He’d prepared himself for a lightning bolt of recognition; the staggering impact of a homecoming long delayed. It didn’t happen, though. The place had a gothic aura, no question, and the architectural style was suggestive of the supernatural. But the guts of the place had been so efficiently institutionalized that the ghosts had fled, leaving behind only a first-rate medical facility. When Finn was born, the place had been called the New Hampshire Home for Wayward Girls. Now it was called the New Hampshire Health Services Center. Catholic Charities had sold the place to a medical non-profit in the 1990s. The place still provided reproductive counseling, birthing and adoption resources to indigent and single women, but the need for the two-month-long stays for pregnant girls had vanished with the changing times, and the abortions that were now performed at the center were out-patient procedures requiring relatively little space.
