Jim waved one last time at the unsuspecting people below and then noticed that, against all odds, someone was actually looking back at him.

Unfortunately, he was so pathetic that he was starting to hallucinate, because he could have sworn the woman looked like Pam Beesly.

That was impossible, of course. Pam was in Scranton, getting married to Roy in mumblety-mumblety hours and probably going off on the world’s most romantic honeymoon after that. OK, probably not that, he was pretty sure Roy was in charge of planning the honeymoon because he’d never heard Pam say a word about it even when she was in full-on wedding planner mode and that probably meant they were going to some dingy hotel somewhere that wasn’t worthy to have her cross the threshold, but what was he doing thinking about their honeymoon anyway? He had his own problems without importing more. Problems like the fact that he saw a cute woman with bouncy curls and a cute scarf and his mind went straight to Pam even though he was in fucking Australia.

The woman raised a hand and bounced up on her toes and my God it looked like Pam. The human heart was a crazy thing.

And now she was walking over towards him with the weird little half-skip bounce in her step that Pam did and holy shit Pam Beesly was in Sydney Australia.

He pinched himself on the arm, hard, and he was definitely awake. Which meant he’d started hallucinating at some point. Maybe there were more potent “botanicals” in the Royal Botanical Gardens than he’d realized. Maybe there wasn’t actually a fence across the cliff between the gardens and the street below and he’d fallen and hit his head. Maybe he’d just finally cracked under the strain of trying not to think about Pam and now he was actively insane. But there she was, whatever was wrong with him, and he couldn’t help but smile.

She had walked over and now she was standing down on the street right below him looking up and it was definitely her. He’d seen that scarf a million times, draped over her chair at work, hung around her neck the time Michael had gotten in trouble with corporate for his “Scranton Sauna Days” initiative and had to cut the heating budget down to zero for the rest of February, unwrapped from around her throat when she came into work. He felt compelled to say something, but he was too surprised to have a filter, and so what came out was the first coherent thing to make its way past his vocal cords.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

He could not have been more surprised by her response, which didn’t explain anything but did confirm that it was indubitably his Pam (if there ever had been such a thing as his Pam) standing down below.

“Getting a crick in my neck, apparently. What the hell are you doing all the way up there?”

**

Of all the scenarios she’d played out in her mind, exactly zero percent of them had started with those words. She wasn’t sure where they’d come from; they were a far cry from the suave “fancy meeting you here” she’d considered, or the irate “what did you mean by dropping that whole load of emotions on me and disappearing,” or even the relatively calm “hi, Jim, can we talk?” that had been her dominant go-to in her fantasies.

But there was something so absurd about the sight of him, half-grinning, half-still-agog staring down at her that made her want to give him back as good as she got. And so here she was, hands on her hips, waiting for him to answer.

She’d realized, somewhere deep down inside, that he wouldn’t have expected her to be coming: that even though she’d spent days flying towards and then looking for him, none of that had informed him she was on her way. But the degree of his amazement was still startling to her. He was staring down at her with…well, she didn’t have a word for the emotion. It looked like he had been wandering in the desert long enough to give up hope of water and she was a drinking fountain—but part of him was worried she was somehow another mirage.

He shook his head once and then grinned, and it was like the sun coming out from behind the clouds for her. She realized then that she’d had to turn entirely away from the Sydney Opera House—the one place she’d most wanted to see in her entire life, well, except maybe the Louvre or the Uffizi in Milan, but those were all about what was inside them; this was the physical location she’d most wanted to be in—in order to flag him down, and she was happier looking at him than she’d been looking at it.

That’s how you knew, she supposed, that someone was the one for you. When they not only knew everything about you—what your favorite yogurt was, or that a particular pack of it was expired and shouldn’t be eaten—but also made you happier than the fulfillment of your wildest dreams.

But he was still standing there and she waved again to get his attention.

“Hello? Halpert? Jesus, I knew you were freakishly tall, but this is a little much even for you.”

He seemed to startle, and grinned again, but she was not going to let him throw her off again. “You going to come down and talk to me, or what?”

“Why don’t you come up?” Apparently she wasn’t the only one who could be sassy today. “I mean, you’re obviously a daydream of mine, you should be able to fly.”

She rolled her eyes. “James Duncan Halpert, you come down and talk to me face to face or so help me…”

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” He held up a hand, looked around, and then turned back to her sheepishly. “Actually, I don’t know how to get down there.”

“You got up there, didn’t you?” She rolled her eyes again. This was definitely not how she’d expected her first conversation with Jim to go.

“I did, but… that was more of an accident than anything else.” He shrugged, then brightened. “Hey, do you mind, uh, paralleling me?”

“Paralleling you?”

“Yeah, I walk this way—“ he pointed to her left, along the path that curved towards but not to the Opera House “—and you walk that way on your path, and there has to be a way down, right? People wanting to go to the Opera House and all?”

“Is that really the best you can come up with?” Rolling her eyes was becoming a habit.

“I mean, unless you want to use that scarf as climbing rope…”

“Suck it, Halpert.” She turned to walk in the direction he’d indicated. “But don’t think I’m going to let you out of my sight.” She raised a finger at him. “I spent over a thousand dollars finding you, you’re not getting away again that easily.”