Abby immediately pulled her hand away from his face and slowly pulled the other one off of his shoulder. He was reacting and she was on guard. She didn't know if it was a good reaction yet or a bad one but she was on pins and needles, waiting to see if her way of comforting him had worked.
She listened to him speak and tried to connect the dots. She knew that he had lived with his grandma at one point and thought his real mom was dead. But that she was actually alive. Wait... is that what he was going on about? His real mom 'didn't want him' and 'wanted him to think she was dead?' Abby didn't know what to say to him. How was she supposed to react to a mother lying to her child and not wanting him? Instead of saying anything, Abby just kept her mouth shut. She had already made him cry today and she wasn't about to be the cause of more tears.
She waited for Carter to take a few puffs from his inhaler and she was about to say something but then he was... leaning on her? Abby blinked a few times awkwardly and then put her arms around him. Or she tried to at least, as they didn't quite make it fully around his shoulders. When she realized that they didn't reach all the way, she opted instead to reach up and run her fingers through his hair. That had always seemed to calm her down, especially after a nice hot shower but she wasn't about to tell him to go take a shower in the boys locker room so she made due.
"I'm sorry, Carter," she said softly as she leaned her head on his. She didn't know anything more to say to him. She had no other comforting words - how else was the girl whose mother passed away supposed to comfort the boy whose mother had suddenly 'come back from the dead?'