“Hey Ryan.” Jim didn’t have any great hopes of this conversation, but Pam had convinced him that you couldn’t just uproot someone’s life and career without telling them anything at all. She had said it felt a little too close to home, and he’d been unable to disagree with her. In fact, it had made him realize that he was maybe, just maybe, a little bit more like Roy than he’d thought. Not that he’d promised any of these people, not even Pam (at least before they were dating), the sorts of things Roy had promised Pam. He had not accepted, as his brother Pete the nurse would say, a duty of care towards them. But his parents had instilled in him an ethic that said that even if you didn’t sign up for owing people something, some things were owed anyway by virtue of being human—and he was a little worried he might not have fully been living up to that standard.

Not that he was really going to take a no from Ryan Howard on this. But at least he’d inform the guy before dropping him in Jan’s, and Stamford’s, lap.

Besides, he thought he had some good ideas about how to convince him to take the job.

“’sup Halpert. How are things in sunny Stamford?” Ryan sounded alarmingly chipper—which was weird, since it was only just 9 am in Scranton. That made it 11pm here in Sydney, which he’d had to learn after trying this call twice earlier in the evening, getting Ryan’s voicemail, and eventually caving and checking.

On the plus side, that meant that he and Pam had been able to have a lovely dinner out again—this time she insisted on paying, which he was aggressively OK with since apparently she viewed it as some kind of feminist victory for him not to always pay and he just thought of it as not that big a deal except that it made her happy—and spend the evening planning strategy for this call and the one he was hoping to make right after it to Jan.

Pam was sitting in the corner right now by the phone at the front desk—one disadvantage of cell phones was that they didn’t actually work here in Australia, or rather, the ones they’d brought from the US didn’t, as he was sure that Australia was also capable of providing cellular service—while he used the designated phone that this hostel thankfully had for out-of-network guests to use, once they bought a prepaid phone card from the front desk at any rate. She was bouncing up and down, unable to sit still, which was still adorable to him.

“Hey Ryan. I wouldn’t know, since I’m actually in Sydney, Australia.”

“No way, man, you actually went on that trip?” He could almost see Ryan leaning back in his chair (according to Pam, actually his chair) and crossing his legs. “Tell me all about it.”

“What do you want to know?” He didn’t know Ryan all that well—they weren’t not friends, but they weren’t really friends either—but even he could tell that something was up.

“How’re the chicks down there?” Of course.

“I mean, there’s this one girl in particular…” he flashed Pam a grin. “I don’t know, Ryan, I think she might be the one.”

“C’mon, Jim, the one? Aren’t you over that kind of…” Ryan’s voice petered out and suddenly he shifted registers. “Ah, I mean, how romantic.”

“Kelly’s there, huh.” It wasn’t a question.

“Exactly. It’s so weird that you know exactly how it feels too.” He had to hand it to him, Ryan was good at saying sentences that meant two things at once. It was the one thing that made him sure that Ryan was not going to fail as a salesman, even if he hadn’t made a sale yet—and therefore the thing that made him feel OK about dropping the ARM position in his lap and walking off.

“Right. How would you like it if I offered you a way out of that?” This was line one of three that he’d prepared to convince Ryan, and he was not surprised it was the first one he got to use.

“That sounds fantastic. You just read my mind.” He could hear Ryan lift his ear from the receiver and shout to what he presumed was Kelly. “It’s Jim! He’s talking about a girl he met in Sydney.”

“JIM!” Suddenly Ryan was replaced by Kelly. “You can’t possibly have met someone in Sydney! You haven’t heard the news yet? Ohmigod, I thought someone would have told you, but then again, who would have told you, Michael might have but he’s been sooooo bummed since you left, he keeps moping in his office like you’d think someone died, and then Pam’s been sooooo sad too, but then of course she has, I would just die if I had called off my wedding barely a week before the date, not that I blame her of course, who would want to be married to Roy Anderson? But I just couldn’t see myself calling things off…” he was pretty sure she went on for a while like this, but Pam was sending him panicked eyes from the corner where she could clearly hear everything Kelly was saying so he cut her off.

**

Thank God Jim didn’t expose her to more of Kelly’s “sympathy,” Pam thought. It wasn’t that Kelly was a bad person. They were actually friends. But she did have a weird thing about relationships, and voluntarily ending one where the guy in question had already proposed, bought a ring, and set a date was not in the cards. Or at least not yet—Pam was pretty sure Kelly had a little more romantic and less pragmatic in her than she liked to pretend.

But being on the other end of the pretending was not all that fun.

Fortunately Jim must have gotten her back on track, or else Ryan had repurposed the phone, because she stopped being able to hear the other end of the conversation—which probably meant it was Ryan, now that she thought about it.

“Yeah.” She wished she knew what Jim was responding to—but then again, she wasn’t sure she did, because what if it was about her? She’d enjoyed the way he’d casually misled Ryan about exactly whom he’d met in Sydney, because it really wasn’t any of Ryan’s business, and besides, she wasn’t entirely sure how Ryan would have reacted to the news. He was a firestarter, not just in the joking way they talked about the time they’d ended up outside the office for a fire drill but in the sense that he enjoyed poking at people’s weak places and setting them up for difficulties for his own amusement. He read people well; and he’d see Jim’s desperation of a hint of the Pam situation (as she herself had referred to it over dinner) came to his attention.

So she admired Jim’s deft handling of the issue, distracting without lying.

“Yeah, so I realized…I’m really just not into this whole Stamford thing.” She held her breath. This was a key moment.

“Yeah, it’s a big raise, but…my whole life’s back here in Scranton.” They’d agreed that Ryan would have zero sympathy for this line, but also that he was exactly the sort of person who would think that other people thinking that way was something to take advantage of. “And well, I guess not having Michael around makes life surprisingly dull.” Nicely done, she thought. Good work dropping in the absence of Michael as a seemingly side note.

He laughed, and she wondered what at. “No, don’t tell him I said that. And no, it’s not like Sydney’s boring—as I said, I met this girl---but anyway…oh, I’ll tell you all the details when I get back.” He shook his head at Pam as he said it and grimaced. She grimaced back. He better not! “But I don’t suppose….no, it would be too much to ask of you. Forget I said anything.” He rolled his eyes at her as Ryan responded. “Are you sure? Well, then, what I was going to ask was…”