The following is an excerpt from Don’t Leave Her Alone by Desirée de Fez, translated by Lizzie Davis. One of Europe’s foremost experts in fantasy and horror literature and film, de Fez has spent more than fifteen years advising international filmmakers and production companies. She is also a film critic and international film festival programmer. Don’t Leave Her Alone is her debut novel.
Don’t Leave Her Alone follows Alba, a woman consumed by anxiety who relies heavily on her mother, Carmen, while her sister, Diana, struggles with the demands of work and motherhood. When Alba encounters two mysterious women at a shopping mall just before Christmas, a terrifying series of events unfolds, culminating in her disappearance on Christmas Eve. As long-buried family tensions erupt into visceral horror, the three women must confront the fears that bind them together. It is available now from G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
1.
The preschoolers had dressed up as angels. They wore wings made of cardboard and cotton, golden crowns, glitter on their chubby cheeks. The idea was that everything should be immaculate white, to symbolize purity, but a few pairs of beige Decathlon pants and threadbare T-shirts kept the scene from flawlessness. From the stage, Brisa scanned the room for her mother while she recited the Christmas poem: I’m the queen of the house and nougat’s my treat, at Christmas I send you kisses so sweet! She looked for her in the audience, her performance switching to playback as she mouthed the verses they had spent weeks preparing with clumsy charm. Failing to see her mom in the crowd, she decided to stop looking.
Diana had done everything to make sure she would be on time for her daughter’s Christmas play. Her partner was going to be in Madrid all day, so a classmate’s mom was picking up her son. She had blocked off the afternoon weeks in advance: She’d go to the performance, then take Brisa out for a treat. A girls’ day, just the two of them. She left the house early, happy to have turned in her articles before the start of the holidays. She’d even finished the following week’s assignments, something she hadn’t managed since she’d gone freelance all those years ago. She couldn’t remember a Christmas when she hadn’t put off her shopping, slipped out of a family dinner, or missed a school play just to hole up and finish reviewing some absurd movie, or rush off to interview a barely relevant public figure. Diana walked down Balmes looking radiant, more put-together than usual, intending to have an espresso before heading to the school.
But halfway there, her heart started pounding in her ears. It couldn’t be. There was no way. She couldn’t have left her straightener on, could she have? Surely not. She mentally reconstructed the moments before she left the house, but she couldn’t specifically remember the moment when she unplugged it. She tried to convince herself it would be all right even if it were on, because she always left it resting in the sink—there was no danger because there was nothing for it to touch. And anyway, she was sure it had a temperature gauge and turned off on its own when it got too hot. But did it actually have a temperature gauge? Was she sure? In fact, she had never paid attention, and it was quite old. What if she’d left the tap dripping and water got on the straightener? Or maybe she’d set it on the shelf, next to the towels, instead of in the sink? She turned halfway around. She called Carlos to tell him what had happened. She wanted him to pick up and tell her what she knew already: that she hadn’t left the straightener on, or the door open, or the lock unlocked. She wanted him to make the decision for her, tell her not to go back home to check. But he didn’t pick up. So she hurried back up Balmes, teary-eyed, embarrassed. She felt the weight of her makeup, the pins and needles on her face, the sweat soaking through her thermal T-shirt, her too-tight new boots destroying her pinkie toes.
More humiliating than her slow but steady breakdown, than the feeling of becoming as lifeless as a dishrag, was crossing paths with the parents of Brisa’s classmates, who all had left home with just enough time but would seemingly still beat her to the school play. She pretended she was texting to avoid eye contact—she couldn’t stand when smiling parents pointed out that she was going the wrong way, though she herself had made that joke, too, when she saw someone rushing home to grab a swim bag or whatever else.
After what felt like hours, she arrived at the building entrance, exhausted. She didn’t smell anything frying or burning. She climbed the stairs, breathless, hoping she had, in fact, left the straightener on and that something—a towel, a scrunchie—would catch fire the precise moment she walked through the door. She longed for a harmless flame, something small she could easily put out, to prove to herself that she wasn’t ridiculous; sure, she had missed the start of the play, but she’d also averted a total catastrophe. She went in. There was no smoke, no fire, no click of the temperature gauge. The straightener, which of course had no thermostat, was turned off with the cord coiled up, set half a meter from everything else in the bathroom. Everything was in order. Everything had been checked, and checked again, an hour earlier.
Diana arrived at the Christmas play late, her pinkie toes raw.
When she walked through the school doors, she could feel the teacher’s aide—lost in thought, counting the minutes until she could leave—judge her for being late. Diana’s eyes clouded and her legs shook when, from the hallway, she heard the Christmas song Brisa had been humming at home for weeks. She’d been hoping the play had started late, or that the kids in the other year had gone first. But no. They went class by class, in order. Diana walked faster, spilling into the auditorium. She saw the kids on stage, and the exact same shot in miniature, multiplied by one hundred, on their parents’ and grandparents’ phone screens—they’d ignored the instruction not to take videos. She saw none of the nannies she knew from school pickup. Only rows of family members who’d arrived well before she had, mostly moms. Moms who had shown up on time, serene and impeccable, toes soft and perfect. After the poem, the kids launched into a loosely religious version of a Taylor Swift song. The parents laughed loudly, eager to show they recognized a song so famous that even an alien would know it. Diana sat down alone in the last row, careful not to make a sound, and looked for Brisa in the windows between other parents’ arms. The stage was dimly lit and all the children resembled each other, but it wasn’t hard for her to spot Brisa. Not just because she could have picked her daughter out even in darkness, but because Brisa was acting in a way that drew attention. In a way, her acting out had made her the star of the Christmas play: The only child not singing, she had crossed her arms and made a mask of the golden crown her classmates wore on their heads. Stung by her mother’s absence, she had sunk into the choir. She looked like a tiny felon in a lineup, blindfolded with a band of sparkly paper.
Excerpted from DON’T LEAVE HER ALONE by Desirée de Fez, translated by Lizzie Davis. Copyright © 2026 by Desirée de Fez. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.