Pam worried her bottom lip between her teeth. “Jim,” she entreated gently.

“Pam,” he echoed.

She stared at their clasped hands, her gaze pensive. “I’m really worried that once I tell you this, you won’t like me much anymore.”

His brow furrows. His stomach drops. Pam is here. Pam is here. Pam is here, his mind chants. It can’t be that bad. His filter has also apparently been lost in the accident. “I could never not like you,” falls from his lips without his conscious permission to do so.

He feels the blush shadowing his neck and averts his gaze to join hers at their hands.

She releases the faintest hint of humourless laugh. “Trust me, it hasn’t felt a lot like that lately.” He frowns at her. “It’s been a long year, Jim. The longest. I’ve really missed you.” She runs a hand over her forehead and some of the mask drops, he glimpses a weariness in the depths of her troubled expression that he’s never seen before – or, remembered seeing.

“Did Roy die?” he blurts out and slaps a hand over his mouth, eyes becoming saucers, because what if he actually had and Jim was the most insensitive friend on the planet? At least that would kind of explain why he had some casual girlfriend and hadn’t actually made a move on a not-engaged Pam.

A slightly mortified chuckle fell from Pam’s lips. “Oh no. He’s still alive and kicking, but I could see how you think him dying would be the only way I’d build up the courage to admit it wasn’t quite working out.”

Jim’s expression was instantly serious. “It’s hard to admit when things aren’t working out, Pam.” She waved him off.

“It didn’t matter. All that mattered was you.”

Jim felt the seeds of hope blossom and sprout like they never had before.

* * * 

Pam felt the entire axis of the earth rested on this conversation. It was a lot a pressure to place on her jumbled thoughts. She’d already confessed to Jim’s girlfriend the depth of her connection to Jim and yet it was somehow so much more difficult to discuss it with the man himself.

Telling him now was one thing. She could handle that. The crux of it was that he would remember Karen soon enough and this whole moment would be erased once again. She’d have to go to the passive aggressive office of sorrow and pretend this whole thing never happened. He might be able to brush it aside again like he had so successfully in Stamford, but she’d be stuck with the muscle memory of his hand warming hers and the look of delight in his eyes as she entered the room.

She was already having enough trouble living with the weight of casino night pressing on her shoulders. Oh god. She was going to have consider leaving the office if she had to live with this moment crushing her too. 

But maybe. Just maybe, a cautious optimism warned... if she could get across her side of things to him now, even if he remembered everything, he could forgive her just a little bit. Maybe they could be friends again? She tried not to cling to the flicker, if she held onto it and it was wrong, it would ache all the more.

“Me?” Jim whispered, failing to mask the awe coating the word. “Me,” he repeated, as if he was trying to convince himself that she’d really said it.

“Yes. You, Jim.”

She’d dropped her purse and keys over near the doorway back when her knees were shaking so badly with relief that she could barely stand. “I’ll show you,” she murmured, squeezing his hand gently before rising to her feet and tugging her purse from the floor.

He watched silently as she pulled a worn sketchbook from the depths of her bag. “Back in May,” she started, her voice a little softer than usual. “Michael staged a casino night in the warehouse. It was this whole black tie thing.”

“I bet I took you for all your money,” Jim smiled and she was hit with a pang of what used to be. 

“You wish.”

She took a deep steadying breath. “Here,” she thrust the sketchbook towards him. “I couldn’t stop drawing it,” she shrugged, “especially when you were gone.”

“Gone?”

“You moved – transferred to the Stamford branch. When I came into work on Monday, your desk was already empty.”

Jim palmed the book in his hands hesitantly. “I didn’t work for a week,” she whispered. “I just drew it, over and over again.”

She leant towards him and thumbed the book open. The image was brilliant, with vivid blues and purples. “That was before I knew you had left.” It was a brightly colored sketch of the both of them. Pam’s hands were clasping his neck and he was wrapped around her. His eyes shone, bravery and victory radiating from them.

“It’s the second after we kissed,” she murmured. Jim sucked in a sharp intake of breath.

“I want to remember,” he stuttered.

“That was my favorite moment. Everything still felt so, possible. Before reality crept back in.”

“Roy?” he choked.

“Yeah. You asked me if I was still going to marry him and I’m so sorry Jim because I lied, I said yes, when really the answer was already no, but I didn’t know how to make that happen and I didn’t know what to say and then you were gone.” She felt the tears retracing a familiar path down her face.

She reached for the book and began to flip through the pages. “I drew it so many ways. I tried to fix it, I – ” Jim stilled her hand. He flicked back to the first page, taking in the vibrant colors again, his finger tips brushing over the shape of her dress. He turned to the second page, and the third and the fourth and the next. Gone was the color, after the first image, each following picture was black and harsh. Her strokes were less careful, but more intentional. He could see where she’d gone over the same line multiple times, almost breaking through the paper.

There was a theme running through it all. Each picture was of them. The setting changed, some were at his desk, others in the office carpark. Some were snippets: his eyes, his hands, his retreating back. “I tried to fix it,” she repeated, as he paused on a picture of her leaning in to kiss him in the carpark, instead of the office.

“This didn’t happen?” he murmured, running his hand over the page. She shook her head. “Please Pam. Please tell me everything. I don’t understand why I would’ve left like that. I don’t understand why – ” he traced her blackened lips on the page.

She understood the question he wasn’t asking. He didn’t know why he had laid his feelings on the line, when he had been sitting with them for so long without making a stand.

“I was going to marry Roy,” she started.

“You were always going to marry Roy,” he muttered, eyes flashing with anger. He always had trouble masking his frustrations when it came to Roy.

She shook her head. “We set a date.”

“Oh,” Jim closed his eyes momentarily. It was strange to think that even in a world where it hadn't happened, it still stung. 

“Yeah.”

“I guess that pushed me over the edge,” he grimaced.

Pam reached for the sketchbook, turning it back to the first image, the one rich with possibility and tried to tell herself that possibility remained and was in her reach once again. “You told me that you were in love with me,” each word stuck in her throat as she fought to push it out. Jim swallowed roughly.

“I, umm,” she cringed, “lied, or at least wouldn’t let myself consider it. I stuck to the script. I said we were friends.”

“And I didn’t want that? I said I wanted more than that?” She nodded – and Jim hung his head a little at how predictable he was. It was eerie to have him repeat in now, without the memory, and still the words almost mirroing his earlier admission. 

“You, uh, walked away.”

“I’m an idiot.”

“You were brave. Braver than I could ever be... I went upstairs. I sat at your desk. I tried to imagine a different life.”

Jim opened to the next sketch. “I came back?”

“You did,” the small smile that wanted to form couldn’t quite make it out under the weight of the conflicting emotions from the memory.

“I kissed you?” he breathed, a little in awe that he’d found the confidence. He was sure that this would be the memory he would regret losing the most.

“I kissed you too,” Pam’s tone grew a fierceness and certainty that made his heart skip a beat. “I said the most honest thing I said all night. You said that I had no idea how long you’d been waiting to do that and I said me too.”

“You too?” Jim’s eyes widened.

“Yes,” she stated definitively.

Jim schooled his expression, “but then you said you were still going to marry him?”

She nodded. “And you believed me.”

“You didn’t," an acknowledgment. 

“You were gone,” an accusation.  

Silence filled the room.

All her earlier fears assaulted her. Even a recount of how terribly she’d treated him that night was enough to drive him away. He didn’t need to remember it, he could piece it together well enough from what she described and once again it was unforgivable. She’d been given a second shot and she’d blown it.

On the other hand, she was mad. Mad at him for leaving in the first place. Mad at him now for not understanding everything that she wasn’t saying and everything she was. She’d left Roy for him. She wanted him.

Mostly she was mad that he hadn’t given her time to process. If he knew her as well as he thought he did – which she thought he did – he should have known that she would need more than an ultimatum in the parking lot. She wasn't a jumper; she was a dip your toes in the water and gradually inch in. This was a fundamental part of her being which he had conveniently forgotten about when it mattered most.

“Pam?”

She met his gaze. He was still moving through the sketchbook, hands caressing each image as he went - whether he was committing it to memory or trying to prompt what was lost she wasn’t sure. “I’m sorry?” he gave her the tiniest makings of a crooked smile. “For hurting you, I guess. I, I would never want to hurt you.”

“I just wish you hadn’t had left so quickly. Things would have been different, Jim,” she answered in small voice.

“What are things like now? Why did I come back?”

“It wasn’t your idea,” her tone was hollow. “There was a merger, Scranton absorbed Stamford.”

“Oh.”

“Karen was from the Stamford branch,” the slight twinge that made her feel as if she wasn’t being fair to Karen was back. It was kind of difficult to tell somebody else’s boyfriend that you had feelings for them. “You came back with her.”

“Oh.”

She softened slightly. “To be honest, you never really came back. Some version of you did, but not,” she swallowed, “my Jim.”

He wanted to cry. Pam was single and seemed to, I don’t know, like him? Miss him?

“You’ve been… professional,” she hedged.

“That doesn’t sound like me,” he attempted a hint of levity.

“I don’t know anymore.” Her words were wooden.

“Pam. Can we have a do-over? A fresh start? Please?” he pleaded. “I know – well, I don’t know – that I’ve been acting like an idiot lately, but me? Right here, right now in this hospital bed… You’re the person who matters to me most? Can we – ” he trailed off, unsure of what exactly to say. How exactly to fix it. He didn’t care what recent Jim had been acting like, he was sure, deeply certain, that there was no way he was over Pam.

He pushed the sketchbook to the side and stretched his hand to Pam once more, his eyes pleading. She hesitated for a moment and Jim felt his entire future balance delicately on what would happen next. She slipped one hand gently into his… And then lowered her head into the other and wept in earnest.

Jim found that it was difficult, with a broken pelvis, to lean from his hospital bed, but he managed to manoeuvre himself so that his other hand rest on her back. He rubbed soothing circles as best he could as her shoulders shook. “Pam…”

“I,” she hiccupped between sobs, “am so scared that you’re going to remember and be mad at me again.”

“No. No,” he repeated. “Because I’m going to remember this Pam. I’m going to remember that even though I’ve been treating you like rubbish, you're the one sitting at my hospital bed.”

“You’re going to remember that you love Karen,” her tears intensified at the thought.

“It doesn’t matter,” he argued. “I’ll remember that you were the first here. I’ll remember that you stayed when she left.”

She gulped air into her aching lungs. “It won’t matter.”

“It will.” He stared at her helplessly, feeling her shoulders continue to continue to rise and fall with each heady sob. “You have to trust me,” he pleaded.

She raised her blurry eyes to find his face, desperation radiating from it. “You’re with Karen,” she whispered.

“I don’t care. Pam, I’m in love with you.”