He supposed Noelle might find a husband. Probably would since she was lovely. God, he couldn’t think of a single teen in town he would trust with his daughter. He rolled onto his side. “Why are you asking?”

Her eyes were on him, soft and luminous in the low light from the lamp on the nightstand. “I don’t know. I’m curious, I guess.”

This was getting serious. He knew it, but he wasn’t sure he was ready for this conversation. “I hadn’t thought about it at all. Monica had a rough time when she was pregnant with Noelle. She didn’t want to try again. I suppose I got used to the idea of having one kid. Then we got divorced and the accident happened and I haven’t thought about remarrying or even dating at all until I met you. I kind of thought you wouldn’t want kids.”

That seemed to startle her. “Why?”

This was a conversation filled with land mines. “You’re very focused on your career.”

“The funny thing is if I was a man, you wouldn’t even consider that being a barrier to me wanting a family. The other funny thing is a couple of years ago I would have said you were right. I would have said the last thing in the world I wanted was to be a mom. I didn’t have one. I mean I did, and she’s all right now, but when we were growing up . . . Kids need stability. I did not have that.”

“Because your mom was an addict?”

“Oh, yes. She was addicted to a lot of things. Mostly I think she was addicted to not dealing with things. She always wanted to be out of her head. It started with liquor and men.”

“When did she start going to jail?”

“The first time I was six,” Lila explained. “My aunt came and stayed with us while my mother was incarcerated, but she wasn’t terribly interested in four kids under the age of ten. She was there but she wasn’t. She spent most of the time teaching us how to take care of ourselves. It felt harsh, but I was grateful for the lessons later.”

He didn’t like to think about her childhood. “She should have taken care of you.”

Lila shrugged. “We weren’t hers. She never wanted kids and she wasn’t going to spend her life cleaning up her sister’s mess. We found that if we didn’t ask much of her, she was willing to help us with CPS. That was our whole life, trying to convince CPS not to split us up. No one wants to foster four kids together. We learned how to take care of each other, how to push each other to excel because it was the only way we were ever getting out of that trailer park.”

“You grew up fast.”