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.

It turned out that the simplest ideas were often the best, Pam thought, as she watched Sam put Dwight through his paces in the break room.

“When I say jump, you say how high!” Sam’s voice was nothing like R. Lee Ermey’s in Full Metal Jacket, since he was after all still technically prepubescent, but otherwise she thought he was doing an admirable job of imitating that kind of self-authorizing swagger and authority. He’d stalked into the office in front of Jim with a scowl on his face and a star pinned on his shirt, and made a beeline for Dwight’s desk. He hadn’t let Dwight get a word in edgewise, just announced that “as senior deputy present for the Lackawanna County Sheriff’s office,” he was conducting a surprise inspection.

She’d expected Dwight to push back, but apparently there was a certain button in Dwight’s psychological makeup that you could push and he’d just…follow instructions. He’d let Sam poke about his desk, commenting on everything he’d found in a rapid-fire patter that reminded Pam inevitably of his older cousin in full flow. Then he’d marched Dwight into the break room and started making him do what Pam thought was probably a version of the Presidential Medal of Fitness exercises she’d had to do in middle school, at least as far as one could without actual gym equipment. Currently that meant jumping jacks.

“Jump.”

Dwight jumped.

“I didn’t hear you say how high! Jump!”

“How high?”

“Very high!”

Dwight jumped again.

Jim sidled up to her desk, from which she had a perfect view of the action, and she pushed the jellybean jar in his direction.

“No popcorn?” He grinned and popped a jellybean into his mouth.

“Well, I was considering getting some Bertie Botts’ Every Flavour Beans next time,” she teased. “I’ve heard that has popcorn as an option.”

“And vomit, if I remember correctly.” Jim looked at the next bean he’d instinctively grabbed with a skeptical eye.

“Maybe I should just stick with jellybeans.” She smirked as he looked up to meet her eyes and popped the jellybean into his mouth.

“Maybe you should.” He grinned. “Though now that you mention it, I happen to have a box of those at my place. If you wanted to come over and try them.”

“I might just do that.” She grinned back and pushed the jar even closer to him. “But for the moment, these are safe.”

They turned back to watching Dwight get redder and redder as he jumped and jumped.

“Do you think it’s time to let him off the hook?” she mused.

“Hmm…I think he’s paid off the lasso work, but what about Michael’s popguns?”

“You’re right.” She clicked over to another game of Solitaire instead of releasing Dwight from red-faced misery. “Maybe after lunch.”

It wasn’t October. Pam did have to check the calendar several times to make sure, because Michael had decided, in all his (extremely finite) wisdom that this week was going to feature a costume contest. She wasn’t sure exactly what the link was that he’d decided existed between this random week and Halloween, because Todd Packer had come into the office while he was explaining it to them and that meant two things: first, she suddenly needed to be anywhere but in his line of fire (the more she experienced his particular brand of humor, the less she found it funny or even tolerable) and second, as evidence of the first but also contributing independently to not finding out what Michael might have been thinking, Michael and Todd started a “Hall O’ Peen” chant that prevented further communication.

Fortunately after that they took whatever their raucous, ridiculous, risqué humor might have extended into back into Michael’s office, and she could focus on figuring out what she was going to do for this silly think Michael had decided they had to do. Because of course he hadn’t dropped the idea, just the explanation, and so they were still stuck with a costume contest. Yes, not just a costume event, but a contest; apparently the winner or winners (Michael, being Michael, wasn’t willing to commit to a single winner being chosen) would get some kind of reward that probably would have been identified if he’d ever finished a thought in his life, and the losers would have to come in on Saturday (he’d been very clear about that one).

It honestly reminded her of the dumb basketball game he’d had them play, the one where Roy had gotten overly invested in everything and elbowed Jim in the mouth.

At least this time she didn’t have to worry about that kind of machismo, and that meant she was actually perhaps ready to admit that while Roy didn’t deal with things well and shouldn’t have committed physical violence against a friend-slash-coworker, he hadn’t been entirely wrong that she was into Jim. Not that she would have acted on it in a million years without the kind of giant shove that breaking up with Roy on her own had been, but hey, it had been there, simmering under the surface.

Of course, she hadn’t ever been the kind of woman who would actually be swayed by how someone did in a sporting event (much less an office pickup basketball game), so he was still being stupid as well as violent. It was ironic, given how much of Roy’s personality had been invested in his sporting success, but that was never what had drawn her to him. She’d thought they had wanted similar things out of life, even if in different ways—he was no artist, but she’d thought their vision of their lives going forward (including her doing art, and him doing the hobbies she didn’t share, like poker with the guys) had been the same. She’d been wrong, it turned out, or maybe they’d just changed, but either way, his football prowess had never been the draw. And neither was Jim’s apparently greater skill with basketball, no matter what Roy had thought back then.

No, what drew her to the man who was even then snacking on the worst flavor of jellybean available in her jar was nothing so insignificant as his jump shot. Nor was it purely physical even beyond the sporting arena: she liked his hands, yes, and his face, and his lanky, lean frame…where was she going again? Oh, right, she liked those things, and she liked kissing him, and she had begun to learn that she really, really enjoyed being in bed with him when one of them stayed over at the other’s place, and right, Pam, focus. She liked…all of that. She liked Jim physically. But that was all a bonus. What she really liked about him was his sense of humor, and the way he knew just what to say to pull her out of a funk, like the Todd Packer-related one that was still lingering in the corners of her mind.

“Twilight.”

“Excuse me?” Especially at a time when she was thinking about the way Jim always said the right thing, that was not what she had expected to come out of his mouth.

“Twilight. You, me, Edward, Bella.” He grinned and grabbed a red jellybean and squeezed it. “This is the jellybean of a killer, Bella.” He popped the jellybean into his mouth. “I bet we could win the contest and get Angela to try to stake me, which could get me at least a day off on the company dime. What do you think?”

“Why Twilight?” She knitted her fingers together and leaned towards him across the desk. “I thought you hated Twilight. Wait, no, I didn’t even know you’d read it.”

“Who says I did?” He leaned towards her, creating the little zone in which it felt like there was no one else in the office, a feeling she realized abruptly she’d treasured since well before they started dating. “I’ve had to hear Kelly recap each book and movie in more detail than I think I’d have gotten out of them if I had. Besides, I had a younger sister to tease.”

“So you did read them.” It wasn’t a question. She knew how Jim deflected, and this was classic Jim.

“Fine, I read them. Now, will you be the warmblooded better half?”

“Sure.” Pam winked. “On one condition.”

“What condition, Beesly? Do you need to see me play baseball really badly in order to prove I can be a proper Meyers-style vampire? Sparkle for you in the sunlight? What?”

“Just tell me one thing: were you Team Jacob or Team Edward?”

One of Pam’s favorite things about dating Jim was discovering new things about him.

Or, in this case, new things about his little sister, Larissa—but things that reflected on Jim, so it counted, at least in her head.

Specifically, she was learning that while Jim might not know how to cook (well, he claimed to make a mean grilled cheese, and she could verify that that was true, but he wouldn’t extend the claim much further, and she couldn’t deny that even in her most infatuated state she wouldn’t have disagreed), that was at least partly because he didn’t need to.

Because Larissa very much did.

This was currently a problem for Pam, however, since she had been dragged into helping Larissa in Jim’s kitchen—a space she had evidently commandeered often enough that Jim’s roommate, Mark, had simply labeled some ingredients in the cupboard “Better Halpert, Do Not Trash” so that he wouldn’t risk her wrath. Being a student meant that Larissa didn’t have a great kitchen to herself, and so while Jim’s wasn’t amazing, it was a major step up, and Larissa apparently demanded a step up frequently.

Today, specifically, she had been horrified to learn, from Jim, that Pam had never had sticky toffee pudding. Pam wasn’t sure why exactly that was a capital crime; maybe something that came from the same BBC obsession that had led to her Lord of the Rings obsession, and Jim’s as well. But for whatever reason it might be, evidently it was a grave sin in Larissa Halpert’s world, and she (and Jim by connection) had been dragged into a baking day.

Or more specifically, Jim had been dragged into buying a bunch of ingredients and Pam had been dragooned into working in the kitchen (or at least observing and commenting while the force of nature that was Larissa Halpert made things happen around her and made seemingly random demands.

Right now, that meant watching Jim and Larissa have a mock battle (or at least Pam hoped it was mock) about the difference between heavy cream and double cream.

“This is insufficient, James.” Larissa gestured with a container of cream that Pam really, really hoped was fully screwed closed. “Insufficient.”

“It’s the creamiest cream I could find!” Jim rolled his eyes at Pam, who made sure that Larissa couldn’t see her behind her back before rolling her eyes back. An annoyed Halpert was dangerous to mock, she had found, including Jim but also Larissa as well. “It’s heavy! If you take cream and make it heavier, isn’t that what double cream is?”

“Heavy cream is not double cream!” Larissa put the cream down, to Pam’s relief, and jabbed a finger at it. “36% milkfat, Jim! 36! Double cream is 48%. That’s thirty-three percent more cream!”

“How was I supposed to know…”

“You were supposed to read the list I gave you!” Larissa threw up her hands. “If I asked you for a cremello, you wouldn’t give me a palomino! Totally different horses! DOUBLE CREAM, JIMOTHY!”

Pam snorted. It was involuntary, and she regretted it both because she didn’t actually like sounding that unattractive around Jim and because it was likely to bring the ire of an annoyed Halpert down on her, but she couldn’t help it. There was something about the way that Larissa had just switched from sounding like Dwight (although her topics of interest were British baking and horses, not beets, bears, or Battlestar Galactica) to sounding like Michael in a heartbeat. Or maybe the hilariously offended face Jim pulled when Larissa called him Jimothy. Or just the sheer absurdity of the situation all over. Whatever it was, it pulled a snort out of her, and both Halperts whipped around to look at her with comically identical expressions on her face.

They stared at her for a moment, and then Jim was the first to break, Larissa only a semidemiquaver behind.

Then the entire kitchen was full of guffaws and chortles, to the point where even Mark (who usually tried to ignore these sorts of things until he was eating the results, Pam had discovered) poked his head in to discover what was going on.

“DOUBLE CREAM, JIMOTHY!” Larissa croaked out amidst the laughter and Mark just shook his head and ducked back to whatever he was doing.

From that point on, Larissa just put the heavy cream in the toffee sauce, and they finished the sticky toffee pudding with only the occasional chuckle breaking the silence.

Pam would never understand why Larissa had been so annoyed by the lack of double cream—honestly, if it was any better than the heavy cream sauce had been, she might have died right then and there—but that didn’t mean that “double cream Jimothy” didn’t become an in-joke between her, Jim, and Larissa for the rest of their lives.

Michael was having a Michael day, as Pam thought of it, which meant that he had taken a particular memo issued by corporate to heart in a deeply strange and fundamentally insane way, and had run with it in a manner that was personally inconvenient to her and collectively detrimental to the office as a whole.

In this particular case on this particular day, it was a directive ordering that all Dunder-Mifflin locations must emphasize “agile,” “peer-to-peer” communication strategies in order to “maximize interemployee workflow.” Pam was pretty sure, based on the administrative assistant grapevine in the company, that this was a response to two employees in the Utica branch refusing to talk to each other over a dispute over bonus calculation and formally routing all communication through their administrative assistant, who was forced to print out memo after memo to issue to the other party.

It was nice to realize that theirs was not the only screwed up branch in the company, and that there was a reason Michael wasn’t fired yet because he wasn’t necessarily the worst manager in it either.

Or maybe that wasn’t nice. But in any case, it was true.

So she was pretty sure that was the cause of this particular command from Corporate, just an anodyne instruction to actually talk to each other and use the phones for God’s sake. But Michael had decided it had to be directed towards their branch in particular, and since no one in their branch had done anything completely out of the ordinary in terms of communications discipline recently (a rare statement but for once true) he had decided in his definitively finite wisdom that this meant that they needed to overhaul their communications protocol.

This translated, in Michaelese, into ordering all communications in the office to route through AOL Instant Messenger and chatrooms rather than through the traditional channels.

This had meant a chaotic morning in which she had been required to set up AIM and AOL chatroom access for certain of their coworkers (she liked Phyllis, she really did, but troubleshooting technology for her was not her favorite activity, and that went quadruple for Kevin). It had also meant that they had probably wrecked the productivity of the entire morning if not the entire day because once they did get set up with AOL and AIM, unsurprisingly, it wasn’t actually conducive to productive work to have everyone on an instant communication service with each other.

The one major benefit was that she and Jim could continue their normal behavior of expressing themselves in emoticons throughout the day without being accused of slacking off. She had normally had an AIM window up in her day-to-day workflow to talk to Jim anyway, but now she didn’t have to minimize it when Michael or Dwight walked into the part of the office where they could potentially see her screen. Instead, she just brazenly kept talking to her boyfriend throughout the workday, which had the unfortunate side effect of reducing the amount of time he spent bent over her desk talking to her but the major benefit of connecting her with Jim all day.

The major disadvantage was that Dwight Schrute was exposed to online chat speak, thanks to one Kelly Kapoor, who was incapable evidently of communicating online without them.

So that was fun.

Dwight had spent much of the day critiquing the language choices and accuracy of common online abbreviations, beginning with lol (“I distinctly did not hear you laugh out loud. I have a decibel meter on my laptop and it has detected no spikes in the volume within this space.”) and moving on towards ttyl (“False. Due to this directive you have no need to talk to me. You will instead write to me later. It should be wtyl.”) and lmao (“Not only is that inappropriate language, but I can confirm that in fact your ass remains distinctly on.” “DWIGHT! Are you looking at my ass!”). That last one had destroyed anyone’s ability to get any work done for, by Pam’s count, two hours straight.

But now, she had come up with an idea to strategically leverage this tendency for her own amusement, and Jim had (unsurprisingly) gotten on board instantly.

It started with her telling a light joke, in the office-wide chatroom. Nothing too funny, but enough to prompt a response.

She got a couple lols (thanks Kelly and Oscar) and even a lmao (aww, Toby) but the key was Jim’s response.

rofl

“Jim! What does that mean!” Dwight was ever-vigilant, as they had expected him to be.

Jim, however, was far too busy to respond—which was fine, because (as they had again predicted), Kelly could not resist. “Rolling on the floor laughing, Dwight. Jeez.”

“But Jim isn’t…” and this is where Dwight had to stop, because otherwise he would have told a lie.

Because the reason Jim hadn’t answered for himself was that he had, in fact, dropped to the floor and begun to roll about laughing. Giggling, actually, if Pam was honest, and since it was cute and funny she decided to be honest.

“Hm.” Dwight visibly straightened in his chair. “Well, I’m glad to see that someone in this office takes their words seriously.”

Now Pam was the one rofling, and yes, she did also literally drop to the floor for it.

One of the dangers of working with Dwight and Michael was that sometimes they got ideas into their heads that no one else wanted them to have, and it became practically impossible to divest them of those ideas. You just had to wait them out, and that sometimes meant going along with things that you didn’t actually want to do—or just trying to ignore them. Sometimes this was something minor, like the whole week that Michael insisted on being addressed as Sir Michael of Dunderton, even in front of clients, which Pam had gone along with begrudgingly (because yelling “Sir Michael” across the office was not the most embarrassing thing she had to do in a day) and Jim had neatly avoided by simply not referring to Michael at all. She wasn’t sure entirely how he’d pulled that off, but Michael hadn’t yelled at him and that was proof enough in her book that he’d succeeded.

Other times it was more annoying, because it went beyond verbal tics or even frustrating things like the time Dwight insisted that they replace the hinges on the bathroom doors because they were “not squeaky enough for him to establish whether someone had been on a bathroom break for too long without visual inspection.” In this particular case, it was becoming all of their problem, because it required them to all journey out of the office for a teambuilding function that Michael had decided to hold on Dwight’s farm.

It was important to note, Pam reflected as they rode in an awkward 13-passenger van (awkward because the van was clearly only 13 passenger if no one took up more space than an stick-thin adolescent, and also because the ride was far too long—how long was Dwight’s commute anyway?) that this was in fact Michael’s idea even though it was at Dwight’s beet farm. Dwight had of course agreed to it and seized on it with his normal mania surrounding anything that he saw as Michael ceding power or authority to him, and had announced a whole scheme for “paper-based engagement” at the farm, which was the new corporate buzzword Michael had started sprouting off after an all-managers call the week before. But it was Michael’s idea, and because of that it was being done on Michael’s timeframe.

Which meant that no one had known when it was going to be (very loudly including Dwight) until the day before, and now they were all crammed together wishing that no one had to breathe or possessed functioning muscles to fidget.

The small silver lining on the van-shaped cloud was that she was at least squashed only between Jim and the side of the van, since she’d been the first one in to the last row and Jim had piled in after her. She’d been afraid he might have justifiably taken shotgun for the leg room, since his limbs were basically Picassoed into the row, but Michael had called “dibs” before anyone else could, and Phyllis was the only one with any experience driving such a large vehicle outside of the stockroom (and the stockroom was not invited, which was a relief given that Roy was still working there. She wasn’t on bad terms with him or anything, they just didn’t talk and she found herself increasingly OK with that). No one knew why she had that experience, but she did, and so she was driving and enduring the force of nature that was Michael in the front seat.

If Pam had not been in such uncomfortable quarters it might have occurred to her to wonder who was navigating, with Michael doing Michael things and Phyllis concentrating (she assumed) on not driving the van off the road in response, but she was distracted both by physical discomfort and by the fact that this was one of the few times she could freely touch Jim Halpert in a work setting without anyone getting suspicious.

Not that they were hiding their relationship, but there were still things one didn’t do with Angela staring at you or when Michael might pop out at any minute.

She wasn’t exactly feeling Jim up, not in these conditions, but it was nice to actually feel the solid contact of Jim next to her, even if she was worried about his physical wellbeing once the van stopped.

She was not the only one who wasn’t thinking of navigation, however. Dwight hadn’t come in that morning—he was going to meet them at the farm, naturally—but he claimed that his farm was unmissable. “You just drive right up to it.”

Except apparently you didn’t, if you didn’t know where it was.

Instead, they drove right up to a farm that seemed like it would be the right farm for all they knew until the sign on the shed said “Nahant Horse Farm.”

Maybe that alone would not have clued them in—she had no sense of what, if anything, Michael perceived from the outside world when it contradicted his expectations—but certainly the horse did.

The van was, at that point, crawling along a dirt road at perhaps five or ten miles an hour, and the horse seemed to take that as an invitation to investigate. Or perhaps to run them off—it did not seem to like the van’s presence, and the first Pam noticed it was when it suddenly appeared and snorted outside the window.

She was quite glad for Jim’s physical presence next to her, even if she would never admit she shrank away from the horse. There was nowhere to shrink to, anyway, in such tight quarters. Still, she was alarmed, no sense in denying that.

So were they all, in fact. Michael perhaps most so, since he repeatedly insisted to them all at top volume that Dwight had promised there were “NO DANGEROUS LIVESTOCK” at the farm.

Pam wasn’t ever quite able to find out from the backseat how they got put on the right track—she assumed Phyllis must have figured out where she could turn around, the horse pacing them and staring at them the whole time—but it turned out that the horse farm was one country road down from Dwight’s beets, and it was not a long time by the clock until they were arriving at the proper pace, horse far behind. The time felt longer, though, especially until the horse let them go, evidently satisfied that they were not planning to re-enter its domain.

Dwight met them at the farmyard doors and scoffed at their fears. When Kelly said something about the horse “trotting” along he let out a sniff and insisted that the horses at the Nahant Horse Farm were not trotters—they had an ambling gait instead, which he said meant they were “gaited”—as if that was the most important point.

It was then that Jim leaned over and whispered in Pam’s ear.

“If a gaited horse made us leave its farm, does that make the farm a gaited community?”

It was good that they weren’t squeezed into the van anymore, because Pam wasn’t sure she’d laughed that hard since Jim had rolled in the floor.

It wasn’t that good of a joke, but it had the benefit, as before, of annoying Dwight quite a bit.

Pam didn’t, honestly, spend that much time thinking about Roy anymore. Not that she didn’t care about him—there was a part of her that was forever changed by having been with Roy for so long, and she didn’t want to become the kind of person who couldn’t acknowledge who she’d been in order to become someone new—but she didn’t actively spend a lot of time thinking about him. He was still working downstairs, and so she’d see him from a distance from time to time, but while he didn’t seem particularly glad to see her (nor did she him, she supposed), he didn’t seem too angry at her either. He just seemed to be going on, Roy-style, which she supposed meant going out with the boys just as often but not having anyone to come back home to. Or maybe he did; she wasn’t the one, but she’d managed to move on so maybe he had too. But he wasn’t her problem anymore.

That didn’t stop her from worrying, though, when she did think about it. Roy could be like those racehorses that you had to keep from noticing the other horses with blinders before a race: he would be focused on one thing and then bam something else, and he could be kinda flighty when those changes happened. It was funny; in so many ways he was like a plowhorse or a draught horse, one of those sturdy kind that didn’t startle much. He was certainly capable of doing the same thing over and over and over. But his temperament was not quite that settled; he enacted his routine because it was his routine, rather than because of a great tranquility of spirit.

And apparently no part of that routine in the months since they’d broken up had involved changing her from being his emergency contact, which was strange given that it had taken a herculean effort on her part to convince him to change it to her from his mom when they’d started living together and his parents had been the best part of two hours away.

That was the plowhorse part of Roy. The racehorse part was the way he startled and shied when she turned up at his bedside at the hospital.

She didn’t remember much of their conversation, after. Not that it wasn’t important, but it didn’t hold her attention the way that the visuals of the scene did: Roy, cradling himself in such a way that she couldn’t tell if it was genuine pain in his broken wrist and take pressure off a broken rib or an attempt to keep himself away from her; the room, stark and sterile but with a little window overlooking a patio garden on the house next door to the hospital; the nurse, straightforwardly giving her details about his situation as if she was still Pammy, the girl Roy dated, and not Pam, the girl who’d broken up with him; the little button, so small and almost inconspicuous, that apparently controlled the morphine drip they’d given him for pain.

Not a DUI; she’d been worried about that, when they’d called her. Just an accident, the kind of thing that probably happened a dozen times a month somewhere around Scranton, the slick roads and Roy’s likely inattention to the actual act of driving combining with an unfortunately placed ditch and settling soil next to the roadway.

The insurance implications weren’t her problem. Nothing, it turned out, was actually her problem, because once they found out that she didn’t have legal authority to make medical decisions for him, the hospital didn’t make her stick around. She did, until Mrs. Anderson finally made it, but Roy was enough out of it on the painkillers that they didn’t really talk. He mumbled; she sat and tried to make awkward conversation; she composed a painting of the scene in her mind to stave off the knowledge that the conversation might be better that way.

Eventually her former-intended-mother-in-law arrived, and that conversation was somehow less awkward; Mrs. Anderson knew Roy and knew Pam had broken up with him months before, and she was mostly apologetic that Pam had had to come out at all—which was its own awkwardness, because Pam didn’t know what to do with the idea that she should feel so inconvenienced by taking care of Roy that his own mother would apologize to her.

She ended up at Jim’s that night, not to do anything other than sitting under a blanket on the couch and watching some kind of heist TV show as a distraction, the palpable feeling of Jim by her side helping leech away the weirdness of the day.

She was glad Roy wasn’t a racehorse, or any kind of horse, for real—with those injuries, they’d put a horse down—but it was still odd to realize just how far she’d come from a year ago, when Roy in the hospital would have been every fear she’d ever had come true.

Having visited Roy in the hospital gave Pam a sense of closure, which was good, because if she hadn’t had that closure she honestly couldn’t have told you what her reaction to Michael’s plan the next week would have been. Because Michael had decided that the office was a team and that a team needed to practice, and the best example of team doing practice was high-school football.

She did suspect that this was at least partly due to some misplaced semi-nostalgia of the kind that came from Michael never having actually set foot nor even shadow on the football field in high school but wishing that he had. She also suspected strongly that he’d been told that his next field trip for the team, if he was even allowed a next field trip, was going to have to be both cheap and close to home, so he’d opted for the kind of team-building that basically amounted to cutting a small check to a local high school and having everyone drive themselves there instead of to work one day. He’d even gone with PB&J sandwiches for lunch as a “throwback” which she suspected quite strongly was simply cheapness.

But that wasn’t what would have bothered her, if she hadn’t just seen Roy and reflected on her former relationship and its ending.

What would have bothered her was that it was her alma mater that Michael had picked, and that he’d furthermore gotten the high school to actually let them wear old jerseys for the activity. Except, being Michael, he’d also insisted that she not actually participate and instead take notes on his ‘brilliant management insights’ from the bleachers.

So in other words, she was literally reliving her high school life, sitting on the bleachers while watching a group of men including her boyfriend do football-like activities in a football uniform. Or, she supposed, in this case, a football costume, because it could not have been more obvious that none of the guys on the field actually knew anything about football practice.

Which was funny, because she would have bet that Kevin had actually been some kind of lineman, but apparently not.

Jim had apparently done basketball practice in high school enough to know that you were supposed to have a plan for practice, but Michael was running things and he seemed to be missing that piece of critical information. Instead, he had lined her colleagues up and had them run up and down the field while shouting incoherent mixtures of football lingo (he particularly liked yelling “Omaha!” like a discount Peyton Manning) and business jargon (again mostly cribbed from television), sometimes combined (“TACKLES ARE FOR CLOSERS!”).

Dwight responded to this last one by literally tackling Toby into the turf, which put paid to whatever conceivable idea of an organized event had been even remotely possible. Toby was largely unhurt, much to Michael’s visible disappointment but audibly expressed grudging relief, but Kelly announced that if that was a possibility, she was going to sit with Pam on the bleachers, and the rest of the office filed over in what could have been solidarity but was much more likely to simply be relief that someone had broken with Michael’s plan to do running in unfamiliar pads that stank of human sweat.

Michael whined a bit, but they ended up having a reasonably productive day after that, mostly thanks to the football coach (who was fortunately not the same one that had coached Roy, since that worthy had decided that his greatest achievements were behind him after Roy Anderson graduated and took his one run to the conference semifinal with him). Michael, running out of ideas now that the one idea he’d had had flamed out, had called the coach up to talk about “synergies of sport.”

She wasn’t entirely sure if the coach actually knew what the heck Michael was talking about, but she supposed that any high school football coach worth his whistle could recognize someone with no idea what to do next from the next stadium over. He pulled together some truly interesting anecdotes about how football, like paper sales, involved a lot of preparation before the actual event.

It wasn’t the best presentation she’d heard in her life, but it beat the (costume) uniform pants off of what Michael had been talking about.

And she got to sit on the bleachers next to her boyfriend instead of just watching him on the field, so honestly, it was better than high school too.

One of the things she enjoyed about dating Jim, Pam decided, was that while he was still a bit of a jock, he actually liked it when she understood things about his sports of choice—and was willing to talk to her about them, and not just assume that she magically knew everything from having been around him. Perhaps that was because the relationship was knew, but then that didn’t necessarily promise anything: Roy had assumed she knew how to get home herself after a hockey game on their very first date, after all, and while that wasn’t exactly sports knowledge it did speak to the fact that a new relationship didn’t necessarily mean solicitous behavior.

Not that her relationship with Jim was exactly “new” anymore anyway. It wasn’t “old” by any means, and she still occasionally just remembered it mid-thought some days with a little “oh” of happiness because she hadn’t actively been thinking about it before, but it was beginning to be the kind of thing that was just true, and not new. She no longer had to stop and explain to her aunt who this Jim was, or remind the woman who cut her hair that she was dating someone ‘new’ when chatting during the event. She no longer felt the need to say that she’d only dated one man “well, until now”—she would just say she’d dated two. So, that was another reason that this wasn’t just because the relationship was new—because it wasn’t.

Today, for example, she’d found herself on the couch at Jim’s place after a nice meal he’d cooked (well, they’d cooked—his recipe, but the timing hadn’t been the kind of thing where you could really get away with only one set of hands in the kitchen and besides she liked being around him, not off in the living room while he worked on their food). And he’d asked (asked!) if they could turn on the 76ers game. And she’d agreed, because while she didn’t really care about basketball Jim definitely did, and she liked having a sport to watch sometimes with someone who cared about it, even just as a kind of background noise while her brain processed the day. It was comforting, sweet even, to just zone out with Jim while he watched, and to enjoy his presence.

She asked when something confused her—not the basic rules, she wasn’t the kind of person who liked art and therefore had to hate all kinds of ‘sportsball’ and pretend they never watched a game in their lives, but odd things the commentators said or strange choices players made. Sometimes Jim’s explanation was that he was as confused as her—there was a player on the other team (she didn’t really care who they were) who drove directly into the lane several times in a row and got blocked each time and neither of them knew why he thought that was a good idea—and sometimes he had a good reason she hadn’t known—apparently it was the style now to “drive and kick” out to a waiting three-point shooter, not a mistake that was getting bailed out by the pass.

At one point the announcers called one of the players a “unicorn” and she made Jim explain three times why that was the term they used. It struck her as funny that a sport she’d always thought of as full of machismo—maybe not as much as the football players, but there had been some swagger in the high school corridors from the basketball players as well—had adopted a term she associated most with Saturday morning cartoons.

She used it to extract a promise from Jim that they would watch some My Little Pony next time they were having breakfast together on a Saturday, and settled back in against him to watch more of the game. She wondered if you could consider the tattoos on a basketball player to be a kind of cutie mark, and that was the last thing she remembered as she slipped into dreamland, asleep on Jim’s shoulder on the couch.

Pam had never been a big fan of going out late, staying out late, generally of being outside of the home after the point at which the only things that were open were bars. It wasn’t that she objected to drinking, or to having fun—she’d had plenty of good times in bars, and for that matter plenty of good times on the occasions when she had actually gone out late—but rather that she was simply the kind of person who also liked her creature comforts back home. Nestling under a blanket, or pulling out a sketchbook and taking a stab at drawing something, or even just sitting and reading—these were her favored evening entertainments, if she had to have a default.

Again, this didn’t usually mean that she was unwilling to go out. She’d spent her share and more of time at Poor Richard’s, and she’d cheered the ball falling at New Years with the best of them more than once. As long as there was a reason for it, she’d go out, she’d enjoy herself, she’d be as much of a party animal as she felt comfortable being. That could be quite the party animal too, as a certain company awards party at a Chili’s could attest—one she remembered with a lot less embarrassment now that she was dating Jim. “Second drinks” made for a better story when you got a chance with the guy you were with—or maybe it was better to say, gave him a chance.

In any case, she could more than hold her own. But sometimes even when she’d gone out with the best of intentions to have a lot of fun, the siren song of the couch was too strong.

And such it was tonight. She’d been invited out with Larissa for her birthday—a sweet offer, she thought, given that everyone else who was going out was one of Larissa’s close friends and she was just the brother’s girlfriend—and she’d really tried. Larissa and her friends were lovely! She had expected as much! None of it was about the company, or about the activities (she liked bar trivia, even if she wasn’t the most amazing person at it when the topics shifted out of her comfort areas of art history, random sports facts that Roy or Jim had impressed upon her or she’d picked up at volleyball practice, and Westerns). She wasn’t bored, or particularly unhappy. She wasn’t even that tired, because she’d made sure to get a good night’s sleep the night before and Michael had been out of the office that morning so he hadn’t made her run ragged getting random objects or covering up for his messes.

No, there was nothing particularly concrete about her wish to go home. It was just…there. She was enjoying herself, but she also wanted to be on the couch, cuddled up with Jim, watching the new nature documentary staring David Attenborough that she’d found in the library last weekend.

The trivia had just wound up and the girls at the party (she couldn’t remember any of their names except Larissa, even though they were nice, and she was pretty sure she was “Jim’s girlfriend” to them at most in return) were discussing where they could head next when she felt Larissa’s hand slip onto her shoulder.

“It’s OK, Pam.” Larissa grinned over at her, dwarfed by the giant hat one of her friends had brought that read BEST BIRTHDAY GIRL EVER. “You don’t have to go clubbing with us.”

Pam startled, surprised to be called out that way—though she did have to admit that Larissa was usually pretty direct, so it wasn’t as much of a shock as it could have been. The larger shock was that someone had noticed her internal dilemma, though again Larissa was pretty good at that as well.

Larissa laughed and patted her shoulder again. “I recognized the look. It’s the one Jim gets when he thinks it would be rude to break up the party, but he really wants to go hang out with his cool girlfriend at home.” She winked. “Well, now it’s about the cool girlfriend. It used to be going home to pine about this girl at work, and I used to make him stay so that he wouldn’t do that, but I think that’s gotten better recently for some reason.”

Pam felt her face try to grin back but not quite make it. “I don’t want to quit on your party.”

“You’re not! You made it! You contributed! You got us that stupid mashup question about Manet Ramirez!” Larissa waved her hand like a magic wand. “Here. I hereby give you permission to turn back into a pumpkin.”

“A pumpkin?”

“You know, like Cinderella? That’s what I always called it when Jim had to duck out early, like it was only fairy godmother magic that got him to come out with his little sister in the first place. Go turn back into a pumpkin, or a mouse, or a servingman, or whatever other thing you were magicked out from being in the first place.” Larissa turned the waving wand into a shooing motion. “Go on. I know I’m not the Halpert you want to be hanging out with right now anyway.” Her continued smile and overly leering wink took the sting out of the words.

“Well, if you’re sure…” Pam had to admit, it was pretty attractive. And it was good to know that Jim was the same kind of homebody that she was. Convenient, even.

“I’m sure.” Larissa straightened up, and it seemed like the rest of the party had come to a conclusion on their next destination, because everyone else stood up at the same time. “Besides, you’re the only one here who isn’t single. You’d harsh our vibe, Beesly.”

“Yeah, right.” But Pam wasn’t going to fight her own desires or Larissa’s generous permission any more. “Happy birthday, Larissa.”

“Thanks, Pam. And tell that brother of mine that he owes me a present next time I see him. A birthday text is not sufficient, and he knows better.”

Pam made sure to hold up that part of the bargain when she got back to Jim’s place, in between settling under a blanket with hot cocoa and cuddling with her boyfriend. She liked going out sometimes, but it was still usually better to end the night comfy at home—even if the home wasn’t technically the place she paid rent.

“Pam. Pam. Pam.”

Pam waited with bated breath in the women’s bathroom while she heard Dwight repeat her name with increasing volume and intensity.

“Pam. There is a fax. Pam.”

She knew there was a fax. Jim was out “on a sales call” using the fax machine at the public library that very moment. Of course there was a fax. But it was critical that she not be the one to give it to Dwight, because she wasn’t entirely sure she wouldn’t break—and even if she didn’t, Dwight would believe it more if he saw it for the first time entirely unconnected to her or Jim.

“I’m going to tell Michael you are falling behind on your duties!” Dwight’s voice carried through the mostly empty office. Michael was out buying party supplies (with a very grumpy Angela supervising him and probably continually reminding him that the party planning committee did not include him, thank you very much) and some kind of stomach bug was going through the rest of the back office. Ryan was missing for something related to his business school classes. That basically left her and Dwight in the office, and she’d been in the bathroom for exactly as long as she thought Dwight’s willingness not to know what the fax sitting on the fax machine was would last.

She waited a moment longer but the calls for her ceased, which was her cue to flush, wash her hands, and make her way back out to the main office.

She beelined for the fax machine, feigning surprise when it was empty. “Dwight, I thought you said there was a fax.”

“There was.” He didn’t look up from his desk.

“Well, who was it for? What was it about?”

“That’s not important, Pamela. I have distributed it to its intended recipient.” Dwight was not actually that good at being shifty, but he thought he was, and she could tell he was enjoying doing it now. “You need not concern yourself further.”

“I thought you said you were going to report me to Michael. If you are, it’s important that I know all the details.” She decided it was worthwhile to poke the bear.

“I do not think that will be necessary. We may consider the matter closed.” Dwight sniffed, audibly, and turned to his computer.

Pam decided that was enough pushing, and returned to her desk, starting another game of solitaire. Dwight typed violently for a few minutes and then went on his own bathroom break. Jim bounded into the office a few minutes later, stole two jellybeans from her jar, and sat down. Then they busied themselves with the intricate dance of the prank: completely ignoring Dwight. Now, that was not that difficult, since she found she had quite enough to talk to Jim about (and enough work-slash-solitaire to focus on) that she hardly needed to interact with Dwight at all.

But making it much more difficult was what she knew was the content of the fax. Specifically, that the fax purported to come to Dwight Schrute from the CIA, with a single phone number.

The double jellybean steal Jim had executed upon entering the office indicated that Dwight had already messaged that number, most likely during his bathroom break, and contacted the generic phone that she had bought from Walmart two days ago, and which was currently in Jim’s pocket.

They had arranged a dead drop for the next day, followed by an intricate series of escalations that would hopefully, if she had planned it all correctly, result in Dwight believing sincerely that he was being recruited for a secret CIA project centered on the Dunder Mifflin offices and the connection between their paper suppliers and a massive counterfeiting ring.

And if they played their cards right, he might even think he was being considered for a full-time CIA job—not just as an analyst or desk job, but as an active spook.

She smiled over the desk at the back of Jim’s head. This was her birthday present to him this year, and she was glad to be able to share the execution of the prank with a coconspirator that she got to see as much outside the office as in it—and more.

They hadn’t gone beyond dating towards anything more, but she was comfortably more certain about this relationship than she’d been about her old relationship, when everything had been supposedly set up already. She didn’t really need anything more (yet) with Jim; she was comfortable in the certainty that she was where she ought to be, and that Jim was where he ought to be, and it would all work out.

Though to be fair, maybe it was time to take a bit more initiative herself. She pencilled in a note next to the schedule for the prank that traced it all the way up to convincing Dwight he was going to be helicoptered out to Langley.

That seemed like as good a day as any to ask Jim to move in.