When Matt Hardy required time off to recover from knee surgery in 2004, he was confident that his long-term girlfriend and travel partner Amy 'Lita' Dumas was in safe hands travelling with Edge, who was Hardy's buddy and also recently married (to Val Venis' sister). How wrong he was. Hardy discovered a secret phone that Lita had used to communicate with Edge. The texts and voicemails left little to the imagination and, when Matt confronted Lita about it she confessed. Matt threw her out of the house and took all evidence that the two were ever a couple off of his website. The news was soon public and Edge and Lita's names were mud. So what did WWE do about it? They fired Matt. Yup, not only had Matt lost the girl he thought he would marry and his close friend but now he was unemployed too. Fans sensed the injustice and began chanting 'You screwed Matt' towards the love rats at WWE events. WWE realised the chants weren't going to go away so they decided to capitalise it by bringing Matt back and placing him in a feud with Edge. Matt Hardy returned on Raw with a new 'worked shoot' character and promo style. He referred to Edge as 'Adam' and Amy as 'Lita' and vowed to make their life miserable. He had a lot of fan support and the angle had a lot of potential but, as is typical with worked shoot storylines, the line between fantasy and reality got a little murkier and the angle lost a lot of steam at SummerSlam where Edge hammered Hardy and the ref stopped the match after only five minutes of action. Edge won the feud decisively in a Lose-Leaves-Raw ladder match on the Raw Homecoming show in October 2005 and moved to Smackdown where he was given a couple of stiff beatings from that stickler for locker room etiquette, JBL. For a while, though, the feud was exciting and had fans guessing about what was real and what wasn't.
