Excerpt from The Ensemble by Aja Gabel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She had been, of all things, nervous. She was never nervous. It wasn't part of her nature to be nervous. Confidence led her in all things, ever since she was a little girl, but she'd felt a sense she'd done something wrong hanging over her since before they took the stage. From the wings where she waited to go on, she caught sight of Fodorio in the third row, where the judges sat. He was dressed in all black, and his hair was in his eyes. She lifted her hand and held it up to catch his attention. When he looked at her, she began to smile, but his face did not change. Probably to an outsider it would have looked that way. It was that what registered in his face was recognizable only to her, and caused her shame. She wasn't ashamed to have slept with him—that she would have done anyway—or even to have threatened or blackmailed him, or whatever one called it. She was ashamed to have asked for help, to have admitted to being in the position of needing help. And the way he looked at her had acknowledged only that: Oh, there you are, that person who needs help.

When the quartet took the stage for the first round of performances—the round they would not make it past—all of them, each member, felt apart not just from one another, but from themselves.

Word that they would not progress to the next round of performances, during which they would have played the much kinder Haydn, wouldn't come until the morning, but no one needed a phone call to know it. They walked off stage to tepid applause and said nothing to each other. The only sounds in the greenroom were the clicking of the locks on their cases and the shuffling of music stuffed into pocket sleeves. The boys wordlessly took a car back to the lodge, but Jana and Brit walked. The night seemed cruelly cold now, much colder than May in San Francisco.

What they didn't say to each other: what next?

In the large hallways of the lodge, Brit followed Jana back to her room, and when Jana unlocked the door and turned to find Brit behind her, she said the first thing she'd said to anyone since the performance: "Why are you still here?"

"Let's just have one drink," Brit said. "Come on, you know you don't want to be alone."

"No, you don't," Jana said, but held the door open behind her anyway.

Brit thought for sure Jana would have a solution of some kind. That's who she was. Solution girl. She always had a plan, and the plan always had multiple steps. This kind of failure wasn't in the plan, but Jana was quick and determined. Brit wanted a drink, yes, and she also wanted to hear about Jana's plan for their future.

Brit opened the minibar and took out one of the tiny whiskeys. For Jana, she poured a small vodka over ice, a drink she'd seen her order at the bar they went to after rehearsals. When she handed it to Jana, Jana looked surprised that she knew her drink. But of course they all knew these small details. It was impossible not to after the hours of work and attention they'd extracted from each other. Brit sat on the floor, and Jana on her bed, legs crossed. No one opened the curtains or touched a remote or anything. They stared at the floor. Brit didn't know what to say. "I'm sorry" was either incorrect or not enough.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" Jana asked.

"I'm not," Brit said. "I mean, I'm looking at you, but not like anything."

"You guys always expect me to fix things."

"No we don't," Brit said. "Well, maybe Henry does."

"I tried to fix that tempo."

Brit wasn't going to touch this line of thinking. It was useless and unproductive to go over what exactly had gone wrong, at least so soon afterward. In any case, they had all been there. They all knew.

"At least our parents weren't here to see it," Brit said, and they both laughed. That was the sort of thing Jana would laugh at, something slightly morbid.

Excerpted from The Ensemble by Aja Gabel. Copyright © 2018 by Aja Gabel. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.