Cristina Ihiri Haswani

Eleven days before Christmas, a man no one invited is coming to dinner. He is family, after a fashion - and he has come to tell a mother the truth about her own life, in the kindest voice in which anyone has ever held a knife. Nine-year-old Hildegard reads a room the way some people read weather. What he reads is that his mother's loneliness was never an accident. Someone built it. Darker and more tender than The Boy Who Was Too Much, No One Ever Comes is a story of manufactured cruelty and unbought love - of a man who prices everything and treasures nothing, and of two boys who learn, on the worst night of their lives, what their mother has been holding, and how to hold it for her.
Because home was never a place. Home is the people who truly see you. The Twice-Exceptional Heart continues in Book III.