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Sometimes Pam misses Roy.

She misses the way she felt safe when he held her close. She misses the occasional Saturdays they’d spend with just each other, lounging around the house or going to the lake together.

It isn’t that she doesn’t love him anymore. She does. You don’t just get over ten years of being with someone. Their love had just changed over time, had become more comfortable, less exciting, less romantic. But the love is still there. She’d just realized that she wants more out of life than just a husband who doesn’t seem to really appreciate her and her dreams, and a job she doesn’t even like. She actually had tried to talk about these things with Roy a couple of times—about what she really wants to do with her life, about what she really wants in a husband. He hadn’t wanted to listen, and he didn’t fit what she wanted or needed, hadn’t been willing to change. So that's that.

But after she’s broken up with him, she sometimes finds herself in her new apartment hugging her pillow as she sleeps. She misses his presence in her bed.

Sometimes, in her loneliness, she finds herself pretending the pillow is Jim, but she doesn’t admit it to herself. Jim is not the reason she broke up with Roy.

He’s not.

Sure, Jim is her best friend, and she loves him a way a best friend does. She used to love spending time with him at work, planning pranks on Dwight. And she could talk to him about things she couldn’t talk to anyone else about; not even Roy.

…And when he’d kissed her…

Okay, maybe she loves Jim, too, but he’s gone now. She’d been too indecisive, and now he won’t even talk to her. He must know that she’s not engaged anymore, yet he hasn’t made an attempt to contact her in four months. It breaks her heart, but she can’t blame him.

So more and more often, she finds herself talking to Roy again. He comes up from the warehouse during the day to get a soda in the kitchen, and stops to talk to her. Sometimes, on her way out, she walks through the warehouse to meet up with him. He seems sweeter than he used to be, more willing to please her. And it’s refreshing. Maybe breaking up is what it took to get him to treat her the right way.

So when he asks her to dinner one day, all cute and nervous and stammering, she doesn’t refuse. Over dinner, she tells him about her art classes, and he seems proud, and actually a little eager to see her latest work. She wears her new shirt, and he compliments her again. There’s a chemistry there that had almost been gone before, and it makes her shiver.

Over the next couple of months, Pam and Roy find their way back to each other, and it’s sweeter than before, like it had been ten years ago, and she almost forgets about Jim.

Almost.

Until the branches merge, and Jim’s suddenly in the same office again, and the way he looks at her- wounded and sad, but hopeful, in love with her- when he sees her for the first time in six months makes her world come crashing down around her.

Again.