There wasn’t a great place to hide, at least not one with a view, leaving Pam to wait in the stairwell. With an ear pressed to the door, she listened for the bing of the elevator to know when to crack it open and peek out. Phase two of her plan now set in motion, she expected her other version to emerge any minute and make her departure from the building, quite possibly forever.

If all went as it should, by the time that Pam arrived back here, it would only be to fade away again. Just the same as Hermione and Harry had when time folded back on itself and their new versions stepped in for the old.

The thought of it, of their convergence back into the present had her beyond nervous. There were still so many moving parts that had to come together, not just for her and Michael to return safely to a single timeline, but to do so having locked in the changes she made in her life. Changes, that had it not been for this strange journey she might never have realized how much she needed to make. Sharp turns in her path that even if she had ultimately come to see was the route to her happiness, she might never before have discovered the strength in herself to shift from the direction she was going. At least not before it was too late.

But in rewinding the past, she found her way to a road that led forward.

As always, she reached down for her finger. It wasn’t just the recollection her ring was no longer there that stopped her in her tracks but the muffled chime alerting her to the opening elevator doors.

Through the smallest slit she could push open and still see out of, she peeked through to see the girl in the pale colored puffer coat walk past Hank, without as much as a wave or a glance in his direction. Knowing it had to be her other self’s aggravation with Michael that was to blame for her rudeness didn’t make it any less so or absolve her own guilt about ignoring him as she sailed on by. She wondered how many times before she had been too preoccupied, whether from annoyance at Michael or busy sharing a last laugh with Jim, to at least nod a goodbye to Hank.

Maybe when she’d slipped into her counterpart’s place, she could find time to come back down to apologize for doing it today. She couldn’t now, not after witnessing the lines of confusion striping his face, arched brows accentuating what he must be thinking watching her leave again so soon and without an acknowledgment of their recent conversation. But as before, his bewilderment was fleeting. In no time at all he was back to his reading, before the glass door even settled back to a closed position following her other self’s passing through it.

A strange sensation came over Pam as she pushed the one she hid behind to seal it shut once more. Knowing the girl who just left was her past, she couldn’t help but feeling a touch of sadness that a chapter of her life was ending. That the chasm of who she was and who she wanted to be would soon close as she’d carved out a new version of Pam Beesly, one who had a chance to start over and rewrite her story with someone who made her feel important and smart and talented and loved.

Herself.

In due course, she would share that love with a partner who appreciated and treasured the new girl with a renewed fire in her green eyes. She would begin rewriting that new arc today.

Still feeling a touch of poignant nostalgia for the girl leaving, Pam closed her eyes and smiled.

After a beat or two of reflection, she opened them again, looking down at herself as she turned to make her way up the stairs.  Once more she caught sight of the striped shirt she wore.

Buttoning up her cardigan to hide it, she glanced down again her now bare finger.

Both were concerns as she intended to take her own place for the rest of the day and had her worries about who might note the changes in her. It wasn’t like anyone would suspect time travel was the reason, but she had enough to be concerned about already without having to explain why she had changed her clothes after lunch.

Thinking it through she decided it was primarily Kelly she needed to avoid, and maybe Phyllis. Busy bodies, each of them, either one could very well notice her ringless hand, but only the former would likely hone in on the altered style and color of her shirt.

With a mental note to try to keep her hands out of view the rest of the day, she mused again how pockets would come in handy, but with none she would have to resort to other methods of hiding them.

And avoid Kelly as much as she could, which she would want to do anyway. There was too much abuzz in her head. She didn’t need Kelly’s ceaseless chatter disturbing what little composure she was struggling to maintain.

She’d made it halfway up the stairs when it dawned on her, the other issue with regard to her wardrobe. She left from the office wearing her jacket. If she intended to walk back into Dunder Mifflin mere minutes after she departed, she ought to return with it on.

But the lookalike version was down in the spare room along with Michael. She could kill two birds at once, go get him and the coat. But she couldn’t go back through the lobby to get there. She couldn’t confuse Hank any further than she had.

Instead, she continued climbing, past the second floor and up to the third once more in order to switch over to the back staircase and get back down to the first.

She was getting quite the workout today going up and down the stairs, a good thing considering how much she’d been eating these two weeks. Though she no longer had to worry about fitting into a wedding dress, her work skirt was feeling a tad snug when she put it on this morning. She knew a few more trips up and down wouldn’t make a huge difference to her actual weight, but looking at the extra steps as a head start to a new fitness regimen made it feel worthwhile. And while she imagined it was in her head only, by the time she got back down to the ground floor she felt a whole lot lighter, if also a bit winded.

It wasn’t until she had reached the room, noting the three boxes piled up in front of it, that she slowly shut down her lids, recalling what she’d forgot.  

The coats were not in there. They were, if Michael had followed instructions, returned to Burlington by now.

All in all, it wasn’t a huge setback. She had probably been overthinking her re-entrance; coat or no coat, would anyone even know she had been gone?

Michael might have if he wasn’t missing himself.

And Jim.

She was sure of it now, despite their fight, he’d still be the one to know she just left, and he’d be the one to track her coming back.

Suddenly she wanted to be back up in the office where he was immediately. Even if she wasn’t going to declare her love, she just wanted to be near him, make things right again and tell him what she had just done.

But first she needed to grab Michael.

Setting her ear up against the door to hear him belting out ‘feel the beat of the tangerine’, her eyes dropped again, this time to accompany the gentle smile that washed over her knowing he was having loads of fun in his new, well to this version at least, playroom.

She crept away, deciding it was better and faster for her to keep to the original plan. She would let Michael do a little more dancing inside and Randall would retrieve him once he saw her back at her desk. Besides, with all the stair climbing, she was too tired to start moving boxes out of the way.

To be safe she decided to go up the back stairs. Sneaking in through the annex, and doing it without grabbing the attention of its two inhabitants she imagined could prove a little tricky but thankfully she managed to get through undetected. Aside from the shirt, the overnight bag on her shoulder would certainly have invited questions from Kelly, and she was still not prepared with any answers.

With Kelly and Toby engaged in a round Dunderball, she didn’t need them, and sailed on through to the kitchen and then the bullpen.

As suspected, nobody even looked up as she completed the trek to her desk. Not even Jim, because he wasn’t at his either.

Her heart already racing, it now also sank to her stomach where its increased thumping was as combustive as a Mento dropped into a bottle of cola. After wiping new beads of perspiration from her brow, she unbuttoned the cardigan that at this point was only adding to the trapped heat brought on by her panic. She’d wanted to take it off but knew that would only make the different shirt she was wearing more noticeable.

Where was he?

Her bag tossed under the ledge in her space she swiftly turned back towards the break room via the kitchen to see if he was there picking up an afternoon snack.

But when she checked, the breakroom was empty too.

Everything had been going so smooth up until now but without Jim her plan could very well fall apart. There was no one else she could trust with the manifesto which, if the memories faded along with whichever version of her also did, could be the only thing that might make her understand why she had ended it with Roy. Without it, and the coded messages it contained, she might not even know she had. She could only imagine how that might go when she went to meet him in the truck and learned what she’d done.

Once she got out of the hospital with no signs of drugs in her system or other diagnosis for what could have caused her dissociative fugue state, she might fall right back into her old ways and wind up in the same exact place she started.

It was that damn immutable timeline.

Despite all her efforts, it might come down to be that the time travel model they were experiencing was the one where nothing changes in the end.

Still, she decided to have faith it wasn’t. That there was the likelihood that when her two selves merged back, so too would all the memories. Along with everything she’d learned and everything she decided and everything she did.

Plus, there was still time for Jim to show up.

He always had for her in the past.

The trip back through the kitchen she took slower, pulse still rapid but as she focused her breathing it began to slow down.

This time as she emerged into the bullpen, she nearly bumped into Phyllis startling her enough that she dropped the boxes of pens and paper clips just collected from the supply shelf.

Reaching down to help grab them, Pam remembered about her shirt and missing ring and quickly drew back her left hand to awkwardly pull her cardigan closed, hiding her finger in the process. Scared Phyllis might notice, she hurried to pick up the two boxes with her single hand but as she rose to hand them back, she had to let go of the sweater in order to slip the hand to her side, revealing the striped shirt behind it.  

“Thanks, dear. Bending down with my sciatic hip is not easy.”

If Phyllis had noticed the clumsy movements or what she was wearing, she never let on, but Pam still hurried away leaving Phyllis to refill her pen cup and clip tray while she stepped to the other side of Dwight’s desk.

“Hey Dwight,” she meekly interrupted his manic typing and intent focus on the computer screen, unaware he had just spent so long debating the existence of wizards that he was behind on his self-established deadline and trying to catch up on time he had lost.

“Do you happen to know where Jim went?”

Barely lifting his head to look up at her, he muttered under his breath, “sales call.”

She may not have been witness to it but Dwight’s mood told her Jim had either just completed one of his pranks had otherwise been giving him a hard time. Despite knowing with Dwight mad at Jim, and perhaps her by extension, he wasn’t going to be much help, she still asked her follow-up question.  

“Oh, thanks. Do you know when he’s coming back?”

From over at her desk, she heard a trilling, only it resounded with a bell-like sound, instead of the normal chirping of their office phone system.

She’d been gone for two weeks, three days of which, there was no version of Pam in the office at all. Three days at Dunder Mifflin was a long time, two weeks, an eternity. With Michael making decisions without her to stop the most rash and ridiculous of them, anything could happen including a change to the telecom equipment. That Techstar rep had been getting more and more persistent in his calls. Did he decide to just show up one day and get her boss all excited with his fancy new telephones? Or had Ryan just messed with the ringtones just as he rearranged the stuff on her desk?

“Do I look like Jim’s secretary? It’s not my job to keep tabs on his schedule. Michael’s, yes, as assistant regional manager, that’s the calendar I need to stay on top of, although I’m not even sure where he got to in the last hour. I don’t recall anything on his calendar that would keep him away this long.”

The persistent ringing of the phone continued as Dwight looked up at last, eyes scanning around for their boss.  Pam held back from saying ‘to the’ as Jim often tortured him by adding whenever Dwight mentioned his fake title. And though she knew exactly where he had gotten to, she refrained from mentioning anything of where Michael was, or the fact it was not part of his job to know. If it was anybody’s, it was hers. But that was a debate she didn’t have time to get into. Besides Michael would be back soon enough.

But Dwight being Dwight, jumped up to begin a search for their manager, heading first towards his office, barking at Pam as he walked away from her, sounding a little like Angela with his condescension about her interest in Jim’s whereabouts.  

“But it is not my duty to keep track of where Jim is and it isn’t yours either. However, it is your job to answer the phones so shouldn’t you be at your desk answering that?”

Dwight was right about that, attending to the phone was her responsibility. She had to hope it would still be hers even with the fancy new system she was beginning to suspect had replaced the old one while she herself had been out also becoming new and improved.

And if new phones made her job redundant, she would have to insist on that promotion to saleswoman that Michael himself just brought up.

But for the time, her job was still receptionist, no matter which one of herself was here, so she raced back to pick up the call.

🕐🕑🕔🕖🕘🕚🕧

Something was not quite right.

There was no reason he could know, but he got the sense her mic pack wasn’t picking up any audio.

He was unsure why it even crossed his mind as he aimed his camera on her. He never heard live what the wireless lavaliers recorded as he filmed. The only dialogue he picked up while rolling was what he could hear with his own ears.

It was why he needed laser focus and something of a Spidey sense to know where the story would be; where to point the lens, especially if he was out of earshot from the action. But those mic pacs and Brian’s boom often caught some bonus chatter that added depth to what they were documenting.

Sometimes faces alone defined a moment. Sometimes it was body language. But typically, it was the combined audio and video that told the complete story, even when they seemed out of sync; when the far away looks and longing stares and the smiles they likely didn’t even know their eyes were making, contradicted the declarations they said aloud.

 And sometimes hot mics picked up audio gems revealing some hilarious shit and some deeper secrets.

He prided himself on the sixth sense he possessed which once again had been spot on.

As Pam turned away from Dwight, who was giving her a hard time about the phones, it confirmed what he had suspected.

She wasn’t wearing her additional mic.

That meant there was a reason she had taken it off. And it had to be huge.

Whatever she didn’t want being heard, surely told a bigger story. And that was precisely what he and the crew was here to uncover.

Without leaving his post, he trailed her back to her desk, focusing the camera on her face to search for some clue, zooming in as she brought the receiver to her ear.

That’s where he found the biggest one.

Her finger was bare. Gone was the engagement ring that he was sure had been there this morning. He specifically remembered filming her earlier turning it round and round as she so often did. But it was not there now. 

This was bigger than he thought. He had to alert Randall and the rest of the team. But he couldn’t yet because what he was capturing on her face as she spoke to the person on the other end of the call was as telling as any audio they might have missed. Someone was making her very upset.

🕐🕑🕔🕖🕘🕚🕧

Vicky’s tone was a mix of concern and questioning with a hint of the quickening anger Roy had clearly inherited from his mother.

But it wasn’t a big surprise to hear the mama bear coming out in Vicky. She was always quick to defend her son, making excuses for behavior Pam knew she still recognized as wrong since she would often follow the Matlock-style defense she presented to her future daughter-in-law, with a Judge Judy-like dressing down directed at her child. She'd been following the pattern for years, first appealing to Pam’s sympathies and then attacking him sometimes right in front of her. In fact, it was Vicky who first told him to, in her exact words, “shit or get off the pot” prompting the engagement that was intended to make Pam part of the family.

She knew Vicky, as angry as she might be at Pam, still loved her like she was and was only trying to get to the bottom of this fight so she could do her normal meddling, which meant giving them both a talking to. This was just Pam’s turn.

But Vicky seemed more upset than usual as if she knew there was not much she could do or say to either of them this time to fix the situation, and squarely putting blame on Pam with her initial accusation.

She started with a harsh reproach stating threats didn’t work with Roy, and to stop with the repeated ultimatums, they’d never end in the result she intended them to. Scolding her angrily that what she’d pulled last night was bad enough, but today the dramatics with the ring was a step too far.

The choke in her voice as she spoke the word ring ripped into Pam’s resolve and hearing the woman’s attitude shift from condemnation to something that felt a lot more like compassion and grief, was like a punch to the gut that left her nauseous and dizzy.

Still, she remained silent, not entirely sure what Vicky was even talking about as she went on about how it wasn’t fair to have forgiven her son last night, only to then break it off again today, that she hadn’t even given him a chance to make amends.

But speech wasn’t possible for Pam, as the emotion compressing her heart had made its way to up to her throat, strangling her vocal cords before continuing its upward climb to where it was currently assaulting her eyes, flooding them with mournful liquid.

Pam’s face had flushed hot the moment she first heard it was the woman she had grown to love on the other end of the line. Now she almost wished Vicky kept on with the yelling and her outrage. She’d still feel sadness but not quite the devastation overwhelming her now.  But as the love hidden in Vicky’s pleads got louder and louder, she could hear nothing else.

It was that same love for her and his whole family, that she knew had played a subconscious role in keeping her tied to Roy so long. She was, in spirit, engaged to all of them too, Vicky and Janet, Dennis and Bob, Kenny who she often didn’t care for, but Samantha, his sister who she did. In her planning what she’d just done, she’d not taken into account that leaving Roy, ending her relationship with him, meant losing all of them too. She’d not considered how much it would hurt.

But it wasn’t just that sadness soaking her eyes as Vicky kept on asking her what Roy could have done that was so unforgivable, she was willing to throw away the 9 ½ year relationship they had built.

It was the culmination of everything that she’d been through over those years heightened by everything that had been happening to her in the last two weeks and on top of that all the nervousness, anticipation and fear of what was going to occur in the next two hours.

“Vicky,” she started but unable to form the sentence that might begin to explain, she went quiet again.

It was then she looked up and saw Matt’s camera directed straight at her.

“I can’t,” she cried into the phone before placing it back on the cradle and running off to the bathroom as the tears that had been caught between her lashes streamed down her face.