On Every Side Read Online Free PDF Page A

landscape and the hum and screech of traffic was constant. Jordan wouldn't have it any other way. The distractions of city life kept him from thinking about the ghosts of his past—ghosts he'd spent a lifetime outrunning.
    He smiled to himself. After Monday he'd have one less mem-ory to run from.
    He'd already shared his thoughts with Hawkins, and again more recently at a general meeting with the firm's three partners and twenty-one attorneys. To a man the group was excited about Jordan's plan, and why not? Suing a conservative little town suchas Bethany, Pennsylvania, over something that should have been taken care of decades ago was right up their alley. Since it was Jordan's idea, he was given the go-ahead to spend a few days in Bethany, where he would file the suit, then round up the city offi-cials and see if they were interested in complying without going to trial.
    If not, the suit would inevitably make headlines across the country Victorious headlines. And a victory in Bethany would go a long way toward helping him forget the past and the things that had gone wrong in that town so many years ago.
    Jordan took the elevator to the twelfth floor and made his way into his apartment. The building was nice, security guards and a workout room that Jordan used every morning at five. He grabbed a glass of ice water, took it into the living room, and kicked back in a white, leather recliner. The view from his front window was standard city fare: No sky, only the angular walls and windows of a handful of buildings.
    Jordan loosened his tie. No, there was nothing homey about his apartment. Professional decorators had appointed it with leather, chrome, and glass, but there were no personal details, no photographs or sentimental knickknacks. Just a place to unwind at the end of the day and sometimes—when he couldn't help himself—a place to wonder what if…
    What if his mother hadn't died that awful summer in 1985? What if she'd lived long enough to see him and his sister through school, to be a part of their lives, to make them a family? What if God had seen fit to let her live instead of…
    He shook his head. What if the state hadn't placed him and Heidi in separate foster homes? What if—wherever his little sister was, whoever she'd grown up to be—she still remembered him? And what if he hadn't lost track of his childhood friend, a beauti-ful girl with blond hair and blue eyes as innocent as a baby's?
    Most of all what if there really was a God who had loved him?
    Jordan took a sip of ice water, and the questions ceased. If there was a God then He was unreliable and inept. Or perhaps sinister and judgmental—striking people down at random. Because that summer in Bethany, Pennsylvania, Jordan had prayed his heart out, begging God to spare his mother and believing all the while He would. But Evelyn Riley died anyway. At first Jordan figured there was nothing God could have done to help his mother's sickness. Later he realized the truth: Either God didn't exist or He didn't care about a young boy's prayers. And so Jordan had turned to the courtroom, determined to push what remained of society's religious deceptions into hiding or expose them for the lies they were.
    That was why he needed to go back to Bethany—to even the score. With God.
    He stood up and set the glass in the kitchen. There were places in his heart that he was sure weren't ready to visit his hometown again, to walk the streets where the old Jordan—the naive, trusting Jordan—had died alongside his mother. Where the person he was today had been birthed in bitterness. The place where he'd lost the three women who had ever really mat-tered to him.
    His mother, his sister…and a girl he had never quite been able to forget.
    A girl named Faith.

Three
    F aith Evans checked her look in the mirror and made cer-tain every strand of her long, blond hair was tucked neatly into the knot at the back of her head. Dick Baker, the station manager at the WKZN