The light above was murky through the water.  She hadn't dropped far, could still save herself.  But the shifting shapes on her hands were fascinating.  Her lungs began to tingle.  Then she heard it.  Like the light, it came from above, strange at first then more familiar.  She resented it even as she rose to answer.

She surfaced into consciousness, her chest still tight.  Behind her, her husband was still sleeping.  Her hands, dappled now only with age, fumbled for her phone.  She stared at the display but could make no sense of the numbers there.  The snuffles behind her were becoming irregular.  She pried open the cell.  "Yes?" she slurred.

There was a pause and then a voice like a wave over her head.  "Pam?"

She forgot to breathe.

* * *

She hadn't meant to go.  There could be nothing there for her.  After all, she hadn't kept up with them, so why see them again now?  Meredith would still be drunk, Michael inappropriate, Toby awkward.  Dwight would still be Dwight, and Angela Angela, and together they'd be magnified into something righteous and insane and beyond Pam's tolerance.  The others would be long gone or exactly the same.  The company didn't even occupy the same building anymore.  Her desk no longer existed.  Neither did his.

She had sat in her car outside the hotel and watched them arrive.  A few fond memories tagged along behind them like ducklings, but nothing (no one) compelling enough to draw her out from behind her seatbelt.  She had told herself that she was just curious.  As the minutes became hours, though, curiosity had rolled over into disappointment, then sadness, then embarrassment. 

When she'd climbed out of her car at home, her hips had been stiff.  She'd made her way inside, kissed her husband with absent lips, and gone to the bathroom.  As the water roared into the tub, she'd leaned on the sink and watched her mascara trace dark paths on the bowl below.  When she'd finally lowered herself into the bath, she didn't stop at her shoulders, but slid down, down until she was alone with her heartbeat.

* * *

 It came again, the voice, like the beam of a lighthouse.  Scattering the dark, illuminating the crests around her.  A path to shore.  She closed her eyes against the light, felt warmth on her face, and filled her lungs with fresh air.

Then remembered the pain.  Rocks, and hidden piers.  Riptides. That was no safe port.  Besides, it was no longer her home.  She lived here, in the water.  At least until she tired of treading.

She made her voice neutral.  "Wrong number."

The phone closed on his apology and fell from her fingers.

She lay back on the bottomless waves and exhaled until they closed over her again.