Selvage

Cane's Folly, 1926. One hundred years before Flotsam.

Luella Cane sews for the living and the dead, and the dead are the steadier custom. Two drowned by March. Each one nearer in than the last, in calms that wouldn't put a cat over a rail, and the town's answer is to move the salt to the front of the store and say nothing.

Then a stranger walks into her shop at dusk with a bolt of gray silk that has no selvage and no intention of unraveling, and gives her name at full volume. Mercer. The name the island only says once a year, into a quilt, with the salt fresh at every sill.

Luella takes the commission. She measures a woman she never once touches. She leaves her window open one hand wide, and for the first time in two years, she sleeps.

She knows what comes through windows after dark. She knows what it's said to take. And she knows what hers has taken — nothing — and what it leaves behind, morning after morning, warm above her collarbone like a kindness set where it would be found.

The sea keeps what it's owed. Unless someone claims it first.

A sapphic Southern Gothic monster romance about a seamstress, a hag, and the one dress on earth cut to the size a woman used to be. Explicit. Ends on a held breath. Start here, or after Flotsam; either way, you'll know something Luella didn't.