Everything We Never Said by Sloan Harlow

 

I was pleasantly surprised by how good this was!! Everything We Never Said is a story about a high school senior Ella Graham who accidentally killed her best friend Hayley Miller in a car accident. She doesn't have much memory from the accident. She feels very guilty for killing her best friend, and to make matters worse, she starts developing feelings for Hayley's boyfriend at the time of her death, Sawyer Hawkins. When Ella is helping Hayley's mom go through Hayley's stuff, Ella finds Hayley's journal and decides to steal it. What she learns from the journal opens a whole can of worms. 

Everything We Never Said draws you in immediately. I've read enough thrillers to know that nothing is what it seems in the beginning of a thriller, so I'm dying to find out how Hayley really died (surely Ella didn't kill her). We are told that Hayley's body was never found because the car crash was near a ravine and her body was assumed to have been thrown overboard into the ravine. Suspicious. I'm also dying to find out what is in her diary.

As Ella reads Hayley's diary, we learn that she uses just an initial for each person she writes about. E stands for Ella, it's obvious. She also talks about a lover, S, which we assume is Sawyer. However, the S she writes about is quite violent and abusive. Ella has a hard time reconciling the Sawyer she knows with the one in the diary. She starts to wonder if it could be someone else. There's a classmate named Scott who is quite rude, making her wonder if it could be Scott. But that turns out to just be a red herring.

She talks to her high school counselor Mr. Wilkens. Mr. Wilkens holds counseling group sessions in school to help all the classmates get over Hayley's untimely death. Sawyer acts weird around him and is very protective of Ella. Eventually, Ella and Sawyer confess their feelings to each other and they kiss.

Ella feels guilty for falling in love with Sawyer and talks to her old friend Seema about it. (Isn't it funny all these names start with the letter S?) Seema tells her she shouldn't feel bad, that Hayley would want Ella to be happy. Ella reads more of the diary and more entries on the abusive S, who has successfully brainwashed Hayley to make her believe he loves her and is a good man. Ella wonders if she should be careful around Sawyer.

Ella and Seema both work at the YMCA as lifeguards for the swimming pool. Hayley's mom who has an abusive boyfriend named Sean also works at YMCA as an electrician. Ella and Hayley have always felt uncomfortable around Sean, who openly ogles at the girls. One day, Ella sees Sean ogling at her in her swimsuit at YMCA. She feels very uncomfortable, but Sean saves her from a dangerously exposed electrical wire. Nonetheless, she tries to run outside, when Sawyer pulls up and offers her a ride. She decides to get in the car even though she was trying to run away from Sawyer too - she feels the danger from Sean was more imminent. 

Ella reads more of the diary, and the abuse in the diary is getting worse. One night "S" hit Hayley. Hayley justified the action by saying S was abused by his father. Ella goes to Mr. Wilkens and tells him about the diary. Mr. Wilkens gives Ella his phone number and tells her to call him any time, and that he's going to look into whether the diary can be used to prosecute Sawyer.

At the fall festival, Ella is noticeably scared to be around Sawyer. She tells Sawyer that it's not his fault that he grew up with an abusive father. Sawyer is shocked and asks Ella how did she know. Ella says she read it and that she had gone to Mr. Wilkens about it. Sawyer is angry, and tells her she needs to stop going to Mr. Wilkens and start coming to him instead, which doesn't help the situation.

Ella leaves the fall festival and calls Mr. Wilkens. They meet at a park for a walk, near the scene of the accident. Ella starts getting flashbacks from the accident. She remembers Hayley yelling for Ella to drive faster and saying "he's going to kill us". She assumes "he" is Sawyer. One night, someone broke into Ella's bedroom. When she screams, the intruder jumps out of the window. Ella calls the cops and tells them it's Sawyer. She thinks Sawyer was looking for the diary.

Sawyer gets arrested and is shocked to learn about the diary. Ella calls Mr. Wilkens for support again. Sawyer calls Ella from jail. Ella tells him she's with Mr. Wilkens and she's safe, then she blocks Sawyer's number. Mr. Wilkens takes Ella to his house. She realizes he actually goes by his middle name, Sam. She recognizes things at his house from the diary so now she knows "S" is Mr. Wilkens. She also sees his car having a dent in the bumper. But it's all too late. He knocks her out and by the time she wakes up, she's bound in his basement. 

He tells her that he loved Hayley, she tells him he's a murderer. Someone sneaks down to the basement and kills him with a baseball bat. To Ella's shock, it's Hayley. Hayley quickly explains what happened and wipes off her fingerprint on the bat and leaves the bat with Ella (so it looks like Ella killed Mr. Wilkens in self defense). She also had a pocket knife to cut her bindings and left the knife with her too. Apparently, Hayley and Sawyer staged her death so Hayley wouldn't be killed by Mr. Wilkens. Hayley was pregnant and Mr. Wilkens wanted to kill her. Hayley was forced to be dating Sawyer on the surface to cover up her relationship with Mr. Wilkens. Hayley never wanted to expose her identity but when Ella blocked Sam's number, Sam had little choice. He called Hayley for help. Hayley had an abortion and now goes by Hazel, living at a women's shelter. Sawyer is released. He's friends with Ella again. The END. 

Even though the book was kind of predictable, I didn't see the end coming because I wasn't actively trying to guess who "S" was. (Not sure if I would have figured it out if I was trying.) I knew Hayley's death wasn't what it appeared to be but I was moderately shocked when she came back alive. My minor complaint with a book like this, is why would Ella not visit the scene of the accident afterwards? With books where there is memory loss involved, why would the patient never visit the place the incident happened to help rejog their memory? We do that in real life, don't we? Similar to Listen for the Lie, the mystery gets solved pretty quickly once the memory loss person revisits the site of the incident. In both cases, we could have saved a lot of pages if they had done that sooner, to the point there would be no book written.