Roy had been trying to avoid Pammy.

He didn’t like thinking of it that way. After all, she was…well, she wasn’t his girlfriend anymore, but she was still the only person he wanted to be with. The only person he could imagine coming home to.

But at the same time…she just wasn’t the same Pammy, and it was bothering him.

Or maybe, if he was really honest with himself, he wasn’t sure he was the same Roy. The DUI hadn’t actually changed a lot—Darryl bailed him out, his mom was weird about it for a while, his insurance rates went up (again—they’d gone up when Pammy had moved out too and he’d had to admit he was the primary driver)—but it had changed something in how he felt about the whole situation.

Now whenever he saw her he didn’t feel sad about the non-wedding, or impatient for her to realize they were meant to be together. Well, he did feel those things, but they weren’t the primary feeling. No, his primary feeling now was guilt. Because he knew from Darryl that she’d been the one to call him, and he felt guilty about it. Not guilty enough to actually bring it up with her and clear the air (how did you do that, anyway? Didn’t talking about things make them more noticeable, not less?) and not guilty enough to stop seeing her altogether (every lunch was still a chicken or fish day, and he still loved the moment when he walked up to the double doors of upstairs Dunder Mifflin and saw her bent over her desk, the moment before she noticed him when he could pretend they were still together and nothing had changed—right up until she raised her head and looked up). But guilty enough to make those visits short, and to pass on the opportunities Darryl kept handing him to bring up warehouse complaints or shortages (and thus be upstairs, and thus see Pammy). He stopped passing on his family’s greetings, or their mutual friends’ (though now that he thought about it, those greetings had also gotten fewer and farther between, and his mother had said something about “giving Pam her space” that he hadn’t really registered until now).

So he was, in his own way, avoiding her.

It just wasn’t very effective.

Now he just had one lunch a day to listen to half-heard snippets of conversation: that one woman (Kelsey? Kelly? Something like that) was always going on a mile a minute so it was hard to keep things straight, but he thought he’d heard something about a double date. And Pammy had turned a little red so he thought it was about her. But now of course the other woman was on about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, so maybe they’d been on a double date with some other celebrity couple? He remembered vaguely that Pammy had liked Brad Pitt in one of those movies she was always seeing with her girlfriends (some sort of rom-commy thing, not for him) and so maybe she was blushing because she had a crush on him? Or maybe there was nothing there at all, and it was just the glare from that stupid mustard-colored salesman’s beet-infused beet salad that was throwing off his color perception.

Then another day there was something about buying new clothes. He’d already noticed the new clothes she had, why did she need another set? What was wrong with his Pammy, the cardigan-wearing woman he’d been with for a decade? Sure, he’d nagged her enough himself about getting new clothes, but those weren’t for work. He’d hoped she’d come home and change or something, not go around in new stuff for all those salespeople and stuff to see. And anyway, why’d she have to change now, when he couldn’t properly enjoy it?

Ugh. Why did Pammy have to make everything so hard? She just needed to realize that he was sorry, and that they’d be happier together than either of them could be apart, and come back to him already. All this new stuff was just a waste of time. Especially his.

Why didn’t she just come back?