He didn’t go to Australia.

He probably should have. The ticket was booked. He was able (by turning on that Halpert charm and being very, very patient, and also by paying another $200 “change fee”) to turn it into the airline equivalent of store credit. But somewhere inside he knew he wouldn’t use it. Not until or unless he had to flee again, and he had promised himself he wasn’t going to get in that situation or anything even vaguely close to it ever.

Instead, he transferred to Stamford as soon as possible. Technically sooner than possible, in that he leverages that week off he’d already taken and moves it up so that it covers the week after Casino Night.

He arranges all of this at 5 am on Monday, because he can’t stop noticing her.

All weekend he waited by the phone hoping against hope that she’d call him. It felt like giving her a last chance: if she couldn’t talk to him in the moment, maybe the weekend would loosen her tongue. By the time it’s Sunday night and she hasn’t reached out, he’s pretty sure he’s done for.

Still, he’s planning to come into work, because Jan says it’ll take a little while for the paperwork to come through, and besides, he can help by moving his clients over to the other Scranton salesmen and women during the week.

He can’t sleep Sunday night, because he knows that if he goes into work that Monday morning he’ll have to interact with her, and he has absolutely no idea how to do that. It’s like all the coping mechanisms—the teasing, the self-deprecation, the laughter—have washed away in the flood of emotion from Casino Night and he just knows none of them will work. But still, he’s not looking at this like something he can avoid; in fact, he’s almost numbed himself because he knows it’s going to happen to him and it’s going to be awful.

Because he can’t sleep, he decides to get a move on in the morning. By 4 am it is clear that “can’t sleep” is entirely literal, and he drags himself up, into the shower, and over to Scranton Business Park. Maybe being in the office will spark some idea of how to deal with this, to deal with the dead thing that he used to call us.

Instead, it confirms his determination to get the hell out.

The doors to the building are haunted. There she bent over, doubled in laughter, after he managed to convince Dwight that his car’s tailpipe needed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (with the engine off, he’s not a murderer). By that shrub she first mentioned her love of The Princess Bride. On that bench he sat for fifteen minutes after kissing her upstairs and wondered what the hell he was doing with his life.

The whole walk into the building is like this, like he’s playing one of those first-person shooters he’s absolute garbage at (and Mark loves) where just looking at something by scrolling your cursor over it pops up a tooltip with pertinent information. Hank’s desk reminds him of teasing Pam about how she’d need to get a new badge that said “Pamela Anderson”—not a good thought right now, but that was earlier in their rela…in their whatever it was. The elevators remind him of every journey up and down when he silently wished they’d get stuck (now he’s wishing the same thing, but just so he wouldn’t have to go through with today). The doors to the Dunder Mifflin suite are so covered with memories he can’t even really discern one individual thought, except maybe (he thinks with a sardonic twist of his mouth) the old Dantean expression: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

And he’s right, because walking into the actual office is hell.

Her desk, of course, is the first thing he sees, and if the doorway was bad, the sight of the jellybean tray on her desk is pure and unadulterated torture. He has to tear his eyes away from cataloging the rest of the detritus she’s left there because if he does he won’t be able to stop. He’ll just stand there hyperventilating until Dwight comes to tip him over at…whenever it is that people like Dwight get into work (he actually knows the answer, down to the minute, because of a prank he and Pam executed over a year ago to slowly move all of Dwight’s clocks forward by a minute a week [the car clock was particularly hard to manage, though Schrute Farms was surprisingly easy] but he doesn’t want to think about that prank so he forces himself not to remember the time).

His glance grazes the break room and he twists himself around to avoid looking too carefully at…well, at anything, but particularly at the damn cupboard which is sitting ajar, and in which he can see the rounded edge of a particularly meaningful teapot.

This present is special, because it has bonus torture.

Unfortunately this frantic turn points him at a window, and he can see the parking lot, and it’s too much. He falls, heavily, into his chair, as if his feet had moved by autopilot. He does not want to think about the last time they did that in this office. It didn’t work out that well.

He thinks, for a moment, that its odd that he hasn’t actually looked at his own desk, but he quickly realizes exactly why that is. His desk was already a shrine to Pam, although she didn’t necessarily know it—in fact, given what happened last week he’s pretty sure he can say definitively that she did not know it—and it’s only made worse by the fact that he can still see the changes made by…whatever it was that happened on Casino Night. He refuses to think about her fiddling with the cord to his phone, or how their legs had swept the papers askew on the edge of the desk, or any of it. It’s all pushed back into that black box labeled “Casino Night.”

It’s then, with his pulse racing, that he picks up the phone and dials corporate, knowing that they often start their days on UK time, especially at the start of the week, to conference with the suppliers in Slough. He’s hoping against hope that this is one of those days, because he desperately needs Jan to be in her office.

She is.

At the same time, he’s turned on his computer and is frantically clicking through options on the airline site, and—once Jan is assured that he really means what he says and clicks off so she can go onto one of those international conference calls—picking the phone up again and calling helpline after helpline. Or rather, calling one and letting them transfer him in what he would swear is an infinite loop. Fortunately for him, however, 6 am on Monday isn’t their busiest time, and he gets through eventually.

He arranges a call back at 10 “since your case is so complex, Mr. Halpert,” marches to the annex, leaves Toby a note saying he’ll send in the forms remotely from his newly moved vacation and to check with Jan for the approvals of vacation and transfer, and packs up his desk on autopilot. He’s done before 7, which was his personal drop-dead point, that being when the earliest people (Angela, for instance) tend to start drifting in.

He doesn’t really rationalize why he keeps the little yogurt lid or the sketch of Dwight as cupid. But he does. And his last memory of Dunder Mifflin Scranton is of a jar sitting empty on a counter. You’d only know it was for jellybeans if you’d seen the man walking out the doors munching on them one by one and crying.