SLOAN HARLOW’S All We Lost Was Everything is a sexy thriller with a shocking twist. Read on for an extract.

ABOUT THE BOOK

River Santos is stuck – in her job, in her dead-end town, in her grief. Her father died in a house fire, her mother has been MIA for nearly a year, and the only person she can count on is her best friend.

Things feel like they’re turning around when Logan – the mysterious, hot guy at work – suddenly seems interested. But things get complicated when her ex-boyfriend, Noah, starts showing up.

The flames of romance must take a backseat though, when startling revelations about the deadly fire emerge…

River isn’t sure who to trust anymore, but she needs to figure it out, fast.

EXTRACT

prologue

river

Every Friday, my mum played the lottery. She would stop at the gas station on her way home from cleaning whatever mansion was on rotation that week and buy scratchers for the largest pot on offer. She would win, here and there. Small amounts – sometimes the cost of the ticket, sometimes a little more. Once, she even won a thousand dollars. More often than not, though, she’d come up empty, and she seemed truly surprised every time it happened. I think she really believed that one day, the odds would be in her favour. That one day, she would be a millionaire and magically her life would be better – all our lives would be better. The never-ending debt from her unfinished college degree would be gone just like that. The need for my dad to take on a second and sometimes even a third job would disappear overnight. I could attend college without a single thought about tuition.

We would be rich and happy, but we would be responsible, the kind of family that wouldn’t be destroyed from within by its new-found wealth.

When I turned 15 and learned about the odds of winning the lottery – ‘one in 300 million,’ my stats teacher had intoned – I told my mum she’d be better off saving her money instead of wasting it on tickets each week. She’d just waggled her eyebrows and said, ‘Someone’s gotta win. Why not me?’

As far as I know, she never did win the lottery. But I did. And all it cost me was everything.

chapter 1

river

Cemeteries are the greenest places in all of Scottsdale, Arizona. Even greener than the golf course at the nicest country club in town, which I only know because my mum worked there as a house-keeper when I was seven, and her boss used to let me eat ice pops from the snack stand at the 13th hole.

Ocotillo Ridge Memorial Park is no exception. There’s no red dirt here, no gravel. No dusty scrub or faded mulch. Just a clear stretch of brilliant green grass, water shortage be damned. The sea of green is broken up only by headstones and a smattering of flowering trees that lace the air with the gumdrop smell of acacia and the grape-soda scent of Texas mountain laurel. Dad loved those pendulous purple flowers, that sweet smell. It’s why I dipped into my GoFundMe money – the dubiously earned nest egg I’d vowed never to touch except in case of emergency – to secure him a spot here, so he could always be near those blossoms.

It’s the trees I focus on now, the way they glow in the morning light. I don’t focus on the way a priest is saying my father’s name – Jay San-TOS – and how it sounds all wrong on his clumsy tongue. The way substitute teachers used to say my name, indifferent, not bothering to understand the vowels or pronunciation, because in an hour, that name would no longer exist to them.

If I focused on how wrong it sounds, I would have to focus on how wrong all of this is. That my dad is lying there, in a cedar coffin, waiting to be lowered into the ground, instead of standing here by my side. That my mother hasn’t even called, let alone shown up for his funeral. That life as I knew it burned down to the ground just two weeks ago, when my house caught fire, taking everything with it – my guitar, my songbook, my diaries, my clothes, everything.

And most importantly, my father.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sloan Harlow is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Everything We Never Said and All We Lost Was Everything. She splits her time between St Petersburg, Florida, and Canton, Georgia, and is still trying to train her black cat, Pabu, to not nap on her keyboard.

Read an extract from Everything We Never Said

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