He was sitting at Byron’s table with Byron and Tito.
This had never happened.
As such, this didn’t give me a good feeling because, even though, in very different ways, Tex and Tito were father-esque figures to all of us girls, and Dream worked weekends, so she was one of the girls, I didn’t think this was a them-sitting-him-down-and-asking-his-intentions chat.
I knew it wasn’t when Tex looked over his shoulder at me.
He had a lot of beard.
I could still see his face.
And it was serious.
Raye wasn’t in yet. Willow was probably helping in the cubby. We were barely open so there wasn’t anyone sitting at a table.
Those weren’t the reasons I rushed over to them.
“What?” I asked.
“Sit, Luna, please,” Tito said, giving up his seat for me.
But he stood by the table even after I sat down.
I didn’t know who to look at, but since we were in Byron’s space, I looked at him.
“What?”
“Cynthia Chambers fell off the face of the earth twenty-two years ago,” Byron said.
I wasn’t following.
“I’m sorry?”
“Knox’s mom ceased to exist twenty-two years ago,” Byron essentially repeated.
“That tracks. That’s about when she left them,” I said. “Sorry, you might not know, but she left Knox and his brothers and sister when he was eleven.”
“And she fell off the face of the earth,” Byron drove home.
“I don’t know why you keep telling me that,” I said.
Tito slid in next to Byron. “Luna, love, a woman can leave her husband, but she’ll still leave a footprint.”
It was hitting me.
“Nothing?” I asked Byron.
He shook his head. “No renewed driver’s license. No bank accounts. No credit cards. No taxes filed. No property holdings. No license plate registrations. No divorce proceedings. Not even any change of name petitions. Nothing.”
“I saw her. She got into a BMW. She was dressed really nice,” I told them.
No one said anything.
“So what does this mean?” I asked.
“One, that wasn’t Knox’s mom who you saw, or two, she’s so far off the grid, the grid forgot she existed,” Byron said.
Could some crazy lady be running around pretending to be Knox’s mom?
