Excerpt from The Turnout by Megan Abbott, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Once, a marketing person offered them a free consultation. After observing them in the studio one summer day, sweating in the corner, wilting on the high stool they'd given him, he spoke to Charlie under his breath for a long time. That was how they ended up with the photo of Dara and Marie at the end of a long day, after dancing together in the quiet studio, their bodies loose, their leotards soaked through.

Charlie shot them collapsed upon each other on the floor, their faces pink with pleasure.

"Move closer," he said from behind the camera. "Closer still."

Closer still. Back then, it seemed impossible to be any closer. The three of them, so entwined. Charlie was Dara's husband, but he was also so much more. Dara, Marie, and Charlie, their days spent together at the studio, their nights in their childhood home. Back then.

After the shoot, looking at images on Charlie's computer, Dara hesitated, imagining what their mother might say of the photos, their bruises and blisters and blackened toenails hidden, their bodies so smooth and perfect and bare. "Are you sure?" she asked.

"They tell a story," Charlie said.

"They sell a story," Marie added, snapping her leotard against her damp skin.

Dancers have short lives, of course. What happened to Charlie-his crushing injuries, his four painful surgeries-never left their minds. His body, still as lean and marble-cut as the day their mother brought him home, was a living reminder of how quickly things could turn, how beautiful things could be all broken inside. One had to plan, to make a trajectory. That was what made Dara and Charlie different from Marie, from their parents.

Marie always seemed ready to bolt, but never for long and never far. How far could one get if one still struggled to remember a bank card pin number, and left gas burners lit wherever she went.

So, when Dara and Charlie did marry-at city hall, he in an open-collar shirt and back brace and she in a tissue-thin slip dress that made her shudder on the front steps-he brought with him a small trust fund from his long-deceased father, to be broken open at last like a platinum piggy bank on his twenty-first birthday. The amount was modest, but they used it to pay off the mortgage for the studio building, drooping ceiling and all. They owned it outright. It was theirs.

We'll do it together, he said.

And Marie.

Of course, he said. We three. We means three.

It was the three of them. Always the three of them. Until it wasn't. And that was when everything went wrong. Starting with the fire. Or before.

Excerpted from The Turnout by Megan Abbott. Copyright © 2021 by Megan Abbott. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.