Pamela Anderson—née Beesly—was content.

She was fairly certain of that, at any rate.

Well, as certain as she could be about a state of being that, if she was being fully honest, she wasn’t sure she’d actually felt for several years, if not at least a decade. She was content because she had to be content, because any other option was foreclosed to her. She could not say she was happy—that particular form of self-delusion had flown the coop the day she’d told Roy either she was moving out or he was moving to the guest room in the basement, and he hadn’t even argued with her, just started pulling his stuff out of the closet in the master bedroom and into a storage tote he found under the bed.

The fact that it was the storage tote that still held her long-disused painting supplies, and that he hadn’t even bothered to look inside it before using it was merely confirmation that she’d made the right choice.

She couldn’t, on the other hand, rightfully say that she was unhappy either. She had her hobbies—painting newly reinstated as one of them, after Roy tossed the tote out of the guest bedroom carelessly and she retrieved what remained in the bottom of it—and her friends, and her parents (unlike her, formally divorced) living nearby, and there were ducks and duckponds and the occasional pickup volleyball game after work.

And she had her books, too: recently she’d been getting really into mystery novels—Dorothy L. Sayers was a favorite, especially the line about the “massive continuity of ducks” (she liked ducks) and the second chance romance between Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Whimsey—and the occasional science fiction (never fantasy, or else she’d start telling herself that Roy was a goblin or a troll or something, not merely someone she’d loved once and didn’t anymore).

So yes. She wasn’t unhappy. She just wasn’t happy. And for all the reading, she hadn’t really considered expanding her vocabulary beyond those two options. Not for her the massive possibilities of an unleashed thesaurus. If she was not happy, and not unhappy, then she was content, and goddamnit if she wasn’t going to hold hard onto that word and ignore the whisper in her mind that suggested it was a lot closer to “happy” than she had experienced in quite some time.

She read in bed, mostly, nowadays. The house she and Roy had bought—not rented, which she’d thought was a great idea but now would have said she deeply regretted if it weren’t for the fact that “deeply regret” made her think too much about the word “content”—and were now locked into due to a favorable mortgage at an interest rate she couldn’t have achieved with perfect credit and a million dollars in today’s economy was large enough that there was a whole apartment in the basement. It was traditionally called a mother-in-law apartment, but right now it was an estranged husband apartment and had been for some years. It was large enough that Roy didn’t have to wander upstairs, but they’d never really clearly established the boundaries of when he could and when he couldn’t, and she didn’t really feel like running into him while reading in the living room, or hearing him huff about how the TV upstairs really ought to be downstairs (as if there were space for the monstrosity he’d bought on any wall but the one it hung on), so bed it was. The bedroom was her space, ever since he’d abandoned it for the basement, and while it didn’t have a balcony per se, like she’d always dreamed, it did have a little patio-like space above the front door that she could fit an easel on when the sky wasn’t threatening, and enough lamps to furnish a Home Goods courtesy of her constant search for better light to paint when it was.

Right now she was reading a time travel story—the title escaped her, but it didn’t much matter as she could always glance at the cover if she needed—about a woman who could flit about her own timeline, fixing things and reordering whatever she thought she’d done wrong. It was clearly derivative of The Time Traveler’s Wife, but she’d liked that book enough that this one could hold her interest too, and she liked the deliberative nature of the time travel (and the fact that it was the woman who could travel in time). Still, she couldn’t help but think that the protagonist wasn’t using her power to the fullest: sure, she tinkered with things when they went wrong, but she had lived a pretty good life, and Pam could tell that the lesson the book was slowly bending its way towards was that you had to be content with what you had.

Given her own insistence on her contented state, that shouldn’t have bothered her as much as it did. But she couldn’t help but think that if the protagonist of the story had any guts, she’d go back a lot further and fix a lot bigger things. Who cared if it rained on your wedding day, as long as you were marrying the right person in the first place? Why did it matter if you cheated to win the lottery—something the protagonist had done on page one, naturally, as soon as she discovered this power—if you didn’t have someone to spend all that money on, or with?

What was the point of correcting minor things—of making yourself content—when you didn’t fix the major things that stopped you from being happy?

Pam sighed and put the book down on the bedside table. Once she found herself thinking maudlin thoughts like that, it was past time to go to sleep—starfished out in the middle of the queen bed she’d once shared, because who cared about having a side when there was no one else in the damn thing anyway?

She fell into a dark and dreamless sleep.

When she woke up, she was in the same bed—she’d had this bed for twenty years, after all, since she was working at Dunder Mifflin and she and Roy had finally moved in together, after getting engaged but before the engagement had dragged on long enough that she almost forgot she had a ring sometimes—but everything else was different.

The walls weren’t the soft purple she’d painted them after Roy moved downstairs. They weren’t even in the same position—they were almost up against her eyeballs, since the room seemed to have shrunk overnight. And instead of starfished across the middle of the bed she was tight against what had once been her side before her liberation.

And there, starfished despite sharing, was a snoring Roy, not banished at all to the mother-in-law apartment but passed out next to her, his leg uncomfortably slung across hers and his spittle on her neck.

What the hell was going on?

**