My Groom Walked Out, So His Brother Took His Place novel · Chapter 11 of 32

Chapter 11: The Bar in Austin

Jude's POV

I left at five in the morning and I did not tell her where I was going.

She was asleep in my bed with one arm over her head and her braid across the pillow.

I stood at the foot of it for longer than I want to say.

Then I took my keys and drove ninety miles east with the windows down.

I wasn't going to Austin to hit him.

I told myself that all the way down Highway 290.

The bar was on East Sixth, a narrow brick place with a neon armadillo in the window and a chalkboard that said LIVE MUSIC TONIGHT.

It was shut at that hour.

I knocked on the glass until a woman unlocked the door.

She was in her late twenties, tall, with a shaved side and a sleeve of tattoos, holding a mop.

She looked at my face and at my hands.

"You're the brother," she said.

"I'm Jude."

"He's upstairs. He's been sleeping on my floor for two months." She stepped back. "Don't break anything. I own the lease."

I climbed a narrow stair.

Wendell was on a mattress in a room above the bar, in a T-shirt and boxers, a guitar propped against the wall.

He sat up and put both hands in front of his face.

"Don't," he said. "I know."

"Get up."

"Jude," Wendell said.

"Get up and put pants on. We're going to talk like men."

He did.

We sat on the back steps in the alley, with the dumpsters and the morning heat coming up.

I looked at my older brother.

He had lost weight.

He had a beard coming in, and the look of someone who hadn't slept in a month.

For a second it was hard to be angry.

Then I remembered Bryn tearing a check into a glass of bourbon.

"Did you text her?" I said.

"I texted her."

"The night of the wedding," I said.

"I asked her to ask you what you knew."

"Why?"

He rubbed his face.

"I was drunk," Wendell said. "I wanted someone else to be in it. I knew you'd sat there at the rehearsal dinner and said nothing. I thought, if she's angry at both of us..."

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