A surveyor returns to the West Virginia hollow she escaped—and finds the mountain, the town, and something on the old tipple waiting for her.

On Cane’s Folly in 1926, a seamstress for the dead opens her door to a stranger carrying an impossible bolt of cloth.

For fifty years, Hortense Vauclain has kept the covenant nobody else remembers. She walks the boundary. She records every tremor beneath the Louisiana hollow. And when the last frost comes, she pays the land in blood to keep four ancient creatures bound to her family’s forty acres.

Now Hortense is eighty-three, the binding is failing, and the heir who should inherit it all has never heard the Vauclain name. Calling her grand-niece home would preserve the covenant—and condemn another woman to the life Hortense never chose.

So Hortense makes one final, impossible decision: she will leave the lights on, walk away from the tithe, and trust that what waits in the hollow remembers the difference between abandonment and freedom.

A Southern Gothic prequel to Boundwater, Last Frost is the story of the woman who broke the first lock.