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

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

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

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

            “Can’t wait.”

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

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

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

            And that’s when Jim cleared his throat.

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

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

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

            He nodded, barely smiling at her.

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

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

            “Yes.”

            “So you bought me a box?”

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

            “And then you gave it to Dwight?”

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

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

            “Here.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

            They stared at each other for a second.

            “What do you think?”

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

            “So? Is that a yes?”

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

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