The rest of that day was taken up with a battery of tests that apparently the doctors had just been waiting for Jim to wake up to make him take. They poked, they prodded, they questioned him, they jabbed him, they were generally omnipresent. This of course meant that Pam and Larissa were left to their own devices. It was somehow more jarring to try to pretend everything was OK now that they’d seen Jim up and talking—while they were still capable of enjoying each other’s company, the fact that Jim was awake and being tested was somehow more…absorbing than their earlier knowledge that he was just sitting there, out of it. Something about the idea that he could be there—that they could be talking to him—that rather than sitting there inert, he was being tortuously put through his paces—put a damper on their conversation.

It was not, Pam thought, that Larissa had become any less fun to hang around with, or, conversely, that she herself was actively less invested in making conversation. It was that they had been afforded some kind of freedom by Jim’s inactivity that was now revoked, while at the same time they had both become more aware of their own exhaustion. Larissa had had one good night’s sleep in several days; Pam was not sure she’d had one since Casino Night. They were fidgety—and being fidgety together is still being fidgety, as they both discovered.

So Pam decided to take Larissa home with her. She checked in at the nurse’s station, and they told her Jim would be occupied for the rest of the day—they couldn’t guarantee any availability, since with such a horrific accident they wanted to be extremely careful with his case, and Dunder Mifflin had surprisingly good insurance. In fact, the nurse remarked, they seemed to be covered for every kind of test she could imagine and several she couldn’t. Pam giggled, wondering if Dwight had eventually opted to cover them for Spontaneous Dental Hydroplosion after all. But, the nurse concluded, if it were her family, she’d come back tomorrow, because they weren’t going to see Jim Halpert for the rest of the day.

Larissa put up surprisingly little resistance. Or rather, it was surprising to Pam how little resistance she showed; Jim could have told her that nothing would get Larissa out of that hospital faster than offering to show her something about Pamela Beesly that he didn’t already know. She loved being able to tease him about Pam—had done so since well before their relationship had reached the desperate-confessions-of-love stage—and seeing Pam’s new apartment before him would be priceless to her. Not that she would have abandoned Jim for the chance, but if Jim was already going to be out of commission, there was basically no way Larissa would miss this chance.

So Pam drove Larissa home. She parked her little Yaris in front of her apartment building and suddenly remembered that when she had run out of it in a state of panic about Jim two days ago she had left the place an utter pigsty. There was a table, of course, and a chair, and a bunch of boxes, about three of which were half-unpacked and the rest still sealed. Her clothes from the week were piled on top of those boxes because she hadn’t yet bothered to unpack a hamper or even a real laundry bag; the bathroom was actually OK because she hadn’t unpacked anything fancier than her toothbrush, toothpaste, and her default shampoo, conditioner, and body wash. Even her makeup kit was still in a box, because she hadn’t been able to bring herself to care about Kelly’s exclamations that she looked “so tired!” and “so sick!” after breaking up with Roy. And actually, that had worked to her advantage in some ways, since she’d gotten to avoid work for almost an hour every day while Kelly insisted on doing her makeup for her. And since she’d already decided she didn’t care what she looked like, the end result didn’t really matter, just the opportunity to not sit in her receptionist’s chair looking in vain for Jim’s smiling face at an empty desk. Ryan had been making noises about taking Jim’s desk ever since he left, but with Kelly holding court on Pam’s face in the break room he hadn’t dared to show his face—which was a mixed blessing, since Pam was unsure whether an empty desk or a Ryan-filled on was worse.

She shook her head. Concentrate on the apartment, Pam. She had…a lamp. One lamp, and a little overhead lighting in the kitchen area. Did she have a second chair? Yes, her mother had insisted on buying that set of four stools for the kitchen island, so if she could clear the boxes off of them they’d have somewhere to sit. And if she cleared the kitchen island, they’d even have somewhere to rest their arms. Or a coffee cup, since the one thing she most definitely had unpacked was her Mr. Coffee (with the automatic drip, naturally, since she certainly wasn’t going to get up in time to both make coffee and get to work on time). And she did have a fully stocked refrigerator and pantry, courtesy of Mom, so she could at least offer Larissa some tea or coffee or something. Assuming she could find the French press, since she’d left Roy the coffeemaker. Whatever.

She opened the door and let Larissa in.

“Oh, this is so nice!”

Pam looked around the apartment and winced. She’d left a bra out on the table, and there was a pile of bills half on top of it, and…

“I love the colors!”

Oh right, she had painted the backsplash a vivid maroon and a yellow accent wall in the living room.

“And this painting is just gorgeous!”

But I didn’t put up any of my…oh right, the art on the actual easel, which her mother had insisted she put up (“I know you, Pam, and you won’t bother if I don’t make you, but it will make you happier to paint”) and which she’d been doodling a…oh my god it was a picture of Jim ABORT ABORT ABORT.

“Seriously, the detail here is amazing. You even got the way his eyes shift to the side when he thinks he’s being sneaky.”

Well, the damage was done, she guessed. “Um…thanks. Do you think I should hide that before I invite him over, or…”

“No, you should definitely go all stalker and frame it right in front of the door.” Larissa looked up in time to see the look of embarrassment written all over Pam’s face. “Or, you know, you could just keep it like it is. It’s actually really well done…did he pose for this?”

She blushed, deep and red. “No.”

“Did you have a picture then? This is really life-like.”

“…no.” She just knew what he looked like. It was burned into her soul by now. She had debated between drawing him as he’d looked when she last saw him, broken and hurt and loving all at once as he drew his hands out of hers and turned to walk out of the office, but she had decided to pain the Jim she really knew: the loving prankster who caught her eye and made her feel like the rest of the office—the rest of the world—didn’t exist. Who had a special look that said “we’re in this together, you and I, Beesly.” Who always had her back and celebrated every success with her. Knowing that that Jim would have been so ecstatically happy for her when she moved into her new place had inspired her—realizing that he would have been happy for her, not just because she was free from Roy and might want to (ok, did want to) date him, but because it was a big step for her—but remembering she couldn’t tell him about it had stopped her from finishing it.

She supposed she might be able to finish it now.

Larissa had noticed her brown study and was poking around the kitchen, grabbing two mugs and the teakettle and sitting down at the one table in the one chair. Pam quickly took a box off one of the stools and pulled it up, and they sat there talking about the painting until the kettle whistled. Pam wasn’t sure how it was so easy to talk to Larissa about her brother, but it was. And after the tea interrupted them the conversation expanded to life more generally. She heard about Larissa’s boyfriend, Matt, who was a park ranger at Archbald Pothole State Park (“what a silly name!” “I know, right? He won’t admit it, defends it to the death, but I can’t help laughing every time I visit him.”) and the apartments they were looking at moving into now that they were getting more serious. She was actually able to help with that, mentioning a couple of complexes that she’d looked at that Larissa had somehow missed, and the feeling of camaraderie made her glow inside. Before they each knew it the sun had finally set, and Pam looked up at the clock on her telephone base and noticed it was 10pm—and they hadn’t eaten dinner. They made a quick run to Waffle House (Texas Patty Melt for Larissa, triple hashbrowns smothered, covered, and diced for Pam, who figured after a week like this she deserved something filling and terrible for her) and then Pam deposited Larissa at home with a promise to pick her up early the next morning, since they’d left her car at the hospital. She pulled back into her own apartment complex around midnight and fell into a deep sleep almost immediately—but not before thoughts of seeing Jim again tomorrow had put a smile on her face.

It was a good day.