, she supposed. And it had been a lot of fun hanging out with Jim as they made the little adjustments every day, and watching Dwight slip deeper and deeper as they went.

She couldn’t deny that the opportunity to be close to Jim was the bigger part of her enjoyment, too; it wasn’t that bass Dwight did anything particularly for her, after all! But feeling like she and Jim were a team, like they fit together to make something like that happen…that was no different than it had been, except that now she let herself enjoy that part of it whereas before she had denied that that was part of the thrill, even to herself.

And she was pretty sure Jim noticed something similar, because he’d asked her to come practice fiddling with the mouthpiece on the phone outside of work hours—and while he didn’t make a move or anything while she was there, that was definitely new.

In the aftermath of the prank on Dwight, Pam was feeling pretty darn good about herself and her relationship with Jim. She was increasingly certain, between their time together at work (though not their working together; work itself was definitively not the point) and their time scouting out apartments, that the two of them were legitimately well-matched, rather than simply paired up because the rest of the office was totally crazy—or simply rebounding, with regards to her breakup with Roy.

She and Jim had seen so many apartments by now that they were beginning to blur together, but she had promised herself that she would use the whole time she had left in the grace period from the end of her renting the house—two months until she had agreed to not renew the lease—to find a place that was actually good for her and not just “the best she could do.” That meant weekend after weekend—and eventually after-work time as well—scouting new places, but she was determined that she would not be settling. Not on this, and not on anything else.

Jim surprised her one day at her desk by slapping down a piece of paper on her desk instead of just tapping his fingers like he usually did.

“I’ve got it, Beesly,” he announced grandiosely (she could tell it was meant to sound grandiose because it was very similar to his Dwight voice he did when they were planning a prank). “Consider your problems solved.”

“Oh, you have a perpetual motion machine that will make you infinity dollars and you’re ready to give me the rights so I can quit my dead-end job at a paper company?” she asked, sliding the paper around to face her.

“Better.” He slid around the side of her desk so that they weren’t fully facing each other, but both looking in something of the same direction. It was what she thought of as their co-conspirator pose, the one Roy had caught them in when they’d planned Dwight’s downfall around their healthcare plan, and she had to admit that now that she was single she could totally see what had annoyed Roy so much. It was intimate, and she enjoyed it. But she made sure she paid attention to what it was that Jim thought could be better than infinite money, forcing herself not to react too much to his new proximity. “I found a townhouse. With a balcony.”

She looked down at the paper and gasped. “I thought they didn’t have these in Scranton!” She remembered saying something literally like that in Jim’s hearing before, in fact. “However did you find it?”

“Well, technically it’s in Taylor.” He grinned, a little lopsided. “I know that’s not the direction you were looking in the metro area, but I figured—hey, why not see what they’ve got? There’s some weird new construction out there in the boonies, maybe they’ve branched out into interesting stuff.” He gestured at the image on the Zillow page he’d printed out. “And there you have it. It’s right at the top of the price range you said you were looking at, but if you don’t have any pets it should still be inside of it.”

She glanced down the page at the price—he wasn’t joking, it wasn’t cheap but it was juuuust within the maximum she’d let herself think she might be able to pay—and then her eyes were drawn as if magnetically first up to the picture of the back balcony-stroke-terrace and then up to meet Jim’s. He flushed slightly, she thought, though that might have just been the lighting.

Then she reached out, without looking (as if she needed to) and picked up the phone.

“What are you doing?” he asked, his brows furrowing slightly in a way she found very intriguing, as she wondered if she could smooth them out with her thumb.

“Calling for a showing, what do you think?” She grinned back at him. “I’m not letting this place slip through my fingers after you went to all that hard work to find it for me.”

“Nothing a good squire wouldn’t do for their knight,” he said, but she didn’t like the way his tone seemed to downplay it.

“No, I don’t think so. I think this is above and beyond.” She frowned slightly and was a little gratified at how worried that made him suddenly look. “I think I need to make it up to you.”

“No, well, I mean,” she was not going to let him finish that sentence.

“No, I insist. How about we have dinner together when we go to see it? My treat?” She didn’t want to assume she would get the apartment, or she’d have invited him over for the first night there—or was that too forward? Well, she thought, too forward for who? Not for her, certainly. Not for a Pam Beesly who might actually get to live in a house with a terrace.

“Are you sure?” He seemed unusually hesitant for Jim, and she was worried that maybe she had managed to be too forward, or there was something else that was bothering him.

“I’m sure. Come on, Jim, I mean, it is all the way out in the boonies, like you said, so I couldn’t possibly insist that you accompany me without providing at least some sustenance along the way.”

“Well, when you put it that way…sure.”

She smiled in relief. “Great. Then it’s a date.”

“Great.” Then his head whipped around. “A date?”

“A date.” She bit off the ‘unless you don’t want it to be’ that almost slipped out.

“Great.” His grin when he said that was worth sticking her neck out, a dozen times over.

In fact, it was so great that (after she did in fact call to make her appointment to view the apartment), she spent the rest of the workday drawing a portrait of a grinning Jim on company stationary, and slipped it into her purse on her way out the door.

So while it was generally a good thing, Pam thought, to be the daughter of Bill and Helene Beesly, it was, nevertheless, the cross that she (and to a lesser extent due to being the baby of the family, Penny) had to bear that as their daughter she had to deal with a rather unfortunate degree of intuitive insight into her relationships. She had once managed to fob her mother’s “which one is Jim” off when she’d visited the office, and she’d gotten adept over the years at ignoring or putting off the little nudges about what Roy had decided to do with their money, or whether she had really wanted to go on that weekend in Atlantic City instead of the Poconos or (god forbid) somewhere like New York or Philly with a decent art museum and some theater.

She’d even thought of it as a positive in the last few weeks since she’d broken up with Roy, since her parents’ ability to tell how she was feeling meant that they hadn’t pestered her, as she’d worried they would from generations of rom-coms, about whether she was OK. They’d known she wasn’t but also known she was, if that made sense (and did it matter if it made sense to anyone else when it made sense to her?), and she’d liked that their skepticism at times towards Roy in the past had translated into not being too broken up about their, well, breaking up.

That had been the benefit, but now she was paying the price, because the people who reared her were not easy people to deceive, and her mom had snuffled out the fact that she and Jim were dating from (according to her) the “jaunty way you walked through the door just now” when she decided to visit the family homestead one Saturday afternoon. And while they were nothing but supportive, there was a lurking edge of “I told you so” in her mom’s eye that she couldn’t quite avoid without actively dodging her gaze, and her dad reminded her vaguely of a puffed-up chicken trying to peck at someone.

Not that she had chickens, but her parents’ next-door neighbors did, and she’d seen the behavior. A fact she kept secret from Dwight at all times, lest he begin to dump farm-related knowledge on her.

It wasn’t that she thought her dad was actually going to fight Jim for her honor or anything. But he clearly had questions he wanted to ask him and since Jim was not in evidence, he was a little stymied and it showed.

He was not in evidence not because he did not want to come (Pam was pretty certain after two very excellent dates that he would have come to her parents’ house if she’d so much as suggested it or mentioned she was coming) but because Pam had very deliberately not brought him. Not because she wasn’t excited to be dating him! She was very clear with herself and with everyone else, Jim very much included, that she was over the moon about it. She hadn’t brought him precisely because she wanted to have some control over the situation when he did meet her parents, and it was definitely too soon for him to do that, even though she had no doubt he would.

She just…wanted to keep Jim to herself a little bit, at least as much as one could keep someone you worked with in an office with a dozen people in it “to yourself.”

She liked Jim a lot. She liked dating Jim a lot. In fact, if she hadn’t been absolutely certain that this was the right idea, because Jim was her best friend and also very, very hot too boot (and in ways that she had not really let herself think about when he was just her best friend, but which had not actually escaped her for all those years), she would have said that she liked Jim too much, too fast.

But because she did know Jim was her best friend, and he was as amazing and hot and just plain perfectly matched with her as he was, she would just say she liked Jim a lot.

Maybe even loved him, although perhaps you shouldn’t actually say that to someone after only two dates.

Or at least she hadn’t.

Maybe she would.

But certainly not right now, because Jim was not at the Beesly residence, precisely because she did like him and she didn’t want him to be exposed to the first flush of the Beesly intuition. Once they’d calmed down, she was certain they’d love Jim just as much as she did (oops, there it was). But for now, she was content to sit and take the brunt of the inquisition on his and her own behalf, and let the people who’d conceived, birthed, reared, and raised her ask all the questions they liked.

Not that she answered them all. But most of them, anyway.

And when she drove back to Scranton that night, there was a highly recognizable vehicle outside her new apartment, out of which folded a very tall and handsome man who kissed her senseless as soon as they got inside.

Yes, she liked Jim Halpert very much indeed.

Pam did not mind a Western. The Appaloosa hadn’t been bad, and it had helped her make up her mind about some things (the power of art, she thought only half-ironically to herself). She’d watched more than her share of John Wayne movies with her dad (though she’d been young enough that she didn’t really remember any single plot). And she enjoyed a good Western-themed romance novel, though she did regret the one time she’d been foolish enough to try to read one on the bus for one of Michael’s day-long work field trips to nothing and Angela had somehow sussed out that the book without a dust jacket that Pam was reading was “filthy, filthy smut,” to quote, and spent the whole ride there and back alternately ignoring her and trying to save her immortal soul.

But she had to draw the line somewhere, and that somewhere was Dwight Schrute deciding that as (volunteer) (unpaid) (part-time) (semi-self-appointed) deputy sheriff of Lackawanna County, self-made ID card and all, he ought to wear cowboy boots and a some-ridiculous-number-of-gallons hat to work. Not to mention the lariat on his belt.

Apparently Dwight had graduated from some sheriff’s (volunteer) deputy program over the weekend and decided that his newfound (in his own head) higher status meant that he needed to dress the part. Worse, he’d somehow managed to pull off a sale to a new local collectible shop while wearing the get-up (Dunder Mifflin would now be the exclusive paper vendor for their certificates of authenticity, using a very high-grade paper that honestly Dwight deserved a little bit of pride for managing to move at that price point) and now he was strutting around the office like a little peacock who had seen a peahen.

The only minor saving grace of this was that Jim had a great excuse not to be in his seat (because Dwight kept practicing his terrible lasso-work in their joint space) and to therefore be standing up by reception with her watching their coworker make an ever-living fool of himself.

Michael had given Dwight the OK, too, which made things a hundred times worse. Apparently Michael had gotten the idea that if Dwight was a sheriff’s deputy (insert multiple caveats here) and also assistant to the district manager (aka assistant to Michael), the transitive property meant Michael was the sheriff. And Dwight, ever the brown-noser, had, instead of rejecting Michael as she’d expected him to do because Michael was not the sheriff of Lackawanna County, had embraced this wholeheartedly and even…

And even…

And even bought Michael a pair of toy six-shooters, which he was currently popping off cap by cap in his office and making it impossible for her to even hear Jim a foot away.

God, sometimes she hated working here.

Jim shuffled around the desk as Dwight started in on another impromptu lecture on “the Wild West of Office Supplies,” this time apparently featuring the customers as mustangs who had to be wrangled up (whatever he meant by that), and knelt next to her so his mouth was by her ear. OK, there were some things about Michael making a confounded racket that were passable. But only just barely.

“I think I’ve got it, Beesly,” Jim whispered, and a shiver ran down her spine at how close he was.

“Got what? Earplugs?” she whispered back, gratified when he laughed softly. Or as softly as you could when the popgun was still going. How many caps had Dwight gotten for Michael?

“That too.” He slid a pair into her vision across the desk. “Free at the library, if you can believe it.”

“Good on the city of Scranton libraries, then.” She grinned, and she wasn’t sure if he did in response or he was already grinning when she turned to him. “What else ya got?”

“I think I figured out what certification Dwight passed this weekend.” He slid a printout that she hadn’t heard him make (though to be fair, who could hear the printer right now?) next to the earplugs.

It read:

LACKAWANNA JUNIOR DEPUTY

BECOME THE FUTURE OF THE COUNTY

Next to it was a sheriff’s star, of the kind that a 12-year-old kid with minimal artistic talent might draw. Or perhaps a rushed admin assistant in the sheriff’s office who hadn’t realize graphic design was part of his job.

The small print at the bottom read “For Lackawanna residents 9 and up. Have your parent send in your answers today!”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No way.”

“Uh-huh. It’s the only ‘certification’ you can do online, and they didn’t have any classes or anything over the weekend.” Jim made air quotes around the word “certification” that in this case seemed entirely justified, and leaned in even further, which Pam was exactly the opposite of bothered by. “Besides, doesn’t that star on his hat look familiar?”

Pam looked more closely at the star on Dwight’s hat (as opposed to the star on his chest, which she’d seen from previous times he’d tried to be a big time guy about his deputy volunteer not-at-all-recognized status) and yes, now that you mentioned it, it looked exactly like the Deputy Star Sticker advertised on the same page Jim had printed out (comes in a three-pack!).

“Oh my God.”

“Exactly.”

They grinned at each other and Pam felt an uncontrollable urge to kiss Jim. Well, semi-uncontrollable. She was still very aware that they were doing their best not to make this too much of a thing in the office itself, especially since Roy still worked downstairs, but she did stand up and make her way across to the break room, past Dwight’s lariat show and through the door, with Jim trailing after her. Fortunately the break room shades were already drawn because Michael had declared “light” to be “the natural enemy of good digestion” earlier last week and made them keep them closed and no one had opened them. So as soon as they were both in the break room she edged the door closed and kissed her boyfriend.

Maybe Dwight doing rope tricks wasn’t the most romantic background music for it, but she was happy to make do.

“Now, how do we make him regret the fact that we know?”

Pam chewed on her lip while she tried to think of some way to use the fact that Dwight’s new badge was intended for children against him. She and Jim hadn’t been able to hash anything out in the break room, not least because Dwight himself had barged in and corralled it for “official sheriff’s business” which seemed to mostly consist of more rope tricks (he’d lassoed his computer and almost smashed it into Jim’s, so he’d apparently taken this as a sign to relocate, not to stop). They’d promised to share with the other if they came up with something, but so far she was drawing a blank.

Her email dinged and she sighed. Time to go back to actually doing work, she supposed, not that Dwight or Michael were doing any. Still, someone had to.

Or perhaps not. Because the email in her inbox was not from a client or corporate, but from jhalpert@dunder-mifflin.com

Re: Proposed Action in the Matter of DS

There was an attached document, titled “Formal Proposal,” which she would look at later, plus the message itself.

Abstract and Executive Summary:

Whereas Mr. Dwight Schrute has been making a nuisance of himself around the office with his newly achieved certification as a Lackawanna Junior Deputy, and

Whereas Mr. Schrute is on the record, repeatedly, that respect for seniority is the defining feature of a Proper Man, and

Whereas Larissa informs me that my cousin Sam completed this same certification last year as part of his middle school’s Coffee with a Cop program, with a dated certificate, and

Whereas Michael absolutely loves to host random bring a kid to work days,

Be it resolved that

We convince Michael to throw a kids’ party, I bring Sam, and we get him to boss Dwight around as his “senior junior deputy”

It wasn’t really an abstract, more like a preamble to a bill or a law or something, but well, Pam had never been that much of a stickler for words anyway, and anyway it was cute.

Also, it would definitely work. She glanced across at Jim’s desk and gave him a quick thumbs up, which he returned, and then started in on her part of the prank.

“Michael?” She hadn’t heard a pop from the popgun in a few minutes, so it was quite possible that he’d either run out of shots or actually decided to do some work. Probably the former.

“Yes, Pam, Pam, Banana Fanna Fo Pamma?” He stuck his head out of his office, another good sign that the toy gun was no longer fully holding his attention.

“I have a post-it note here that says I was supposed to ask you about…some kind of youth outreach program?” She quickly scribbled the post-it so that she wasn’t verifiably lying. “I’m not sure what it’s about? Maybe something from corporate, or…?”

“Oh. That.” Michael’s inability to admit that he had no idea what someone was talking about worked to her advantage, since there was literally no way he had any clue about this non-existent program that she’d literally just invented out of whole cloth. “Does it….say anything about when we’re supposed to do it?” He moved his head as if he could peer at the post-it on her desk from his office door, which she was pretty sure was impossible unless he was Gumby or Stretch Armstrong or something like that, with a reversible extendible neck. Maybe Inspector Gadget?

Focus, Pam, she thought to herself.

“Oh, um, maybe end of the month?” She glanced at the note she was literally writing and nodded. “Yeah, it says next month but I’m not sure if that’s a before date or an on-it date.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Michael nodded, suddenly serious as he got. “Well, you know what that means?” His face broke into a giant grin; sometimes she got whiplash from his moods. “Time to invite the young folks ‘round!” He yelled out to the whole office. “Bring your kids to work day! Next week! Be there or be square!” He thought for a moment. “Have your kids be there or be square, I mean. You need to be here for work anyway.” He chuckled to himself.

“Michael.” Angela’s voice was flat, in that way that Pam knew from far too much experience meant she was contemplating homicide.

“Yes, Angela, animals count too. Bring Sprinkles!” Michael’s grin didn’t fade. “After all, a cat may look at a king, you know? So he can definitely look at the world’ best boss!”

“Michael, we already have a party scheduled next week. The quarterly birthday-and-anniversary fest.” Angela looked marginally less homicidal, so there was a chance Sprinkles would indeed make an appearance at the party. That was nice. Pam didn’t actually want cats, but the general opportunity to be in one’s vicinity for a limited time was not unpleasant.

“Well, Angela, this directive comes from corporate.” Pam managed not to flinch as Michael ran with her lie. “So they’ll just have to let me extend the party budget for it. Double cake for everyone!” Michael clapped his hands. “Two parties for the price of one!”

“Literally not for the price of one,” Angela grumbled, but subsided. Pam breathed out a silent sigh of relief and met Jim’s wink across the room with a smile.

They were on. They’d just need to make sure that Sam could come—but somehow she believed that Jim would manage it, even if you weren’t supposed to be able to skip middle school on a whim to go to your cousin’s paper-based workplace.

She got back on her computer and started typing a reply email. They were going to need some ideas for exactly what Sam should do once he started pulling rank on Dwight.