“I can see you standing, honey

With his arms around your body” 

He’s taking a gamble. That’s what tonight is about. Poker chips rattling on the table provide the white noise he needs to cancel out his reservations. It’s now or never and he’s not sure he can live with never. Now doesn’t seem like a much better option, but it’s all he’s got. 

So, he opens his mouth in the parking lot and it all spills out. He goes all in. 

He loses the bet. 

It was a long shot anyway… 

And then he stumbles upon another chip. There’s one more thing he can try. A last ditch attempt and then that’s it, it’s all over. He’s out. 

He’s not even looking for her. He’s coming to clear out his desk. 

For a split second he feels lucky. It’s like she’s the one who slipped this one last miraculous chip into his hand. She’s silhouetted by the soft light in the dimly lit office, outlined against his desk like a mirage. 

It’s fitting because he definitely feels all the desperation of a dying man in the desert. 

She starts to speak, but he’s past words. All he has left are actions. 

He leans in, her lips are soft and pliant beneath his. His heart thrums excitedly in his chest. He’s saying goodbye and she’s answering with all the sweetness of a first kiss. 

It’s enough, coupled with her me too to have him leaning back in. But then she speaks his name against his lips and he tastes the answer in her exhale. 

Is it really a gamble if he already knows the answer? He asks anyway. “You’re really going to marry him?” 

She offers him the faintest of nods. Yet somehow it feels just as definitive as a resounding yes. She leaves him with it, she leaves him in it alone, this relationship with her he’s invented in his mind. He backs away, taking all his love out into the hallway with him. 

It’s time. He’s out of Hail Marys. It’s over. 

“And it took you five whole minutes

To pack us up and leave me with it”

They can pretend it didn’t happen. It’s fine. She can pretend. It might be awkward for a little while, but they can get past it. 

They have to get past it, because she can’t even begin to fathom her life without him. 

That’s the thought knocking at the forefront of her mind all weekend. That’s what she packs into her purse to prepare for the start of the working week. 

She feels it even as she hangs up her coat. The loss. Something is missing. 

She turns to the bullpen and her feet fall out from under her. 

It’s empty. 

Jim’s desk is bare. 

She knows. She just knows. There’s no moment where she considers that Dwight has turned the tables and pranked him. 

Any other Monday and that would have been her first - and only - thought. 

Not today. He’s gone. 

Thank god she’s the first one in the office this morning so there’s no one to witness the way she crumples. Somehow the small sofa cushions her collapse. Her arms settle leadenly over her knees and she sobs, a keening desperate whine. 

The sound startles her and she remembers herself. Work, this is work. She needs to pull herself together. 

No one in this office can find her like this, halfway to the fetal position, wracked with guilt and grief. 

Why didn’t he give her any time? Why didn’t he give her any warning? 

Except he did. As her wedding date has loomed closer, he drifted further. First Australia and now this. Gone. Completely erased. 

You don’t pack up your desk for a two week vacation. 

It’s stupid, but suddenly she needs some evidence that he ever really existed. 

She tests her legs and is surprised to find she can stand. A few unsteady steps later, she sinks into his chair. 

It smells like him which is almost enough to have her openly weeping again. 

She wipes her leaking eyes on the sleeve of her worn cardigan and sucks in a futile breath. 

The surface of his desk is completely blank. There’s nothing of him that remains. 

And yet all she can see is the outline of their bodies pressed against it in the barely there light. 

She opens his drawers. Empty. Empty. Empty. 

It empties her further still. 

She’s hollow. Pieces of her are gone. She feels the loss with ever half-hearted fiber of her being that remains. 

She slides the drawers closed. The second one catches. It doesn’t slide back into place smoothly. 

She leans down and peers into the void. 

Something metallic catches the light in the back corner, caught behind the drawer. 

She reaches her hand in and slides her fingers over the lip at the back. She manages to pinch whatever it is between her fingers, before carefully coaxing it out. 

She deposits it on the desk and takes it in. It’s almost as if he’s slapped her. The sting is instantaneous. Her leaking eyes continue to betray all thoughts she has of calming down before anyone else arrives. 

It’s a yogurt lid. Her yogurt lid. A chain of paper clips declare exactly what it is from. 

She can’t bring herself to throw it away. 

She takes it back to her desk and shoves it into the back corner of her second drawer. 

His desk haunts her all day. 

She can’t live with this ghost. 

She’s not sure how she brings him back to life. She weighs up what - who - she can live without and by the time she slides into Roy’s truck at the end of the day her mind is made up. 

“You never gave a warning sign (I gave so many signs)” 

The Monday after the casino night it’s a Pam he doesn’t recognize sitting beside him in the passenger seat as they drive home from work. 

If there’s one thing he knows in this life, it’s Pam. 

Sure, the guys in the warehouse rib him about not wanting to get married, but it’s not that. 

He just doesn’t get the point of the whole wedding thing. Who actually feels comfortable in those stupid penguin suits? 

Plus, it’s like buying rounds for everyone you’ve ever met all night without anyone buying a round for you. Instead you end up with three toasters you didn’t need because you already live together and already have your own damn toaster. It’s stupid. 

But Pam wants it and apparently that’s not changing, so he goes ahead with it. For her. 

And then she grumps at him for not helping out with the planning enough. He just wants her to be happy, it’s her thing. He doesn’t want to get something wrong. So he lets her plan it. 

It’s not a big deal. It’s not like he doesn’t want to get married to her. 

Well, married or not, he just wants to be with her. 

That’s all that matters. 

It’s been him and Pam for as long as he can remember. He knows her. She knows him. 

She’s seen him at his best (homecoming king, mvp of his senior year) and his worst (crying at his grandpa’s funeral, punching his brother in the face hard enough that he had to go to hospital). She’s seen it all. 

That’s why it takes him by surprise. She’s never even threatened to leave before. Nothing has phased her. She’s been his rock. Constant, steady, always in his corner. 

So, when she wrings her hands like she always does, but then twists his ring from her finger, his whole foundation shifts. 

“Roy,” she murmurs and he knows this is something different. He’s never heard that catch in her tone before. 

“Pammy?” 

He kills the ignition. They’re in the driveway now. She’s looking at her hands. She won’t meet his gaze. 

He watches her hands too, the way her ring gradually inches up her finger as she measures her words. He sees the end as it begins and not a moment before. 

There were no signs. No warning. Just this horrible moment where the only future he’s ever known suddenly blurs into obscurity. 

“I can’t,” she blanches, her knuckles whitening noticeably. 

“Can’t what?” he asks, even though the sinking feeling pooling low in his guts tells him he shouldn’t ask questions he doesn’t want to know the answer to. 

She takes a rattling breath. He’s still watching her hands. The backs of them glisten as the tears spill from her cheeks, landing in perfectly-imperfect patterns. He knows the backs of her hands as well as his own. He watches their life together wash away. 

“I can’t get married.” 

“We don’t have to. We can just…” 

She’s shaking her head. They can’t do this. They can’t pretend it’s the wedding. It’s more than that. 

He’s not stupid. Or at least not as stupid as people think. There’s a reason she’s stuck with him for this long. It’s not just nostalgia. They love each other. Or at least they did. 

Something has changed for her. 

He doesn’t know when. He doesn’t know how. He just knows that she’s leaving. 

“I’m so sorry, Roy,” she chokes. “I’m not. I’m not happy anymore. I don’t know if we’re right for each other anymore.” 

And then she takes her tiny shaking frame and slips from the truck. Her ring sits on the dash. The truck still shakes long after the engine has been silenced and she leaves. 

He adds another moment to the worsts. It’s the first one she hasn’t been there for… He doesn’t know what to do with that. 

“I think I've seen this film before

And I didn't like the ending”

She’s not going to be the one to call this thing off. She’s not giving him the easy out. 

That’s what she decides when the mousy receptionist walks over coals to cross the picket line and make a stand. 

Well, this is Karen’s stand. She’s not backing down. 

Honestly, she thought he was going to break up with her after that whole calling off my wedding for you, I miss you speech. But, he doesn’t. And that gives her more hope than anything yet. 

She spends the entire evening bracing herself, but he makes even more of an attempt to pretend everything is normal. 

There’s no stilted pauses or meaningful looks. He sits next to her on the bus and then he takes her home. They share a pizza and he crawls into bed beside her. 

She wakes emboldened and so, so hopeful. They’ve weathered the storm. 

The worst is over. 

They need an exit plan. She likes that one is already in motion, they both have interviews in New York. There is light at the end of the Scranton tunnel. 

They spend a night in the city, and sure he’s a little noncommittal about moving to the city regardless of who gets the job. But, she feels confident, whichever way it goes, this thing they have isn’t over yet. 

Maybe, just maybe, in time they will be able to joke about his short lived infatuation with the receptionist a world away. They’ll be successful, in all parts of their lives, and Pam will become that fading memory that only tapers down with each passing year. 

The future is starting to come into focus and she likes what she sees. 

And then she catches a glimpse of his expression as he winds his way through the crowded sidewalk to her. 

He didn’t get the job. What’s more he’s relieved he didn’t get it. It’s written all over his face. 

He hasn’t seen her by the fountain yet and she watches the way he carefully schools his expression as he gets closer. 

Her painstakingly constructed future loses clarity at the edges. 

She hates getting dumped. For a moment she considers getting it in first, but she promised herself. She won’t make this easier on him. She won’t give him the out, dammit. 

He reaches her. She doesn’t step forward to kiss him. He hangs half a step back, eyes carefully averted. 

She knows the words before he opens his mouth. 

“I’m sorry, Karen.” He doesn’t go off script. This is exactly how a it’s not you, it’s me speech is supposed to play out. 

“I withdrew from the job.” 

She wonders what the final straw was. She replays her interview and tries to land on which question has flung her future into uncertainty. 

“I don’t want to leave Scranton.” More like he doesn’t want to leave her. 

“This is about Pam, isn’t it?” Maybe she’s sick of being the bigger person. She wants him to know that she’s not blind. Or stupid. 

He hangs his head and rubs the back of his neck. She’s noticed he does that when he’s uncomfortable. She knows him better than he thinks she does. 

“Yeah,” he admits in a small, but resolved voice. “I can’t,” he pauses and she swears he almost nudges the corners of his lips up in the makings of a smile. “I can’t,” he repeats and his voice is stronger, “seem to get past her. I’m not sure I want to.” 

“You know this isn’t okay? The way you’ve treated me.” 

“I know,” he hangs his head. “I haven’t been fair to you at all.” 

She won’t forgive him. But, she will forget him. It’s time to put all her other exit plans in motion. She can drive her own getaway car. 

“All this time” 

The yogurt lid on his passenger seat catches the light with each hasty turn he takes to get out of the city. 

It’s funny, because he knows this is his yogurt lid medal. He thought it was lost, forever. 

An odd sock disappeared into the hidden depths of a washing machine. 

He packed up his desk in a jumbled mess of barely formed thoughts and things he didn’t notice slipped through the cracks. He only saw what was missing when he opened the box in Stamford. 

He ached with the loss. He’d already lost so much. He didn’t want the memories erased, filled around the edges, sure. But not gone. 

The yogurt lid was missing, just like a whole lot of himself. 

He tries not to read too much into the symbolism of it all. She had the yogurt lid. She has the rest of him. He’s coming to reclaim it. The yogurt lid is just the start. 

He wonders how she got it. He could have sworn the last place he saw it was in his second desk drawer and yet he’d emptied the whole thing out entirely. 

He decides it doesn’t matter. That she had it is far more important than how. 

He needs to get back to her. 

His foot itches to press the accelerator further into the floor. Wrapping himself around a tree won’t get him any closer to the future he’s always wanted. 

For the first time it feels close enough for him to reach out and touch. He’s not in this alone anymore. 

She’s in this too. 

He’s nervous, this is where it all begins. There are no more endings. This is it for him. 

He makes it back to the office, slipping the yogurt lid into his pocket. It settles a little like a poker chip and he knows this time he can’t lose. He goes all in again. 

“Pam, are you free for dinner tonight?” 

Her answering smile is enough for him to see their whole future laid out before them in perfect detail. 

“So many signs, so many signs”