Roy was favoring one shoulder, Pam noticed idly as she walked over towards the clump of warehouse workers that now included her very awkward boss. They all turned towards her as if with a single will when she got close, and she was involuntarily reminded of a Tumblr post she’d seen of a bunch of cats staring at their owner from the kitchen table at night, eyes shining in the darkness, with the caption “Apparently I interrupted something.”

Well, it was about time she fucking interrupted whatever the hell was going on with Roy.

Before she could muster the gumption to figure out what it was she actually wanted to say to him in front of a large group of sympathetic witnesses, he took the decision out of her hands—or at least, eliminated several of her more conciliatory options.

“You fucking him?” He lurched up to his feet, and the sting in his words took away any softness that might have welled up in her from the way he sucked in his breath when pushing off his left shoulder. “I should have fucking known.”

She stood there for a moment, mouth agape. This was the man she was planning to marry? This was the man she’d delayed all her life plans for, the one she’d worked for years at a dead-end job with an ineffectual boss whose best friend sexually harassed her just in order to be close to? All she could muster as a response was a single syllable. “No.”

No, she wasn’t fucking Jim. But also no, this couldn’t be happening. No, this was not her life. If she were Kelly, she’d already be looking around for Ashton Kutcher to jump out and tell her she’d been “Punk’d,” because no, this had to be fake. It couldn’t be real. It simply couldn’t.

But also no, she was not going to take this anymore. Yes, she loved Roy, she had loved Roy for all of her adult life and even hearing crazy, jealous bullshit out of his mouth couldn’t stop that (if it could, she would have stopped loving him senior year, when he’d made a big deal out of Austin Blackmon’s staying after school to help her finish their joint final project for art class: as if a wall-size mural could be a one-person job!). But no, she was not a doormat. She was a person, dammit, and worse, they’d been through this all this morning. She’d told him he had nothing to worry about. She’d told him she was friends with Jim (wasn’t it great that there was someone for her to talk to about how crazy Dwight and Michael and everyone else was, she’d practically begged? Wasn’t it wonderful that she wouldn’t have to bottle up every smirk, every laugh, every comment and try to recap it all for him at the end of the day just to avoid going crazy?). She’d told him Jim had never made a move, would never make a move, didn’t like her that way, and that besides that, for god’s sake, obviously she wouldn’t do anything with him even if he did. Because they were engaged—her and Roy, not her and Jim—and she wasn’t that kind of person, and anyway she didn’t want to.

No.

This was not on her.

This was not even, she was beginning to realize, about her.

It was about Roy, and his ego, and the fact that that ego was never going to be small enough to allow for the idea that she wasn’t a possession, that she was a person, and that her being a person, ironically enough, meant that she was actually more faithful to him than she could have been as a possession. Because she had actual agency, and she loved him.

But she couldn’t love Ego the Living Planet.

“No,” she repeated, in case he hadn’t heard her the first time, this time stronger, a building crescendo. “No,” a third time, and this time she took a step towards him. “I am not fucking Jim Halpert. But you know that, Roy,” she said, and she poked him in the chest, temporarily ignoring the ridiculous difference in their relative sizes. “You know that because I already told you that. Because it should be obvious to you and to everyone else here,” and she swept her arm around to indicate the warehouse workers and Michael, who was trying to look as if he didn’t exist, “but apparently somehow isn’t, that I’m not. That. Kind. Of. Person.” She stood there, shaking from the emotion and uncertain where to go from there, but the words kept coming. “And if you think I’m that kind of person, maybe we shouldn’t get married.”

She hadn’t known a parking lot could get that quiet.

Now it was her turn to speak before Roy could rally himself to respond. “I guess that’s my answer.” She twisted the ring off her finger—a familiar motion with a novel ending—and held it out. Roy just stared, and eventually Darryl coughed, reached out a hand, and took it.

“I’ll be at Penny’s. We’ll come for my stuff this weekend…don’t make this harder than it has to be.” That last was a prayer, and she walked with shaky legs back towards the office building, conscious of the eyes that followed her back, but refusing to turn around again.