She stays late almost every night now, not wanting to go home to her tiny apartment to eat a dinner made for one. On the nights when she has art class, she tells herself that she would just be wasting gas, going all the way back to her apartment only to turn around and drive back to the middle of Scranton. She brings a bag of clothes to work on those days and changes in the bathroom so that no one in her art class will ever know that she wears pastel cardigans and knee-length wool skirts.

On the days when she doesn’t have art class to keep her away from her quiet, empty apartment, she just waits until everyone else has gone. She tries to make a game of it for herself, watching the clock to see if she can predict what time each person will leave. So far, Kevin has never stayed in the office a second later than 4:57 PM.

She sits. She plays solitaire some days. Other days, she keeps important-looking documents up on her screen and occasionally pretends to type. Some days, she just sits and stares at people’s backs as they walk out the door.

Jim and Karen always leave together. She has gotten used to their shape, framed in the doorway—Jim standing back and holding the door open as Karen slips through. They never seem to touch. Some days, Jim glances back to say good-night with a small smile. She wonders what it would look like if she were walking through that door with him. She wonders if he’d ever find a reason to turn around then.

But this is all ridiculous and she knows it. Sitting isn’t doing her any good. Neither is waiting. And she hasn’t gotten any better at solitaire.

She’s checking her email one night at just after five when she glances up to see Karen’s shape leaving the office alone. Karen has nice angles—she would be easy to draw. Even her hair makes perfect straight lines. Pam has tried drawing herself, but she always has trouble with her own hair; it’s too hard for her, trying to trace out the imperfect curls. She’s not that good of an artist yet. But she think she could probably draw Karen without too much trouble. She’s not sure what that says about either of them.

She watches as the door swings shut and Karen’s shadow disappears into the elevator before turning her eyes to Jim’s desk, where he is sitting, waiting. She wonders if she should say something. But instead she turns her attention back to her computer and the Sudoku game she had been playing the moment before. This distraction has completely destroyed her time. She might as well start over.

Michael leaves a few minutes later, with Dwight following on his heels, asking him questions about a meeting that Pam doesn’t have written on her calendar. She doesn’t care. She is waiting for Toby to stop by and say goodnight at exactly 5:10 PM, the way he has been doing for the past few weeks now. He’ll be the last one to go.

When he has stuttered his goodbye and smiled his shy smile, Toby leaves the office. His shoulders droop as they pass through the door. He seems defeated. Pam doesn’t know whether she should wonder why.

“Hey.”

She turns her head to see Jim leaning on her desk, hands tapping nervously. He’s not smiling; she could tell that before she even looked at him. His voice sounds different when he smiles.

She looks up at him and struggles to find something normal to say.

“You’re here late.” It’s almost worthless, but better than nothing. Now it’s his turn.

“Yeah. I thought—it’s kind of nice here when it’s empty. Quiet.”

“I know.” She wonders if she’s smiling. She thinks maybe she should be, but she can’t tell what her face is doing at the moment. All she knows is that she feels like her eyes are wetter than they should be, like maybe she’s about to cry and she doesn’t even know it. “Karen left without you,” she says, to say something.

“I told her to.”

“Are you guys okay?”

He shrugs. “As okay as we ever are.”

He sighs and she sees him flinch—just barely, but she notices anyway. She had overheard Karen telling Kelly that Jim had a bruised rib. It probably hurt him to breathe too hard.

“I’m sorry about Roy,” she says. It’s true, but it’s not enough. A tear makes it past her eyelashes. "I didn't think he'd-- I'm sorry."

“Yeah, me too.”

“I never meant for you to get hurt.” That’s closer, but she still hasn’t said what she needs to say. She’s not sure she can. “I thought I could make things better this time. I’m sorry.”

“I’ve been hurt worse than this,” Jim says. He’s not looking at her. He’s looking at his knuckles, still cracked from the effort of punching Roy in the jaw.

She doesn’t know what to do. She never knows what to do anymore. Once she thought she had Jim figured out; she knew him so well that she never had to think around him. Now all she does is think. It's exhausting.

“I should probably go,” he says, straightening up. It takes some effort for him, she can tell. He’s trying hard not to show her where it hurts.

She watches him as he struggles into his coat and makes his way to the door. As he puts his hand on the door, she stops thinking.

“I didn’t know that I was hurting you like that,” she says. It’s almost too quiet, but she knows that he has heard her. “I didn’t mean to. All those times, with Roy—I didn’t know how much it could hurt you.”

“So why did you go back to him?” His voice is almost as low as hers. He won’t look at her.

“Because I was hurting. I thought maybe he could make that better.”

Jim’s laugh is short, bitter.

“I wish I had known how much I was hurting you,” she says, and it’s a limp, worthless sentence, hanging in the air between them.

“What makes you think you have any idea how I felt?” he says, and it’s not cruel like she thinks it should be. Those words should feel like a slap; she thinks maybe she deserves that pain. But they’re gentle and sad. And she’s crying.

“I know,” she says. “I know. I hurt.”

He turns to her now and she is crying, without trying to hide it or stop it. She just lets the tears trace their way down her cheeks.

“If I had known it felt like this,” she says. “If I had known, I would have tried to stop it.”

He leans heavily against the door. “I know you would have.”

“I would have stopped it. I would have ended things sooner. I would have told you—” She stops. They are still, silent. Waiting.

She can't stop her thoughts from taking a new shape, an awful shape. She can't stop herself from asking him the question.

“Did you know?” she says suddenly.

“What?”

“Did you know you were hurting me like that? With Karen?”

He won’t look at her, and she has her answer.

“At least,” she says, finally pushing the tears away, “at least I wasn’t doing it on purpose.”

She grabs her coat and her purse. She makes her way to the door. He moves out of her way and, just for a moment, she thinks that maybe this is over. But as she puts her hand on the door, he touches her shoulder. And before she can go back to thinking, she turns to him and lets him gather her up into his arms.

“I’m sorry,” he says, into her ear. He pushes her curls away and says it again. “I’m sorry, Pam.”

She tries not to hurt him as she pulls away. She tries not to hurt him as she touches the bruise on his jaw with one of her fingertips. She tries not to hurt him as she slips past him.

When she walks through the door, alone, leaving him behind, she makes a shape all her own. She thinks that maybe now, maybe finally, she can do that self-portrait.