Dwight’s call did go to voicemail. Pam wasn’t exactly disappointed, since the last thing she wanted was for something serious to happen to Jim or to The Comedy Roasters, but she was a little bit sad that the absurdity of the situation hadn’t been escalated by finding out exactly what someone on the other end of that phone call would have been like.

Dwight retreated to the other end of the coffeeshop, complaining about how he was a sheriff’s deputy (“volunteer, self-appointed, unofficial,” Jim whispered to her and Izzy) and that meant that the health department had to accept his “officially unofficial referrals” and he would speak to their manager.

This seemed to be a little much even for Izzy, which on the one hand Pam appreciated since it was good to know her friend wasn’t completely besotted with the odd German beet farmer, but on the other was unfortunate since it meant she didn’t let Pam and Jim alone to do any of the activities that Pam could have imagined were possible between two people who had just admitted they were interested in each other within the confines of one of their places of work.

She wondered if there was a supply closet somewhere in the place…

But Izzy’s presence and the appearance of actual other customers meant that Pam had to content herself with finishing her tea, thanking Jim, and heading home. She accepted a to-go sleeve from Jim for the last, rapidly cooling cup of tea (Plantation Mint—it wasn’t like she was going to leave it undrunk if he had poured it, even if she agreed with him about its colonial-imperial associations, and besides mint tea was actually pretty good), humoring him even if she was pretty sure she wouldn’t need it.

And then she and Izzy were out the door and she had to fend off her friend for the entirety of the walk to her car, and then fend off her mother when she got home because her traitor of a best friend had told her that Pam and the barista had hit it off.

It was only when she finally escaped to the safety of her childhood bedroom that she was able to focus on anything other than survival (or so it felt), and even then she was suddenly attacked by an important realization that required her attention: while she had removed most traces of Roy in the room after the breakup, because of course she had, she hadn’t updated the room at all to reflect Pam herself, rather than Pam-before-Roy. When she’d removed the picture of them on the day he proposed, and the one of her kissing his cheek when his darts team won first place at Poor Richard’s the one time that she convinced him not to drink for an hour before the match, and the one of him winking at the camera that (she had thought) showed his best side when he wasn’t drunk, she hadn’t actually put up anything she’d done or acquired since she was sixteen, when she’d started dating him.

Sure, there was stuff on the walls. She wasn’t a hermit and she hadn’t lived her life in a hermetically sealed bubble. But the stuff was a combination of movie posters that early teen Pam had liked, artwork from the beforetimes, and random stuff her parents hadn’t had any other space for and she’d thought “why not” about, like the one poster from Aunt Dotty’s time in college theater that her dad had gotten framed that one time when he’d been struck by a particular wave of pride in his little sister and Pam liked the colors of.

There was nothing in there that spoke to Pam, not to Pammy Beesley, age sixteen—or come to think of it, Pammy B., fresh out of elementary school. There was none of the more experimental stuff she’d been doing recently (to be fair, it was only so experimental to do watercolors, but still—she’d branched out from staplers and buildings to impressionistic swirls of light, which made her feel better). There weren’t even posters of the bands or movies she liked now.

This had to change.

She was sipping on the now-entirely-room-temperature tea and checking eBay on her phone for poster ideas when she finally slipped the sleeve off the cup and realized why Jim had put it on there in the first place.

CALL ME, the underside of the sleeve proclaimed, 308-726-7327.

And then on the far side of the loop: JIM (in case you didn’t realize)—this last part scribbled in smaller letters, like he’d worried she’d forget.

She smiled at the sleeve.

He was silly—and he was adorable—and he was, apparently, really interested in her.

The last part felt best of all.