“It’s not just that. I was thinking—” He pauses, staring at the tree branches sweeping over the power lines. “There’s something about living in a house. It shapes you.” He must feel my eyes on him but keeps his on the road. “If you have all the room in the world, if you can run down the halls and not touch the walls with your hands outstretched, have your own bedroom, bathroom, you walk through life that way. But if you’re sharing a one-bedroom apartment with your mom and siblings, you learn to tiptoe, to shrink in on yourself, and stay out of the way.”

“So what about these guys sharing rooms and common spaces?”

Teddy rubs his face.

“That’s what I mean. It would depend on how they grew up. Their personalities. Maybe they grew up in a small house and decided this was a chance for a fresh start—no more tiptoeing, they’d take up as much room as possible; or they’re used to having the run of things and continue that way, no self-reflection, unless they come face-to-face with someone just like them.”

“And then what?”

“They figure out who the alpha is.”

I chew my lip and think of Tripp. He’s the fraternity president, but did that make him an alpha? He was certainly a natural leader, but in that magnetic, likable way. Michael seemed more the type to bully his way around. And Jay? He’s the unknown element, housed together with all those other volatile young men like a bad science experiment.

“Do you think it ever works in reverse?”

“What?”

“Do you think a guy used to taking up a lot of space would decide to take up a little?”

He raises an eyebrow. “No.”

The asphalt is darkening in splotches, and I eye the gray sky warily. When Truman says thirty, he means twenty; fifteen means ten. So we’re almost running to reach the building, both because of the first etches of lightning slashing the sky and because we know better than to push him.

My blouse is wet and sticking to places I’d rather the others not know the details of, but Oliver’s bent over his computer and Truman’s talking reassuringly to someone on the phone in his office, so neither sees Teddy and me as we head to our desks.

One of the lights is blinking on my phone. It’s a cable-connected gray beast that’s managed to survive the ’70s with more buttons than I know what to do with and takes up the entire corner of my desk. I never did figure out how to set up my voicemail. So anyone who calls my office phone gets to hear the gruff voice of Don Polaski, the guy here before me, on the other end.

It takes four tries before I can access my voicemail.