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Author's Chapter Notes:
Pam talks to the purse girl.

When the crowd finally thinned out enough for Pam to think it safe to make her way over towards where the purse lady was selling her wares, it was already well into the afternoon. She hadn’t actually achieved any of what she was looking for from going to the coffeeshop—well, if you looked at it from one angle, she’d been totally distracted from her renovations at home, so she supposed in a sense she’d achieved part of her goal—but she was having enough fun laughing with Jim that nothing else really mattered.

She took advantage of a momentary lull—she thought it might have been the point when the men who were supposed to be working that day realized it was actually time to head home, despite the fact that none of them had gotten any work done because they’d been in a coffeeshop all day—and slipped up to the purse seller, a slim redheaded woman with impeccable style.

The purse entrepreneur looked up warily. This was, Pam reflected, reasonable given that she was fairly certain that the only interaction she’d have had with another woman at the coffeeshop would have been with either Kelly (clearly jealous) or Angela (…Angela).

“Hi!” Pam smiled, and tried her best to put the other woman at her ease. “I’m Pam.”

“Katy.” Even the wariness in her eyes couldn’t keep the perkiness out of the other woman’s voice, and Pam immediately wondered if she had been a cheerleader—and then castigated herself for caring at all. That was a Roy thought if there ever was one, and she was doing her best to not be like Roy anymore.

“Nice to meet you! I love the purses.” Pam smiled again. “Did you make them yourself?”

Katy looked around at the remaining men who were obviously looking at the purses—handbags, really, they were quite large Pam realized—only enough to try to plausibly be exploring the wares and not the saleswoman, and shrugged. “Sort of.”

Pam did her best not to look threatening as she followed up. “Sort of?” She noticed Katy looking a bit more uncomfortable and suddenly a realization sprung into her mind fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus. “Did Kelly accuse you of selling knock-offs?” She lowered her voice and leaned in. “Don’t worry, she’s just afraid you’ll steal attention from her. She’s not actually going to report you to the Better Business Bureau.”

Katy let out a short exhale—which given her general state of discomfort with the conversation was probably, Pam decided, the equivalent of a cartoon character collapsing in a heap of bones and skin—and nodded. “She did.”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it.” Pam picked up the nearest bag and ran a careful eye and then a finger along the decorations. “Let me guess—hand embroidered on a provided base?”

“How did you…” Katy looked up and met her eyes for the first time, properly, and Pam realized she was so young. Not that she was actually any younger than Pam in years, necessarily; in fact, if pressed, she’d have guessed they were only about a year apart. But she was young in spirit; for all she was being pressed on all sides by only-somewhat-wanted attention in the coffeeshop (and, Pam would guess, in any number of other locations too) she hadn’t gone through quite as much as Pam had in the last few years with Roy and then with not-being-with-Roy.

She suddenly felt a need to protect that spark of…not innocence, exactly, but high spirits. Katy deserved a friendly face that wasn’t interested in getting into her pants.

She shrugged nonchalantly. “When you’re working on an art degree, sometimes they make you practice fiber arts even if you’re doing painting and graphic design.” She slid into the chair next to Katy a moment before Dwight could fill it, turning a cold shoulder to him that caused him to stare at another handbag as if that had been his intention all along. “Nice color palette, by the way. I wouldn’t have thought you could make a brown background do that much work for you.”

Katy brightened at this—Pam would have bet whatever the cost of all those handbags on the table was that this was the first legitimate interest in her actual work she’d attracted in the entire time she’d been here—and the two of them entered into a lively discussion of design principles, interrupted only minorly by any need for Katy to actually interact with her potential customers, who seemed to treat her primarily as a living diorama and not as an actual factual sales representative.

Chapter End Notes:
So the last few weeks have been crazy, but hopefully I'll have a chance to get back to semiregular updates on this at least this week! Thanks for reading and reviewing!

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