Even the most disinterested eye could not fail to notice the proverbial flames coming out of Roy's ears as he resumed his place at the witness box.

The man was furious.

Not the explosive, uncontrolled bouts of fury he was so easily prone to, but the silent, cold rage that he plunged straight into, hurtling down to the rocky floor of the persecuted. This Roy didn't shout, this Roy didn't cry afterwards. This Roy didn't explode at a moments notice.

This Roy was far more threatening. This was the Roy who had made her blood freeze and her bones shake. The Roy who lashed out wildly on the spur of the moment of fury had nothing on this Roy. The blackness of his mood, the underlying danger inside the deadly silence was utterly petrifying, and out of the small handful of times Pam had experienced Roy in this state she had learned a hard and painful lesson on keeping well out of his way. He clung on to the rage like a life jacket – not drowning in it but thriving on it.

It was only a small comfort that this side of Roy was emerging in front of the courtroom. The part of her that instinctively urged to flinch away at every movement, the part that wanted to beg the attorneys to leave him alone, to not play with the trigger of his loaded gun – that part of her was reactive, powerful.

Because she knew what this dark, scarily silent Roy was capable of.

Things – degrading, stomach-spinning, excruciating acts of abuse that she had yet to let out of the box she had buried deeply inside herself. Things that only she and Roy had lived and experienced; the abuser and the abused. Things she did not want to be revealed to anyone, and especially not Jim. Despite all of the reassurances, all of the love he freely gave her; that small nugget of quiet terror smoldered inside her – terror that he would feel differently about her, would no longer want her after learning how she had let Roy use her like that. He thought she was brave, strong simply because she walked away from Roy – but what about the six, seven years when she made no real physical attempt to leave? Staying was weak, just like she had been all that time. She didn't deserve any admiration.

The man who had replaced Thorne was a welcome change. Neither biased nor brash, he spoke with an authoritative tone, and although he was there to defend Roy, there were subtle signs that he did in fact hold somewhat of a disdain for him.

Roy, however answered the man's questions with short, sharp responses, oblivious to any hostility on the attorney's part.

"From the day I met her, she's been playing me." he stated tightly. "She tells me she loves me, she moves in with me and then she agrees to marry me. And all the time, there was Halpert."

Rieper came across the floor to Roy. "I'm going to ask you about this affair you suspected Pam of having. How long had you suspected there was someone else?"

He sat up importantly and pushed his lips forward. "A long time. Halpert was always hanging around her."

"Okay." Rieper looked down contemplatively. "Was there a time that you confronted her about these suspicions?"

"Yes. She would always say there was nothing in it, that her and him-" Roy paused, glaring fiercely at Jim. "Were just pranking Dwight or messing with Michael."

Murphy stood up, objecting to the questioning. Pam looked at him with some mixed relief – eager to get the questioning away from Jim, but dread for the things that she knew would come up, and Roy's spin on those things.

Rieper smiled agreeably, nodding to the objection and continued. "Thank you. Moving on, were you and Jim friends?"

Roy looked appalled, shaking his head emphatically. "Absolutely not. Yeah we were civil to each other and I tolerated him as he was Pam's friend but I didn't trust him at all. I was right, too."

"Why don't you tell us why you feel he was untrustworthy?" Rieper asked.

Roy nodded and took a deep breath. "So many reasons, so many reasons. He puts himself across as a good guy, a decent guy but once you get to know him, hang with him you see the guy I'm talking about. He was always creeping around Pam, always at her desk with her. You only gotta see his track record to know what I mean about not being honest."

"And, what do you mean by his track record?"

"This guy couldn't lie straight in bed. Hanging around a woman he knew was engaged in a long term relationship. That didn't stop him. And you only gotta ask the people who work with him what I mean. He once locked Michael, his boss in a straight jacket. I mean, the guy was in that jacket for hours!" Roy rambled rapidly, his voice rising. "He does a lot of stupid things. He shut a colleague into a shipping container, taped him up and left him there. Our manager thought rats had gotten in the warehouse until he figured out that the scratching and squeaking was actually coming from this box, that by the way, was headed for New York. That's just the kind of guy Halpert is. Doesn't take anything seriously."

"It sounds like you have quite some animosity towards him." Rieper reflected.

"Of course I do, you heard me! He was after my fiancee!" Roy snorted rudely. Pam rolled her lips together and knowingly tried to turn her head slightly to catch Jim's eye. As if by telepathy he was looking at her already when she turned, his expression calm. He looked nonplussed by Roy's outburst. A smile curled at the corner of her lips and he returned it immediately. She once again felt herself in awe at the sheer level of patience he possessed, patience she herself had worn out. When she turned back to the front of the room, she was faced with a livid Roy scowling at her ferociously. She closed her eyes.

"Did you ask him about his feelings for her?" Rieper asked, a little taken aback by the outburst. He had noticed the direction of Roy's glare and tried to get his attention back. Roy looked startled for a moment, and grudgingly shifted his focus back to the attorney.

"I certainly did." he started again, gaining steam. "He was coy, he really didn't want to talk about it to me. He did admit he'd had a crush on her though. Pam refused to talk about it with me when I asked her if she knew he had a crush on her."

"Okay. So you said she was playing you," the attorney continued.

"Yes."

"Told you she loved you."

"Yes."

"Agreed to marry you, but all the while was having an affair with Jim, you believed. Were there other things going on in your relationship that made you feel unhappy, or uneasy?"

"Yeah. She would go out and wouldn't even tell me she'd gone anywhere, she'd keep secrets from me like not inviting me to her sisters birthday party and lying to her sister about where I was. More and more she got less intimate with me as well, like she wanted to prove she didn't need me or something."

Of course Pam remembered the night of Penny's party, just recalling it felt like a bucket of ice cold water had been thrown over her. She shivered involuntarily. Yes, she had lied, to both Roy and Penny that night, and everyone else who had asked about Roy's absence. The situation with Penny had been tricky at best – and Roy never liked her going to Penny's birthday celebrations – she'd learned that early on. It had become easier, in a different way, to just not tell him at all and go alone, saving herself the trouble and inevitable pain it would cause her in the end.

A second, even trickier reason was two-fold. Roy may have endeared himself to their parents, but Penny had taken an instinctive dislike to Roy almost right away, although she was neither obvious or disrespectful towards him in any way. But it was a fact Pam had wanted kept from Roy at all effort. And Roy had liked to play the sisters off against each other – complimenting Penny's youthful looks and figure against the older version that was Pam. It had been extremely degrading, to say nothing of humiliating, to be compared to her own sister as if the two of them were slabs of meat laid out in a meat market.

Only that year, he had found out about the family functions Pam had concealed from him. Recalling that fight following Penny's party, it cut her right to the bone to see him now looking scandalized, looking victimized, as though he had completely rewritten the night in question in his mind.

"Do you think she had any intention of leaving you?" Rieper walked amiably to the defense table and picked up his glass of water.

Roy shrugged. "She'd threaten it sometimes, it was just blackmail, it's what girls do to make you feel sorry for them."

Suddenly she was plucked into the middle of another memory; a dull pressure pushing at the inside of her pelvis as she crushed her knees to her chest and squeezed her hands tight under her pillow. You're making me feel like a monster, he whined, peering down at her from the other side of the bed. She could hear the crack of his elbow as he shifted position, lifting his head from his hand and leaning over her. That's why you cry, isn't it. I thought you were different, I thought you were special. You're just like all the others. She could feel her eyes squeezing painfully shut, willing him to stop talking, to move away from her, to let her breathe, in, out, in out, breathe away the blooming ache in her lower back and the stinging of the sticky, salty tears flooding her eyes. I suppose you're gonna leave, huh. Well go on. Make sure you tell them why this happened. Give them the whole picture. Tell them what you did to me, how you pushed and pushed me to it. You go. You don't love me as much as I love you anyway.

It had always been the same. Why couldn't she see it before? Roy would never change. Here he was in court still spouting the same stereotypes, the same hardcore attitude he'd had since the day she had met him. Why had she so consistently believed he would – could – change? He wasn't capable of change. He had treated her like she was different, incredible, like she was the only decent woman in the world and then he remembered that she was a woman and as a woman she deserved no respect. That's what it had come down to in the end wasn't it?

Blackmail, my ass, she thought angrily, watching as Rieper took a long swallow of the cool water before setting the glass back down. He rubbed his lips lightly. "Why did she agree to marry you?" he continued.

"I thought that she loved me. She told me she did." Roy said simply, a biting anger in his voice.

"But she was planning your wedding?"

"Yeah. Girls love a wedding, don't they? But she left anyway." he looked down morosely, exaggeratedly puffing his lips out. His face had drained until white with restrained fury. Pam, counting the moments like a ticking time bomb, couldn't throw off the absolute certainty - and terror - that an unbridled Roy was an uncontrollable Roy, that despite the presence of officers and guards he was still powerful enough make the too few steps needed towards her, and circle her neck once more. She knew that he could do a lot of damage before anyone would be successful in restraining him.

The attorney's face twisted, as though he was trying unsuccessfully to feign a neutral expression. "What sort of future did you see yourself having with Pam?" he asked casually.

"Um…" Roy appeared to be thinking about his response. "I thought marriage, of course, that one day we'd have kids and we'd take them to the lakes, I'd teach them how to ski, normal stuff like that."

"Okay. Did Pam share this vision of a happy future with you?"

"I thought she did. She did agree to marry me." Roy said, a look of hurt plastered on his face. It made her stomach twist and revolt.

"You were engaged for three years." Rieper said, ignoring the pathetic expression Roy was using. "Why hadn't you married by then?"

"It's the truth that I put off getting married. And Pam was mad at me for it. But I wanted to be sure I could trust her and that she wouldn't fool around with Halpert."

Well, at least one thing he had said that day had been true – he had been the one to put off their wedding. She had never really understood the real reason he couldn't commit, among the accusations he threw at her from time to time – she was too stupid to be a good wife, she couldn't take care of herself let alone him, she didn't love him enough. She supposed the reason wasn't important any longer.

The attorney seemed to be somewhere on the same page as her and didn't pursue it any further. "Why did you not leave her, if you believed she was involved in an affair?"

"It's hard…" Roy said, with exaggerated tiredness in his voice. "She needed me. She always said how she needed me, how she couldn't live without me. How could I leave her?"

She wanted to get up and scream at him, scream at the whole room – that it was him, he was the one who had said it, he said she needed him, he made her believe she couldn't live without him. The thing that galled her was how believable he sounded. It made her sound pathetic and used and helpless. And Jim was sitting behind her, listening to every word. She hated that, hated the possibility that he could believe even one of the lies Roy was spilling out.

"Did you love her?"

It seemed as though every single person in the room held their breath. It was a simple question but the answer was heavy, and crucial. She didn't doubt that maybe Roy had loved her in his own twisted way – or with some feeling that he thought was love simply because it wasn't coming from a place of anger. Didn't matter anymore.

"Yeah. Despite Halpert." he replied resignedly.

"We've heard the testimony from Pam, Jim, your ex neighbors. I have to ask, did you ever lay a hand on her?"

Roy turned angry again. "I wouldn't deliberately hurt her for anything. No matter what she did. I know what it's like, you see."

Vertigo spun through her, a curious sense of deja-vu overtaking her. She anticipated this moment, knowing he would raise it. She could guess exactly what Roy was going to say. After all, she'd heard it so many times.

"Have you ever been a victim of abuse yourself?" Rieper asked carefully.

"Yeah." Roy didn't hesitate. "My dad was rough with us, really knocked us around. Pam knows all this, she knows how I was victimized as a kid. It's why she wants to hurt me this way. She knows exactly what I have been through and this is the worst way she could hurt me."

"Thank you for your candor. I can appreciate this is difficult. Why don't you tell us how this has impacted on your life and relationship."

"It's been very difficult. My mom, she tried her best with us but she got the rough end of it from my dad. Then he left and I felt lost, and when I met Pam and her family I felt like I belonged. Her parents became mine, I loved them like my own. And now I've not only lost her, but her family too, who I considered my own family."

Pam could hear the sharp, angry breathing of her father behind her. She couldn't blame him. Roy couldn't look any more pathetic than he did right then. She had always felt sorry for Roy and the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father – although his father had left before he was a teenager he had clearly left his mark. She stifled, swallowed her frustration at his words – his blatant excusing of his vile treatment of her and only hoped that the jury saw exactly what she was seeing at that moment. A weak, sad man desperately trying to abdicate responsibility for what he had done to her. Since when had the cycle of violence become a licence to for the abused to turn into the abuser?

The words rattled on around her – she blocked then out, caught in her own sea of red and black, surprised by her sudden thirst for retribution, thirst to make him see, to make him suffer.

She concentrated, shutting out the room around her. She was was warm and comfortable in the hug she had shared with Jim before entering the courtroom that day. The hug had stayed with her. She focused on their weekend away, being away from Roy, away from here and the exciting, fluttering feeling in her stomach she felt whenever Jim was around.

She wasn't missing anything in the courtroom as Roy spoke. Sure, his mouth was moving but she didn't need to hear him, to be hurt by him any longer.

She had heard it all before.