“Am I wrong in assuming that maybe some of the joints you mentioned hurting are in your hands?”
She slowly curled her fingers into her palms and then opened them. “Yes. Sometimes.”
Ben didn’t say anything more. He’d put the thought in her mind, but he wasn’t going to leave it to her to arrange for a folding machine. He was going to find one and have it delivered to the church.
If nothing else, he was going to do what he could to make her life a little easier and maybe a bit less painful.
“Did I tell you that I’ve made the decision to move into Annie’s old place?”
Amelia’s brows rose. “Really? Why?”
“I don’t know,” Ben said. “I just thought I’d like a bit more space of my own.”
A small smile crossed Amelia’s face. “I love the loft in that place. I used to go there for fittings sometimes. She decorated the loft so cute with her work stuff on one side and the bedroom on the other.”
“I had a bedroom there too,” Ben said. “It was on the main floor, and sometimes I spent the night there when my folks were in New York. I didn’t always stay with Annie when they were gone, but I always knew that I could if I wanted to.”
“It sounds like you considered it your second home.”
“Definitely,” Ben said. “And now it’s going to become that again.”
“How does your mom feel about you moving out of the main house?”
Ben added the bulletin he’d folded to the pile. “I think she has mixed emotions. She’d rather I stayed in the main house close to her, but I think she’s hoping that my moving into Annie’s house means I’ll be staying longer.”
“Sounds like a mom,” Amelia said.
“My mom has always wanted to keep me close. I’m her baby after all.”
“You’ve got a great mom,” she said.
“So do you.”
Amelia nodded. “Yes. Charli’s been great to me. My birth mother, however, wasn’t as good.”
“Sometimes I forget that Charli isn’t your birth mom.”
“Me, too. At least now,” she said. “At the start, it took me awhile to understand that she wanted to be my mom. There were times when I thought she only tolerated me because she wanted my dad. You know, because he was Layla’s dad.”
Ben paused in his folding. “You never mentioned that back then.”
Amelia shrugged, then began to fold another bulletin. “By the time we started hanging out together, I’d mostly gotten over it.”
“Mostly?” Ben asked.
“Let’s just say that the idea has never completely left my mind,” she said with a sigh. “But I don’t dwell on it.”
Ben considered the revelation as he continued to help Amelia. He’d always thought she and Charli had a good relationship. It hadn’t been the same as Charli and Layla’s, buthe’d just assumed it was because Amelia had a more reserved personality than Layla did.
Now he wondered if Amelia had just never fully opened herself up to Charli, especially if she’d thought that Charli had only tolerated her. It might have made Amelia wary of sharing too much about her feelings with Charli.
Was that part of why she’d been so intensely private about certain things? How much did Charli know about her current situation?
“Have you told your mom and dad about going to New York for the testing?”
Amelia slowly drew her finger along the fold, flattening it into a crease. “No. They’ve already been through a lot of medical stuff with Shiloh. I don’t want to add to their stress.”
“But it’s been awhile since Shiloh had medical issues, hasn’t it? Isn’t she doing better?”
