Everything about her life is exactly the way she wants it.

It’s been almost two years since Michael left, and she’d been right about things changing. She’d always assumed her goal would be to escape mundanity, but oddly enough, the mundane now feels perfect: the predictable chaos, the warmth of security, and most importantly, the thriving love from her family that’s supplied in abundance. She’s fallen into a comfortable rotation -- work, kids, Jim -- and while it’s not anything particularly exciting or dramatic, she loves its simple beauty. 

Jim seems happy as well. His concerns about being in a professional slump appear to have ebbed, for now at least, and while she hopes he figures it all out at some point, she can’t deny that she likes him exactly the way he is. When he’s at his desk right next to her, pranking Dwight or smiling at her about something Creed or Kevin said, he’s her Jim, and she likes him that way.

She sits at the kitchen table, feeding six month old baby Phillip, beginning another predictable morning. Jim stands next to the counter and his phone dings; it’s been blowing up the past couple of days, and she hasn’t bothered asking him about it. But now feels like the time.

“You got another wife on the side or something?” she teases.

“Ha,” he says a little awkwardly, checking his text. “Just my friend Colin, from college. You remember him, right?” he asks, looking up from his phone. “You met him once or twice.” 

Pam spoons some pears into Phillip’s mouth. “Yeah, sure. How’s he doing?”

“Well.” Jim sets the phone down on the counter and pours two cups of coffee. “Turns out those nights getting hammered in our dorm room and talking about the future might finally pay off for the guy.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, apparently he’s starting a sports marketing company in Philadelphia.” 

Pam is appropriately impressed. Phillip spits the pears back out, and while she is quite adept at catching most of them with the spoon, the mess remains. 

“Wow. Good for him. Can you grab me a napkin, please?”

“Yeah, and guess what?” Jim tears a paper towel off, then wets it in the sink, this routine secondhand nature by now. “The entire thing was my idea.” 

“Really?” she asks skeptically, holding out her hand for the towel. “You’re sure it wasn’t a joint drunken effort?”

He gives Pam the paper towel and she wipes the baby’s chin. 

“Really!” he exhales, walking back to the counter to collect Pam’s coffee mug, then setting it down next to her. “I should have written it down on a napkin or something, dammit.”

“It’s okay, honey,” Pam says to him, then turning to Phillip and trying another spoonful. “We believe you, don’t we sweetie? Yes, we do.”

Just as he sits down at the table, Cece runs into the room with no pants on, holding two trains and depositing them into Jim’s lap. “Daddy! Play trains with me!”

“He asked me to help him, actually,” Jim says distractedly, almost as an afterthought, setting the trains on the table. Cece suddenly seems to find the table leg more interesting than the prospect of train time with daddy, and bends down to inspect it closely.

“Help him, as in… work for the company?” Pam asks.

“Yeah, I mean… I’m sure he feels guilty for stealing my idea.”

She grins. “You mean the napkin idea you’ve been sitting on for fifteen years? That idea?”

“Shut it, Beesly,” he smirks playfully.

“Well, what did you say?”

He shrugs. “I haven’t actually called him back.” 

“Oh?” she asks. “Why not?”

“I guess I thought I’d tell you about it first. See what you think.”

Pam levels her eyes at him. “It’s in Philadelphia.” 

She says nothing more, because to her, it feels like the conversation ends here.

“Right. Yeah, you’re right.” He nods and looks back at his phone. 

She waits for him to say something else, but he doesn’t. Whatever this thing is, it doesn’t sound like it’s even a ‘thing’ yet anyway, so she’s not sure what else there is to be said.

She nods. “Well, maybe you can be his Scranton liaison,” she teases. With the exception of some volleyball back in school, she isn’t much into sports; it’s the one thing she and Jim really don’t have in common. But she knows enough to know there really isn’t much in the way of sporting events in this town.

Jim smiles, but there’s a funny look on his face. She’s been seeing it more and more ever since Phillip was born and she wants to ask him about it but there’s a part of her that’s slightly terrified to hear the answer. 

“You okay?” she asks him.

“Yeah, I’m good. It’s just… never mind. It’s all just so impractical.”

She wonders if this is something he actually wants to do. She wonders if she should press him about it. But he leans down to pick up Cece, tossing her into the air, and amidst their child's delighted squeals Pam can almost convince herself she’s forgotten about the entire thing.

***

It’s been difficult getting a read on Nellie since she arrived; first with the weird way she essentially stole Andy’s job, then the whole magician ex-boyfriend debacle. But girlfriends have been in short supply lately. Isabel visits whenever she can, but with two kids and a full time job, work is really the only place Pam gets to have much adult human interaction. And she’s tried and failed over the years to develop meaningful relationships with the other women in the office. 

Well, she’s sort of tried.

In any event, she thinks she’s actually starting to like Nellie as a result of their little impromptu driving lesson. The woman is a terrible driver, and not a minute passes where Pam isn’t terrified she’ll total their car, but she can’t deny she’s sort of fun. And when Pam shows her a picture of the mural she’d painted on Angela’s nursery wall, Nellie seems to genuinely like it. 

Maybe that’s why Pam decides to open up; or maybe it’s just because something’s been bothering her, and putting it out into the open makes it real. 

“...I actually do have this weird feeling that there's something Jim isn't telling me,” she reveals to Nellie in the car. Ever since their last interview for the doc crew a couple of weeks ago, she’s noticed Jim behaving sort of distantly. She’s run down the list of possibilities in her head, and she’s landed on the morning they’d discussed Colin and his new business venture as the source of the change. 

She isn’t stupid. Something inside her is saying he wants to participate in the new business. But for whatever reason, he’s holding back from telling her how he really feels about it. 

Nellie, meanwhile, looks absolutely horrified. “Oh no! Oh! An affair! It is always an affair!” 

“Jim?” Pam laughs, actually laughs. “No.” 

Nellie sighs. “How can you be sure?” 

Pam smiles, because whatever Jim is hiding from her, she’s one hundred percent certain it isn’t that. She shrugs. “Because he just loves me too much.”

Nellie gives her a little side-eye, and while Pam instinctively believes Nellie thinks she’s full of shit, she’s being entirely serious. “You're a cocky little thing, aren't you, Pam?”

Pam grins, completely aware of how lucky she is to feel so secure. This attitude doesn’t always stretch across everything in her life, but her relationship with Jim has been the one area in which she’s always felt absolutely confident. 

“Well, Pam from a few years ago would tend to disagree with you.” 

Nellie grins, thankfully now looking back at the road. “You never can tell, you know. Men.” She utters the last word with just the right amount of veiled disdain.

“Jim isn’t… men,” Pam says. “It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“I used to think like that as well,” Nellie says in that way she does that means she’s got a whole story to unpack. “Then they just rip your bloody heart out, don’t they?”

Pam watches her, waiting for the inevitable sad tale that will surely follow, but Nellie is silent, staring straight out the windshield. Perhaps her story is a bit too painful to share. Maybe they aren’t quite there yet.

“You remember Cathy, who used to work with us?” Pam offers up. “She opened the store in Tallahassee with you guys?”

Nellie turns to her with the same horrified look on her face as before. “Oh Pam, I’m so sorry.”

“No, it’s not what you think,” Pam says quickly. “I mean… well, not really. But she did practically throw herself at Jim.”

Nellie cocks her head sympathetically. “I knew it. Somehow I had a feeling about those two.”

Pam takes a deep breath, not wanting to have heard that. 

“Well, Jim called me right away. To tell me nothing happened.”

“Guilty conscience,” Nellie nods, off in her own little world. “And you believed him.”

Pam bristles a bit in Jim’s defense. She would never believe Nellie over Jim, but the other woman’s skepticism in this moment of Pam’s own certainty is irksome. 

“Well, what should he have done? Not told me about it at all?”

Nellie shrugs. “Who knows the ways of men and their lies?”

Pam smiles a bit, shakes her head. “You are something else, you know that?”

“So, what did he tell you?” Nellie asks.

Pam remembers that night clearly. It hadn’t been easy after Phillip’s birth to regain her self confidence, and while she knew in her heart she completely trusted her husband, Jim being gone for three weeks, and in close proximity to someone she was certain was interested in him, had added up to just enough anxiety for her to eagerly await his phone calls every night on schedule.

“So… I owe you twenty bucks.”

It’s late, and while she’s thrilled to hear Jim’s voice, he had already phoned to tell her good night an hour earlier. The necessity of a call at this hour from Tallahassee to discuss some bet they’d made eludes her.

“What do you mean? Is everything alright?”

Pam hears him sigh on the other end of the line and can picture it: her exhausted husband propped up against a pillow in his hotel room, pinching the bridge of his nose in that way he used to when Michael was around. 

“Everything’s fine,” he says. “You’ll never guess where I am and why I’m here.”

She’d just gotten both kids to sleep and had really been looking forward to taking a long bath. She plops down on the couch and kicks her legs up onto the coffee table. 

“Please don’t make me guess.” 

Jim exhales loudly. “Remember the other night, when you swore up and down Cathy had the hots for me?”

She’s slightly startled by this abrupt announcement. 

“Yes…?” she says, her stomach suddenly churning in a sort of helpless, unfortunate way. She hates that she immediately looks at her feet. Angela’s earlier comment about ‘cankles’ looms far too prominently in her mind.

“...And remember when I said she didn’t?”

Pam cringes. She does. She also now remembers betting him twenty bucks Cathy would make a move on him while they were in Florida.

“What happened, Jim?”

“Well, nothing happened. But you were right about her wanting it to.”

Pam isn’t typically the jealous type; mostly because she has no reason to be. The idea of Jim cheating or even having the desire to cheat is unfathomable to her, and while most people might scoff at such a notion, she doesn’t care. It’s just the way she feels; she’s always felt secure about him in that way. But she’s been feeling particularly vulnerable lately. Her unequivocal trust in Jim doesn’t make the idea of some attractive, younger woman throwing herself at him any more palatable. And regardless of what he would actually do, she can’t help but wonder what he’d been thinking. 

She speaks slowly and deliberately. “What. Happened.”

“She came to my room, wanting to hang out because her heater had broken.”

Pam rolls her eyes. “You fell for that?” 

“Well, no,” he sounds a bit defensive. “I had no reason to think she had an ulterior motive.”

“Besides the very valid reason that your wife told you she does?”

He laughs a bit. “Well, besides that.”

“So then what happened?”

“Nothing. She was just sending me all these signals, so I shut her down, and that was the end of it."

"Uh huh."

"I’m only calling to tell you that you were right. So you can gloat.”

Pam smiles. “I plan to.”

“And to tell you I love you.”

“Well, that I approve of. I love you, too.” 

She can tell he’s being serious, and can’t help but acknowledge the possibility that if anything untoward had actually occurred he might not be calling her at all. 

“I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to work with her after this, though, to be honest,” he says.

Pam grits her teeth. She doesn’t like to think negatively about other women, especially women she works with. But ‘how fucking dare she’ and ‘I will kick her ass’ and ‘maybe I can get Andy to fire her’ have all entered her mind without a moment’s hesitation. 

“It doesn’t matter,” she decides, after taking a deep breath. “You know what does matter?”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line, but Jim delivers.

“Us.”

Her stomach calms, her heart rate slows. If there was even a moment’s doubt, it’s evaporated now. 

“How is everything else? How’s Florida?”

“It’s… fine.” He's quiet, as if he doesn’t want to say much. “I’m not sure if this whole brick-and-mortar idea is going to work out, but I suppose they’re not paying me for my ideas.”

“A paycheck is a paycheck.”

“True,” he says. He sounds as if he might have something to add, but then changes the subject. “That Nellie sure is a character.”

“Wait,” Pam says, sitting up a bit. “Nellie? That woman who applied for Michael’s job?”

“Yeah, she’s running the project out here. I guess she’s a good friend of Jo’s. She’s… nuts.” 

“Wow, you really have your hands full out there.”

“Well, you have your hands full over there. How are the kids?” he asks, and it makes her insides warm. She stares across the room as Phillip’s video monitor flickers on: that brief charged moment where she isn’t sure if he’s awake or just wiggling around in his sleep.

“They’re good,” she says, watching him settle. “Cece has been talking so much. Today she said ‘Grammy is crazy, Mommy.’” Just like that. The whole sentence. Her affectation was on point.”

Jim laughs on the other end of the line. 

“That’s my girl,” he says. “And she’s not wrong. Don’t tell your mom I said that.”

Pam shakes her head, pinching the bridge of her own nose now. She’d never really thought so before, but after your mother has had sex with Michael Scott, there’s a certain amount of respect that’s just irretrievable. It’s true, as it turns out, all these years later: you simply can’t come back from that.

Crazy or not, Grammy has been incredibly helpful while Jim’s been gone. She and Penny had gone home just after the kids went down, and Pam is suddenly very, very aware of just how alone she is. She feels a pang she hasn’t had a moment to properly acknowledge since Jim left. He feels so far away; even though he’s only been gone for a few days she aches for him. 

“I wish you were here right now.”

“Me too. I miss you.”

She switches the tone of her voice to a very specific one she knows he’ll recognize, her fingers toying with the waistband of her pajama pants. “Why don’t you tell me how much you miss me?”

Jim’s voice drops a bit. “Um… I’m not sure now is the greatest time for that…?” He drops it even further, to a whisper. “I’m in Dwight’s room.”

She retracts her hand. “What? Why?”

“It’s a long story. Let’s just say bed bugs were involved. He’s in the bathroom, but I just heard the toilet flush.”

She shudders. “Are you… gonna sleep in there?”

“Yes. Don’t judge me.”

Pam chuckles, things becoming clearer in an instant. “So Dwight rescued you from… bed bugs? Or from the scary twenty-year-old seductress?”

“Both, and I’m incredibly grateful.” She hears him hold the phone away from him, then louder, “say hi to Pam.”

“Hello, Pam,” the very serious voice of Dwight comes through. “Don’t worry, we took care of all the bed bugs.”

“Tell him I said thank you for taking care of one particular bed bug,” she says pointedly to Jim. 

“Hey,” he says after a moment, sounding serious now. “I hope you know I didn’t need Dwight to take care of this.”

“Oh, really?”

“It was just easier that way.”

She smiles. “I know. You are Mr. Nice Guy, after all.”

“Wouldn’t want to tarnish my reputation.”

She grins. “I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

"And I miss you so much."

The fire inside her that's always burned just for him flickers with comforting familiarity. They say their good nights and as she hangs up, her eye catches his “Mr. Nice Guy” Dundie across the room, sitting on their mantel right next to her Whitest Sneakers award. 

She feels a cozy sense of relief that, when it comes to her and Jim, some things will never, ever change.

“Hmm,” Nellie says. “Sounds like a classic cover-up to me.”

Pam rolls her car window up. “Are you being serious, or are you just trying to get a rise out of me?”

“There are two things you need to know about me. The first is that I will never, ever trust another man again.”

“And the second?” Pam asks, almost afraid to know.

Nellie turns to grin at her. “The second is that I like you, Pam.”

Pam narrows her eyes. “I’m still deciding.”

“That is fair,” Nellie replies. They’re pulling into Dunder Mifflin now, and Pam thanks her lucky stars they’ve arrived intact. 

“I actually have something I’d like to show you,” Nellie says as they climb out of the car. She makes a detour from the front door and heads around back, towards the warehouse entrance.

Pam is slightly exhausted by Nellie’s antics, but also curious to see what she wants to show her. As they enter the warehouse, Nellie gestures up at the enormous empty gray wall before them.

“That is quite an ugly wall, isn't it?” 

”Yeah. It's really ugly,” Pam agrees.

“Needs something, doesn't it? I'm thinking… a mural.”

It only takes a second, but the feeling of elation that runs through Pam when she realizes what Nellie is proposing is real and powerful. 

“You mean... me?”

“Yes! You! You are soooo talented!” Nellie looks extremely proud of herself for her amazing idea but being called ‘talented’ by someone who isn’t Jim has the exact amount of serotonin Pam requires right now. “It's going to be my next special project. Hiring Scranton's most dangerous young muralist to paint the warehouse wall.”

Pam cannot believe it. She will actually be paid to do art, and right here at Dunder Mifflin: the place she’s come to love in spite of everything else. It’s the best news she’s had in awhile.

“Oh my god! I love it! Nellie, this is brilliant!” 

What started out as a typical day at work is shaping out to be rather incredible. A new job, and maybe even a new friend. 

Jim and Darryl walk over just then, and Pam can hardly contain her excitement to tell him. 

“Hey!”

“Hey!” Jim replies, and then follows that up with “Can I talk to you? For a second?”

Nellie gives Jim the stink eye, and he looks slightly confused, but as Pam walks towards him, rolling her eyes, she can tell he understands. 

He opens the door to the warehouse office for her, and follows her in. The door shuts and they’re engulfed with a heavy silence.

“What’s up with her?” he asks.

“Oh, she’s… she’s slightly insane, Jim. I think you’re right.”

He laughs. “I told you.”

“But... I actually do kind of like her.” She smiles, making sure Jim knows she’s being serious. “Sort of related, you’ll never guess what I’m going to get to do.”

“What?”

“Nellie just commissioned me to paint a mural on the warehouse wall. As one of her special projects.”

He looks taken aback, but predictably thrilled. 

“Beesly!” he exclaims in that way she loves. “That’s great!” He charges forward to hug her. “I mean… this is exactly the kind of thing you should be doing.” He holds her for a few moments, then pulls away, looking genuinely happy for her. “Do you know what you’re going to paint?”

“I got the job about thirty seconds ago, Jim,” she laughs. 

He smiles, but she hasn’t forgotten that he’s pulled her in here because he clearly has something important to tell her. They’re quiet for a few seconds before he steps back, his hand going to the back of his neck. When he turns around to walk behind Darryl’s desk, she can see his ears are pink, Jim’s tell that he’s very, very nervous about something. He suddenly looks a bit awkward, like he’d rather be anywhere but here.

“So… what did you want to talk to me about?” she asks cautiously.

From the look on his face, a horrible thought strikes her that maybe he is going to tell her he’s been having an affair after all. Maybe Crazy Nellie had been, in fact, spot on. In the excruciating seconds she waits for Jim to speak, a handful of names cycle through her mind, each one less likely than the one before, and she hates that she’s even considering this horrifying possibility at all.

“Okay.” He walks behind Darryl’s chair, grips it with his hands. He takes a deep breath. “So… you know my friend Colin and the business he’s starting?”

It’s about work, it’s just about some job. Sweet relief courses through her veins and she immediately feels guilty she could even for a second have suspected him of anything else.

“Oh!” she replies. “Yeah? The… sports thing?”

“Yeah, the sports thing,” Jim says. She hadn’t meant it to sound flippant, but can’t help but notice he flinches a bit. “Well… he offered me an actual job, Pam. A real job. And, well…” he looks a bit guilty as the next part of his sentence comes out. “...I took it.”

She stares at him for a full five seconds before replying. 

“You... took it?”

He nods.

“The… job... in Philadelphia?”

“Well, it won’t be. While we’re starting up it’s just going to be part time, from Scranton.”

“Oh.” 

“I can keep my job here, you know, and do this on the side,” he explains.

“Oh.” 

She hates that she can’t seem to formulate any other words, she’s just so taken aback by this entire development.

She isn’t quite sure what to say because whatever this is doesn’t sound quite real yet. But Jim seems very excited and she wants to share in his excitement the same way he’d always done for her. 

“That… sounds really great, Jim,” she says. “So what will you be doing, exactly?”

He seems to unclench a bit, the hard part apparently over. “I’ve just been going over logistics with Colin and the other partners, trying to secure some office space, and getting some investors. Feeling around for clients, that sort of thing.”

“Wow,” she says, slightly thrown. “That sounds like a lot of work. How long… how long have you been doing this?”

“Um,” he says, that guilty look back on his face. “I mean, it’s only been a couple of weeks.”

She feels a cold chill run through her body. 

“You’ve known about this for weeks and you didn’t tell me?”

Jim shrugs. “It’s not a big deal, you know. I guess I just sort of wanted to see what it was all about before I told you anything official.”

A memory surfaces of that day at Roy’s wedding, knowing he had something to tell her and watching him squirm all day, simply unable to open up. She and Jim had always told each other everything. The idea that he’d keep something important like this from her is not only unbelievably confusing, it stings.

“I mean… gosh, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

“I’m sorry about that,” he says. “I really am. But this could be so great, Pam. Remember what I told you about finding that thing I wanted to do? That thing I could be passionate about?”

She remembers. She also remembers feeling included in that conversation.

“Well, I think I may have finally found it. This company seems like it can really be amazing, if we can just get it off the ground. Colin and Wade seem to really have a handle on where they want this thing to go.”

Colin and Wade. He says their names smoothly, with familiarity she finds jarring. She barely knows these people. She can’t help but wonder if Colin and Wade have wives from whom they hid all of this, too.

She finds herself nodding, again, her head bobbing up and down of its own accord. This always happens when she’s put into fight or flight mode: it’s as if when she wants to argue, or stand up for herself, her body starts making decisions on its own. Kind of like the way Jim makes these decisions on her behalf: Jim, who bought their house without consulting her. Who proposed at a gas station in the rain despite the fact that they’d agreed to wait. She’s by no means ungrateful or resentful for those things, but she can’t deny there’s a pattern emerging, and she isn’t entirely pleased about it.

She still feels like Jim is holding something back, although she isn’t sure what else that could possibly be. He just sounds distant and secretive, not his usual self. She isn’t sure she likes this Jim; the one who makes executive decisions and keeps secrets. It’s condescending and disrespectful and slightly selfish but what can she do? Tell him no? He looks so happy. 

For a moment, that old part of her rears its ugly head and she wants to shut this all down right here, right now.

I can’t.

I can’t.

But as she looks into Jim’s eyes, she can see herself from years ago: the person who, even for just a moment, wanted to do something different with her life. Someone who could be brave, take a risk.

“And... this is it?” she asks quietly. “This is really what you want to do?”

He nods at her. “It really is.”

She will not tell him he can’t pursue his dream, she would never want to tell him that. Especially after he’d been so supportive of her own pursuits. But the way this has begun… it feels tainted now, oddly doomed.

“Okay,” she says, feeling slightly apprehensive about the whole thing. 

He’s her husband. She’s his wife. She’s promised to love and support him no matter what. 

Jim reacts instantly, gratefully, and pulls her into an embrace. She clings to him, hoping beyond hope that this thing she’s agreed to doesn’t spiral out of her control. 

“This is going to be great for us, Pam,” he says into her shoulder. “I just know it.”

Us, he said. She wants to believe he means it. 

Maybe it will be great, she tells herself. Maybe it will work out, and he can have what he wants and she can have what their family needs and everything will be perfect. 

Just like it always has been.