Jim woke up refreshed, with no noisy German tourists this time to interrupt his slumbers. They must have moved on, or perhaps simply become less noisy—though if Dwight was any indication of the true nature of Germans, that was distinctly unlikely. Not that Dwight was great at moving on from things either. His plan for this morning, to the extent he had made it before falling into bed and trying desperately not to think about Pam, was to wander over towards the Australian National Maritime Museum, with a possible stop at the Powerhouse Museum on the way.

Jim didn’t usually admit it, but deep down inside him (very deep down) there was a little kid who’d absolutely loved science. He hadn’t been any good at it—his skills lay in talking to, sometimes writing for, and paying attention to people, not to the natural world—but he’d always wished he’d been better. He’d loved sitting in bio class in middle school hearing about Darwin and Cook and their voyages—and also in physics in high school, learning about steam engines, rockets, and the space race. He’d always known he wouldn’t be Neil Armstrong, Robert Goddard, or Joseph Banks. But here he was with a whole museum dedicated to the voyages and vessels that had mapped the Pacific both in its human geography and in its flora and fauna—and a stone’s throw away another, also interested in the environment but with a whole section devoted to space and transportation. How could he resist?

And if, as he was definitively not, he had ever intended to go back to Scranton and talk to a certain receptionist about it, there were also almost certainly some of those gorgeous eighteenth-century maps with which Banks and Cook had traced Oceania for the British crown—and maybe even some of the first European drawings of marsupials, in all their oddly misshapen, nigh-unrecognizable glory.

Yes, that would have been pleasant to share, if he’d ever had the occasion to do that. Which he wouldn’t.

And she would have absolutely loved the gorgeous green of the agricultural steam engines on display at the Powerhouse.

But again, he wasn’t going back to Scranton.

**

Pam spent the morning sleeping in. The hostel was shockingly restful—or maybe it was just being in a hotel for a reason other than not being able to sleep in the home she’d lived in for most of her adult life. The sun over the Harbour was gorgeous, and she stayed in the room for a little while to sketch the view from the cramped little window. Her next door neighbor must have been a particularly quiet person, or have decamped for the day already—or perhaps the hostel simply wasn’t that full—because she quite lost herself in the project, and it was nearly noon before she stepped out to look for Jim.

Where might she find him? If her instincts were true, he’d booked this vacation mostly to avoid her wedding, which meant he probably didn’t have any grand destinations or side-trips planned once he arrived. That meant she could probably narrow it down to Sydney, or maybe a minor excursion somewhere with fancy animals, because seriously, she’d be very disappointed in him (if she ever got a chance to tell him) if he came all this way and never saw a kangaroo.

But where in Sydney?

She considered the sports arenas—the NBL was out of season, she remembered, but there were other sports—and decided to wait for a day with an actual game. He might head over there to buy tickets, of course, but he wouldn’t stick around long enough for her to catch him. She did make a note on the piece of paper she had found and decided to call her Halpert Helper to check back on one of the days where the flyers she’d grabbed mentioned a game. She even jogged down to the main desk to ask if there were schedules she could look at, and they were very helpful—union and league rugby were both playing, and there were indeed matches she could jot down on her little piece of paper. They even offered to arrange tickets, but of course she wasn’t really interested in seeing them herself—although the concept of enjoying a sport that Roy hadn’t forced her to watch a million times was strangely appealing.

Hm. Maybe she was actually a sports fan after all, if you didn’t leave her at the rink. That was worth some investigation, later, when she’d found Jim, said her piece, and figured out what she was doing with her life.

As if it were ever that simple.

With the help of the front desk man, the Halpert Helper (a name and indeed a purpose she did not disclose, out of sheer embarrassment) also got entries about museums (science yes, art maybe [was Jim really into art, or did he just indulge her? She didn’t want to speculate], war probably, civic history probably not), zoos (yes), and aquaria (definite).

So to the aquarium she went.