Excerpt from A Well-Behaved Woman by Therese Anne Fowler, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She and Armide reached the dim fourth-floor landing and paused to get their breath. There was a strange metallic scent here, pungent and sharp. Alva started to remark on it, then spotted a young woman lying inert beside the second door. Blood, so dark that it looked black, had pooled around her sodden skirts. Armide gasped, turned, and ran down the stairs, calling for Mrs. Harmon to find help.

Trembling, Alva knelt at the girl's shoulder and took her hand. It was cool and pliant. She watched the girl's chest; it didn't move. She put her ear to the girl's breast. Silence.

Alva sat back. Her hands were shaking, her whole body trembling so much that she put her arms around herself and clamped them to her ribs.

Dead. After being frightened and in pain.

At a party Alva had been to a few years earlier, two women of middle age, well fed and well turned out with pearls and furs, remarked on a tour they'd taken of the Five Points slums not long before:

Wasn't it fascinating?

Yes, horrific! Imagine that being your life—a short one, probably.

People are simply dying to get out of there!

Then laughter at their cleverness. Alva had smiled, too, as yet unaware of how narrow the gap between privilege and poverty. Dying to get out, ha!

Now she sat at a dead girl's side. Had the girl been lying here terrified by what was happening to her, or relieved by what was possibly her best prospect of escape?

The sound of someone running up the stairs—

"Katie?" said a girl whose resemblance to this one was unmistakable. "Oh, no, no, no—" Alva moved aside as she kneeled down and grabbed the dead girl's shoulders, attempted to lift her. "Katie, come on," she said. The dead girl's head lolled backward. The other girl's eyes were panicked. "They said someone went for a doctor, but it could be hours. Where's she bleeding from? What can we do?"

"It's too late," Alva said. "I'm so sorry. She wasn't breathing when I—We were too late."

"This can't be!" the girl cried. "What happened to her? She was perfect when I left this morning."

"I am so terribly sorry."

In Alva's purse was perhaps fifty cents. Her hands shook as she held it out to the girl. "There's not a lot here, but—"

The girl slapped it away. "Money's no fix!"

"It can help—"

"You people. Get out of here," she said. Her face was red and streaked with tears. "Go!"

"I'm sorry," Alva said again, and left the girl there to wait for help that would not help, her words sounding in Alva's mind. Money was no fix for that girl, true—But please, God, she thought, let it be for me.

Excerpted from A Well-Behaved Woman by Therese Fowler. Copyright © 2018 by Therese Fowler. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.