Pam pulls into the diner parking lot and goes inside. She hasn’t had lunch yet, and her adrenalin is ebbing, and she’s not sure what to do now. It’s not that she thinks she made a mistake. She knows she needed to do this. But what now?

And how much of this is about Jim and Jam?

She hasn’t really let herself think about the photos since she saw the Xbox. There’s really only space for so many life-changing events in her mind at once. But she needs to think about them both now, needs to know how much of this is because of him, and how much because of her. Not because she’s going straight from Roy to Jim (would that be such a bad thing, her mind whispers?) but because she needs to know.

She sits in a booth and orders a tea. The waitress looks a bit oddly at her but goes to get it.

She thinks about the photos now. About the realization that Jim loves her. That she’d been too blind, or blinded, or self-deceiving to see it before, but he loves her. And that (while we’re talking life-changing events) his feelings aren’t entirely unrequited. She remembers the pictures shot from his perspective: the way she looks over at his desk even when he’s not there (she knew she did, but she didn’t know what her face looked like when she did). The way her eyes lit up when he spoke to her. The way she curls herself, entirely unconsciously, in his direction, like a plant reaching for sunlight, whenever they’re together (she didn’t even realize she did this).

She thinks about how supportive he is. How he never tears her down, only builds her up—or lets her do the building, like a sentient piece of scaffolding. She thinks about how he’s been the most important relationship in her life for years—how her mother reacted when she told her about him—how much hurt she saw in his eyes in the photos whenever they talked about Roy and how he treated her (how had she missed that before? Oh right, she always looked at her shoes when mentioning Roy, never his face).

She realizes that the life-changing event here is not that he’s in love with her. It’s that they’re in love together.

And that her breakup with Roy isn’t about Jim, or even really about jam; it’s about her, and her-and-Roy. She might not have recognized it if she hadn’t spent all morning looking at pictures of her and Jim. She might not have noticed if she hadn’t seen what it looks like when you’re in love and he loves you back, or if she hadn’t been remembering what it feels like to be supported and valued. But it would have been there nonetheless. The selfishness, the self-destructiveness of their relationship, the damage it was doing to her. She may have needed a little push from those photos and her memories, but it was like taking off sunglasses in a dark room and realizing the lights were on all the time. The glasses didn’t change the world, just your perception of it, and seeing Jim look at her—really seeing it—didn’t change how Roy treated her. It just made her realize maybe that wasn’t the best she could get.

And even if she never ends up with Jim—a prospect that she suddenly realizes frightens her—she’s grateful that he helped her realize that.

The tea comes in one of those little sets where they give you a teapot and let you pour your own hot water. She lets it steep a little, ordering scrambled eggs and bacon, and thinks about Jim. She starts smiling for the first time since she walked into what used to be her house, and twirls a spoon.