The museums were nice enough. Actually, they were more than that, he enjoyed them a lot. But Jim wasn’t feeling entirely himself, for reasons that were so obvious to him that he didn’t really care to examine them (they started with a P and ended with am’s getting married to Roy this week), so while he had fun, he didn’t really get what he thought would be the full experience for someone who wasn’t otherwise distracted.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t fully there. It’s that there was something bugging him in the back of his mind whenever he was there, like a sinus headache or an itch you couldn’t scratch.

It was, in a word, guilt.

He’d been surprised when he’d realized it, enough so that he’d wandered back out of the maritime museum and in search of a quick bite to eat and contemplate the discovery. He felt guilty. Not for telling Pam he loved her. Not even for trying to get her to call off her wedding. No, those things he felt completely and totally assured about. He felt guilty, though, for the way he’d done it.

Not for blurting it out—he hadn’t planned that, it had just come out, and you couldn’t really blame yourself for what your subconscious decided to do when it took over the reins of what was just supposed to be a quick conversation about the possibility of his transfer. Not for kissing her—he was pretty sure that would be atop his memories with a bullet and a star for a long time. Not even for leaving—that had been the respectful thing to do when she’d nodded that she was going to marry Roy.

No, he felt guilty for absolutely not giving her a second to think about it, and then disappearing.

Now, to be fair, he’d had this Australia trip planned for longer than that. It had been planned in its own moment of panicked desperation, when she’d acted like it was completely normal for him to come to her wedding and watch her stomp all over his heart on the way up the aisle. So the trip was itself not actually a part of the disappearance.

But the move to Stamford was, and the request—no, demand—he’d made of Jan that she let him start at Stamford after the trip but not have to go to Scranton in the meantime? That had been all him.

Sure, it was self-preservation. He would have died of embarrassment that next workday, and he just couldn’t go on like that day after day even if he hadn’t died (few people literally die of embarrassment, even if they might wish they would, he knew). But it was self-preservation that didn’t give Pam any options. Basically he’d transferred a whole heap of psychic baggage onto her and then let go, and that wasn’t fair.

He wasn’t sure how he should have handled it differently. Maybe he shouldn’t have asked her right then and there to declare she wasn’t marrying Roy. After all, she’d said “I can’t” and “misinterpreted,” but…really that was it, because she’d also said “me too” and “I’m not drunk” and then he hadn’t even gotten verbal confirmation that she was marrying Roy. Just a nod. And he knew Pam. Change didn’t come quickly or easily to her. She needed time, and not just time like the depth of time for which he’d loved her and begun to think she’d loved him, but time to actually think.

And he hadn’t given her any. He’d dumped his heart out, insisted she pick it up, and when she hadn’t done so immediately, he’d thrown it in the dumpster and disappeared from her life.

Just because it hurt him didn’t mean he didn’t bear some guilt for what it did to her. Or might have done to her, assuming he didn’t misinterpret.

Yeah, it definitely had hurt him. He’d known that.

But the guilt was real, and it also hurt him, and he was going to have to process it now, alone on the streets of Sydney. It was a good thing Australians were good at meat (they had to be, right? They were shepherds and cattle-ranchers, right?) because he was going to need a lot of steak to push down those butterflies in his stomach.

**

Pam didn’t enjoy the Sea Life aquarium as much as she’d hoped, because she kept looking for someone who either wasn’t there or was doing a bang-on impression of a sea lion, a salmon, or a wall.

And she’d been so hopeful too, after filling out the Halpert Helper.

Though she supposed it wasn’t a totally lost cause. The Helper had more entries, after all, so she shouldn’t give up just because the first one was a bust. Maybe she could find him at another museum, or a zoo, or something.

Was there a Cugino’s in Sydney? Probably not.

And hell, maybe he wouldn’t want to eat at Cugino’s again ever even if there had been. Maybe she’d ruined that for him like she’d ruined everything else.

Well, everything except herself. She was still a proud new Beesly and she was going to prove it, even if she couldn’t find Jim.

On that note she found herself strutting into Madame Tussaud’s, located conveniently next to the aquarium. Sure, Jim wouldn’t be found dead in there (or in wax in there, she supposed, more accurately) but she certainly would—and she might have to be, if Kelly found out there was a celebrity wax museum and she hadn’t visited it.

At least someone would be happy to hear about one part of her trip, she thought, as she posed next to a giant wax Superman. And hey, pretending to be Lois Lane was kind of fun in its own right too.