Meg found the Corvallis address through the postcard postmarks.
Not the messages — those were useless. Weather updates, one-line jokes, a drawing of a cat she didn't recognize. Her mother wrote like someone who might be interrupted at any moment, which was its own kind of information but not the kind Meg needed.
The postmarks, though. Phoenix in March. Bend in June. Salem in September. Each one a little further north and west, the intervals shrinking. Meg plotted them on a road atlas with a felt-tip pen and saw what her mother couldn't have intended to show: a trajectory with a shape. Not wandering. Converging.
The last three postcards were all postmarked Corvallis. The messages stayed casual — a farmer's market, a bookstore with a cat in the window, rain that smelled like pine needles. But the geography had stopped moving.
Meg sat with the atlas for two weeks before she did anything. The felt-tip line looked like a river finding its level. Her mother had left when Meg was nineteen. Not dramatically — she'd said she was going to visit a friend in Tucson, and then she just kept going. The postcards started three months later.
What Meg couldn't decide was whether finding the address meant she was supposed to use it. The postcards had no return address, which was a kind of sentence. But the postmarks were a kind of sentence too — one her mother hadn't written on purpose, which meant it might be the truer one.
She wrote a letter to General Delivery, Corvallis, Oregon. She didn't ask why. She asked about the bookstore cat.
The reply came eleven days later with a return address in the corner.