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This brought a grin to his face. “A true compliment, coming from a lady such as yourself.”
“It was meant as one.”
“You mentioned the other night you were divorced,” he said. “Can you tell me about it?”
I wanted to say no, but it wasn't an option in our circumstances. In months of dating, this certainly would've come up.
He waited patiently while I organized my thoughts.
I'd told the story a dozen times to other women at work. Why was it so hard now to tell him?
“His name was Matt Hudson. It ended two years ago. We met in college and were only married for a short time after that.”
“But you kept his name?” he asked.
“It sounds better than my maiden name, more professional.”
He studied me quizzically. His unspoken question hung in midair.
I hated admitting this. “I prefer Amy Hudson to Amy Hoare, and that’s H-O-A-R-E by the way." There. I said it.
He controlled himself and avoided the laughter that commonly erupted after I said my maiden name out loud. “You must've had a very tough time in high school.”
“Incredibly hard, for both me and my sister, but now she embraces it.”
“I can understand why you were in a hurry to get married and change it.”
Now I was the one who laughed. “It turned out to be the one and only upside to marrying Matt.”
“No kids, I take it?”
“No, all I have left from the experience are a puke green couch he bought and alimony payments.”
He cocked his head. “You're paying him?”
“I have a job, and he's going to school, or so he says. He never did get a full-time job while we were married.”
“If you were only married a short time, why the alimony?”
“Good question,” I told him. This part still seemed incredibly unfair to me. “If Matt had filed for divorce in Massachusetts, my alimony payments would have ended. But no such luck. His scumbag lawyer filed in Rhode Island and convinced the judge to extend the payments for another four years while Matt supposedly goes to school.”
Liam reached over to touch my hand for a moment. “That still doesn’t sound fair.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve learned the hard way that the justice system is long on system and short on justice. I only found out that the judge and Matt’s scumbag lawyer went to law school together after it was too late to complain. Just my luck.”
“He’s still not working?” Liam asked.
I was pretty sure of my answer to that based on my Facebook stalking. “Not since the divorce.”
“Is that what caused the breakup?”
I sipped some wine before answering. “That probably would've caused a problem later, but he moved to go to school, and we couldn’t handle the distance.”
“That’s tough,” he said sweetly.
I couldn’t hold back. “The cheating was the hardest part,” I admitted.
Liam reached across to lay his hand on mine. “I'm sorry, Amy. You don't deserve that.”
