Pam decided that the next week was her penance; payback for the wonderful three days she’d spent with Jim, and the hope of being with him (well, forty-five minutes away, but with him in the most important of ways) in the future. She went into work starting on the 14th, as she’d promised Jan, and she had to undergo exactly what she’d expected after breaking things off with Roy: the headache-inducing oscillation between oozing sympathy and thoughtless mockery that was her co-workers approach to every time something was known to have happened in her (or anyone’s) personal life, overlaid with heaping helpings of unproductive advice, inappropriate innuendo, and extreme prying. She found herself grateful the one time that Kelly cornered her in the break room and just talked about Brangelina for half an hour, because it was a welcome relief from the three other times Kelly cornered her in the break room and asked about Roy and her (respectively: their sex life, and whether it was the reason she broke it off with him; if she was still living with him, and if so if they were friends with benefits now or just, like, shacking up or something; and whether she was going to buy a whole new wardrobe now that she was single, since she obviously had let herself go while she had a man). She had expected Michael to be unbearable, but he was actually her one solace in the entire situation. Not that he wasn’t obnoxious, loud, or thoughtless—he was still Michael—but he wasn’t that way about her or Roy. He was annoying a little about Jim (or as he now called him, Jim the Traitoriest Traitor Who Ever Traitored), but she couldn’t really complain too much about it because those conversations let her think about Jim on company time without feeling guilty.

Aww, who was she kidding. She thought about Jim the whole time, and didn’t feel guilty at all. But she felt like she ought to feel guilty—meta-guilt?—and so it was still nice to have Michael bring him up for her. The only problem with that was that at some point she had to actually get his and Toby’s signature on her own paperwork indicating she’d be taking the internship in New York. She had Jan’s promise that no matter what Michael said, she would get to do the internship, but it was going to be much easier to do with his signature, so she had to suck it up and talk to him. Having Toby there helped a lot, mostly because it allowed Michael to throw his vitriol in Toby’s direction instead of hers (she did feel a bit guilty about that, but it was pretty much par for the course so she didn’t feel too bad). By the time he was blaming Toby for both her and Jim leaving (“They just couldn’t stand to look at your ugly face every day.” “Michael, I work in the back.” “Fine! Then it’s just that you’re a terrible human being.”) she was able to slip out with their signatures on the paper and fax it to Jan without either of them really noticing.

Of course, once she’d told Michael she’d basically told everyone, and she had to spend the rest of the week fending off questions about her departure to New York. Her co-workers managed to surprise her on her way out, however, though of course they still remained themselves at heart. She was unsurprised when Angela told her that “New York was a cesspool of whoredom and iniquity” and she was disappointed in her choice to move there—but it was a shock when the petite blonde put her arms around Pam awkwardly and told her not to let it change her. Likewise, she barely reacted when Dwight announced that her leaving was clearly a prank she and Jim had hatched together to weaken the branch, and that he would stand strong behind Michael despite their joint treachery, but she was touched when he declared that he knew that this must be true because “fact: no receptionist could adequately replace Pamela Beesly.” Kelly stopped talking her to death about Roy and started sighing about how she wished she (and Ryan) could move to New York like Pam, but she also pressed a bunch of annotated magazines into Pam’s hand with fashion and food recommendations highlighted (pink for fashionable, yellow for classic and chic)—while Ryan of course rolled his eyes and barely talked while Kelly chattered on, but also took a moment when Kelly was distracted by her own reflection in the break room window (“I look like an Indian Mia Farrow! Not the cute ‘70s Mia, the disastrous ‘90s one! This is a crisis!”) to mutter to her that he was glad “at least someone was getting out of here.” Kevin leered at her—honestly, she wasn’t sure that there was anything in that related to her move, but of course it still happened—but had some surprisingly cogent advice about neighborhoods in NYC to visit and avoid (apparently his cousins in New York were real estate agents, and spent all their time bragging about how they conned various greenhorns with bad deals—and as Kevin put it “I’m actually pretty good at poker. So I just sit there and let them talk, and they think I’m not listening.”) Toby and Oscar were sweet about it, as she had expected—but she teared up when they went in together on a year’s membership to the Guggenheim. “We figured there’s only so many of us here who enjoy the finer things in life, so we should encourage you to do what we’d want to do if we went” Oscar explained. “And we knew you wouldn’t spend the money yourself.”

Phyllis Lapin, though, was the biggest surprise. Not that she was lovely about it—that much was really to be expected—but when she sidled up to Pam on Thursday afternoon and pulled her into the break room when everyone else was busy, Pam just expected some kind words, or maybe a restaurant recommendation. She was totally blindsided when Phyllis sat down next to her and gave her printed out directions to the Stamford office from Corporate, along with a gift certificate to The Capital Grille in downtown Stamford. All Phyllis said was “go get him, honey,” but Pam found herself clinging to the older woman and sobbing out the whole story of how, well, she’d actually already done that. Phyllis held her for a moment and listened, and by the end of the day Pam was ushering a smiling Phyllis and Bob Vance (of Vance Refrigeration) into Jim’s room at Geisinger, where the four of them shared an emotionally comfortable (if physically crowded) meal of take-out from Cugino’s.

Those evenings in Jim’s room were the calm oasis of that week for her: as soon as she got off work she went to Geisinger and spent time with him and his various other visitors: Mark, who felt terrible that he’d missed everything but was incredibly happy for the both of them; Larissa, whom she finally managed to introduce to her actual sister, Penny, beginning what she was pretty sure was going to be a lifelong triple sisterhood that all of them would treasure; Betsy and Gerald, who treated her like a second daughter; and even her own parents (this time including her dad), who struck up a somewhat heartier friendship with the Halperts than she had honestly expected. The nurses were incredibly accommodating, and Pam found herself making close friends with Julia, who was usually on call during the evening hours she was there—so much so that she promised to keep in touch even when Jim wasn’t there anymore, which was going to be very soon at this rate.

But most of all she valued the time she got to spend with Jim, whether or not anyone else was there. They hadn’t actually gotten physically intimate yet, because a hospital room was not exactly conducive to that sort of behavior, but she loved just being able to touch him, talk to him, kiss him, be with him. But of course all good things must come to an end, and she was on her way to New York before he was out of the hospital.

But not much before. She spent a whirlwind week getting moved into her apartment—thankfully in Dunder Mifflin-provided housing—with the help of both Halperts and Beeslys working together to make her new place a home (and sublet her old place on Craigslist—a friend of Mark’s ended up taking it off her hands), getting indoctrinated into her new job (and her paid job associated with it), staying up way too late and eating way too much floppy pizza. Then Jim got out of the hospital and moved up to Stamford—again helped by Halperts and Beeslys, herself most definitely included—and her life changed again, this time for the better—no, for the best.

Having Jim forty-five minutes away wasn’t heaven, although once she started bringing her sketchbook on the train it got a lot less annoying. But it was heaven compared to having Roy in the bed beside her and Jim an entirely uncrossable ten minutes away in Scranton. They found themselves spending alternate weekends in each other’s apartments, and a probably unreasonable (not that either of them reasoned it out) number of weeknights in each other’s towns. They got to know the guys at the bodega down the block from her and the people who shared the pool at his apartment complex. She kept in touch with friends and family in Scranton—at one point she heard that Roy had gotten a DUI, but being in New York she didn’t really think much more of it—but her life was now in what could be grandly called the Tri-State Area, and was more accurately just the Metro North commuter line. She found out she was actually pretty good at this whole graphic design for marketing thing—computers were the bane of her existence, but her hand-drawn art had a wholesome edge that was perfect for a corporation (like, say, Dunder Mifflin) that had a multi-state corporate presence but wanted to present itself as a mom-and-pop-style competitor against national companies like Staples and Office Depot. One series of sketches she did (a little flipbook-style illustration) ended up in a major company ad, and other work of hers became the basis for a whole line of customizable cards that corporate customers could order blank or pre-printed for major occasions. Jim likewise flourished at Stamford, beating Dwight out as salesman of the year and becoming the shining star of the Stamford office. She visited him often at work (her new boss in the graphic design department was a big proponent of “working from home,” which in her case usually meant taking the train up and working from either Jim’s apartment or one of the conference rooms in Stamford) and struck up a real friendship with the saleswoman who sat behind him, Karen, who she found shared her sense of humor.

When Stamford shockingly closed after less than a year, due to Jim’s boss Josh’s malfeasance and his plan to jump to Staples, Jim and Pam briefly considered moving back to Scranton—but since Pam’s internship still had several months to run, they chose not to. On the back of his personal spectacular record he was able to negotiate instead a transfer to corporate while recommending Karen be promoted into his ARM position at Scranton. At corporate he made friends with the CFO, David Wallace, as Pam did with his wife (who had an impressive art collection that Pam endeared herself to her by admiring intensely and in detail). Jim proposed around the same time he moved to New York (Pam had to admit, his suddenly kneeling in the Egyptian temple at the Met did “kick her butt”) and about a year after Jim’s accident, though deliberately not on June 10, they were married back in Scranton at the church where Pam grew up. Mark, Pete, and Tom were Jim’s groomsmen; Larissa, Penny, and Karen Pam’s bridesmaids. Their mothers cried, their fathers tried to pretend they weren’t, and they were deliriously happy.

Their time at Dunder Mifflin came to an end organically as Pam found herself drawn to more directly art-related endeavors and Jim looked for work that motivated him with more than cash. Pam used Dunder Mifflin’s educational incentive to finish a joint degree in art and art history at CUNY, and joined the Museum of Modern Art as a low-level curator (where her experience in marketing and graphic design helped her put together exhibits and signage that drew the eye—and the body attached to the eye—exactly where she wanted it). Jim took longer to find his passion—drawing a six-figure paycheck from Dunder Mifflin Corporate had a tendency to make a lot of other job opportunities pale in comparison—but ultimately found himself working development and sales for Madison Square Garden. He suffered a lot of good-natured ribbing from his friends and family back home for selling out to the Knicks and Rangers (though he insisted he still rooted for the Sixers and Flyers when they were in town), but he loved the work, and the two of them were happy—or I should say, the five, because their three children running around their little house (with a terrace) in Brooklyn were pretty happy-go-lucky themselves.

It wasn’t that everything was perfect. Pam didn’t really believe in perfection. She and Jim had their fights—he almost bought his parents’ house in Scranton before she reminded him that their entire lives were in New York—and life sometimes threw them some curveballs, but they reacted to each trouble with the response that, as Jim would put it, “we started this thing when I was in a coma—is this really worse?” And it never really was. Even though each of them would privately admit that that coma was one of the best things that ever happened to them, it was always a good reminder that, as Pam put it to their children, “none of this is as bad as sitting next to your Dad’s bed, not knowing if he’d ever wake up, without having told him I loved him.” They didn’t live their lives in the past—but they didn’t let themselves forget the moments when it seemed like they’d never get to have a future.

And when their kids asked why, in the modern age of cellphones, smartphones, and wireless technology, their mother kept an old-school landline phone on her desk, she smiled, and kissed them, and told them the story of how that phone rang and their Aunt Larissa plunged her into the great unknown by telling her the most terrifying news she’d ever received in her life—and, ultimately, the best.