The card was addressed to a house demolished twenty years ago. Someone had penciled a second address beneath it, then crossed that out too. Nessa kept it in the sorting tray because the handwriting looked familiar.
The sender was her mother's oldest friend, who had died the previous month. A neighbor had posted the cards found on her desk without checking them. Nessa followed the crossed-out address to a care home, where an administrator recognized the intended recipient's name but said he had never lived there.
He had visited his wife every winter afternoon. After her death, the sender continued writing to the place where she remembered them together. Staff forwarded the cards until he moved away. Neither woman had corrected her address book, and the forwarding trail had become a quiet record of their friendship.
Nessa found the man's new address in the last returned envelope. She enclosed the card with a plain note explaining its journey. A week later, the sorting office received a reply: please tell whoever kept it that the old house was where we met.