Watch Out For Her is a thriller about motherhood and surveillance — read an excerpt now
Maggie Mac Neil will champion Samantha M. Bailey's novel on Canada Reads 2025
Watch Out for Her is about a young mother named Sarah who thinks her problems are solved when she hires a young babysitter, Holly, for her six-year-old son. Her son adores Holly and Holly adores Sarah, who is like the mother she never had. But when Sarah sees something that she can't unsee, she uproots her family to start over. Her past follows her to this new life, raising paranoid questions of who is watching her now? And what do they want?
Watch Out for Her will be championed by Olympic gold medallist Maggie Mac Neil on Canada Reads 2025.
The great Canadian book debate will take place on March 17-20. This year, we are looking for one book to change the narrative.
The debates will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem, CBC Listen and on CBC Books.
You can read an excerpt from Watch Out for Her below.
I watch people.
With a voyeur's keen eyes, I peer out the window of our rental car as Daniel pulls up to our new house at 227 Lilac Lane. This is the house we'll be living in for the next six months until we find one we want to buy. I've seen only grainy pictures of the inside. The new consulting firm my husband will be working for found the home for us—an incentive to bring him on board. It makes this sudden move across the country easier. Easier but still hard.
At twilight, the detached two-story blends into the others on this quiet suburban Toronto street, like I hope we will. At the end of the block, there's a cul-de-sac, and a set of boxy town houses across from a ravine. I shiver, not from the bitter mid-September chill but because the woods feel too close. They remind me too much of everything we left behind in Vancouver.
They remind me too much of everything we left behind in Vancouver.
Our son, Jacob, and I exit the car, sneakers squelching in the puddles from an overnight rain. The sound centers me in the present, far from Holly Monroe, our babysitter over the summer, and the reason I agreed to this unexpected move. Daniel is ahead of us, dragging a suitcase behind him. Every few seconds, he looks over his shoulder, smiling. I smile back, but inside I'm crying over everything I've hidden from him—and everything he might be hiding from me.
Jacob stops in front of the three-bedroom redbrick home looming before us.
"It has eyes," he says. His voice is flat, his body trembling through his thin coat. The wind is sharper in Toronto than North Vancouver, something else my son is now forced to get used to. "The windows are the eyes, and the door is the mouth. It has no nose, though."
I pull him close. A six-year-old's imagination, but still, his words haunt me.
Jacob isn't aware of the real reason we've left Vancouver. All he knows is that Daddy got an exciting new job as a business consultant in the city where he grew up, and Mommy supports Daddy. Neither my little boy nor my husband knows anything about the nights I hid in the thick cluster of trees outside our pool enclosure because it offered the perfect view of our babysitter's house.
I wanted to be her. Holly—young, beautiful, her whole life an exciting blank slate. But then I stopped trusting her. And in the end, I wanted only to protect what was mine.
In the end, I wanted only to protect what was mine.
I turn to my son as he slips his thumb into his mouth, a habit I thought he'd gotten over this summer. My heart constricts at how vividly the freckles dotting Jacob's nose stand out against his chalk white skin. He looks terrible. We took the red-eye so he would sleep, but he was devastated about the move, about being uprooted so suddenly, that he cried for almost the entire flight. It's been said that you're only as happy as your unhappiest child. I have just one child, and he's shattered, so that's how I'm feeling, too. He's lost his home and left behind everyone he loves, except me and Daniel.
"Ready to see the house?" I ask, trying to sound upbeat.
Jacob pulls his wet thumb out of his mouth. The skin around the nail is ripped and chapped. "I want to go home."
Well, that's impossible, I think to myself, but I don't say it out loud. Two weeks ago, Daniel sold our beautiful cliffside home in Forest View to a private buyer from his exclusive golf club. Our home doesn't belong to us anymore. My husband has taken care of everything, for once, a far cry from the man who doesn't make his own lunches for work and who has left child-rearing our son mostly to me. All I have to do now, in this new place, is be Jacob's mother. I should have been content with that all along rather than yearning for more, for my own sense of self.
I should have been content with that all along rather than yearning for more, for my own sense of self.
A porch light flicks on when Daniel gets to the front door. Jacob and I follow him up the three steep steps, and I peer through the decorative glass, our ghostly reflections staring back at me. Daniel rummages for the key in the lockbox, inserts it, and turns it. There's no click. The black oak door wasn't locked.
"Wow. The property manager forgot to lock it," Daniel says.
I feel eyes on me and spin around. Under the dim yellow glow of a streetlamp, a curtain twitches in the house across the street. A face appears, then disappears. I will not overreact. I refuse to give into the foreboding dread that's been pressing on my chest since the last time I saw Holly sixteen days ago.
I trail behind Daniel, pushing Jacob inside and locking the front door behind us. Before I can even look around the main floor, Jacob lets out a howl—a low, agonized wail that twists my insides. Daniel looks at me, shutting his eyes for a moment like he always does to try to make it all disappear.
I take over as usual. "What's wrong?" I ask Jacob as I kneel on the hardwood at his eye level.
"Mr. Blinkers! I can't live here without him!" He punches his fist over and over on his skinny thigh. I take his tiny hand and hold it between mine.
There's no pain greater than your child's pain. I've made so many mistakes that I can never undo. My sole focus now is making my son happy again. But I can't because we lost his favorite toy, Mr. Blinkers—the soft, gray stuffed bunny he slept with every night, all summer long. It disappeared while we were packing up the few items of clothing, toys, and electronics we brought with us. I blame myself. I probably threw it out by accident. It's my fault, like so many things that happened over the summer.
I've made so many mistakes that I can never undo. My sole focus now is making my son happy again.
"Maybe we can find a new Mr. Blinkers at a store here, sweetheart."
Daniel drops our bags, and the house keys hit the small ebony table at the door. The clang makes me jump.
He crouches with me in front of Jacob. "Buddy, we'll get you a new bunny, and we'll take him to see the CN Tower. It has a restaurant at the top that spins."
Daniel's trying too hard, and Jacob sees right through it.
"I want the bunny Holly gave me!" He leans into my shoulder, and the tears come so fast and furious my coat is damp. I hug him fiercely and let him cry, my rainbow baby, my miracle after my miscarriage. Jacob is the only child I'll ever have.
Daniel locks eyes with me, his full of regret. Regret about what? How strained and distant our marriage has become? How invisible I've been to him for the last year? How friendly he and Holly were when they didn't know I was watching? No, I won't go there right now. He's reassured me—I had it wrong. It was all in my head.
Since the day Daniel suggested moving across the country to fix everything, he's been making such an effort to be more attentive, to make me feel like I matter, like when we got married fifteen years ago. I've chosen to believe him that nothing was going on between him and Holly. I've chosen to believe it, but do I actually?
I've chosen to believe it, but do I actually?
Excerpted from Watch Out for Her by Samantha M. Bailey. Copyright © 2022 by Samantha M. Bailey. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Canada, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
