Two years into keeping a town most maps don't bother with, Rosalind Whitlock has learned to expect trouble at the Turning and trouble at the solstice. She has never learned what to do with an honest debt.
At the end of a long winter, a woman named Imogen Aldermere writes ahead in careful green-tinged ink: she is coming to Juniper Hollow this spring to collect on a pledge three hundred years old, made by founders the town has half forgotten and one it erased outright. Imogen is not a villain. She is a reasonable, grieving stranger with an honest claim, a fortune built on being owed, and a founding-day ledger that says the Hollow's hearth holds something that belongs, by rights, to her line.
What it holds is Barty. The oversized gray cat who has slept on Roz's hearthstone since her great-aunt died turns out to be older than the house, older than the Whitlock claim itself, a watcher bound into the founding compact the year the ring was raised. If the debt is called at a lit hearth and refused, the compact will take him, lawfully and irreversibly, and there will be nothing love or magic can do to stop it.
Roz cannot out-argue a woman who is simply right, and she cannot fight a claim she has no grounds to refuse. What she can do is what she has always done best, once she stops being afraid long enough to do it: read the whole contract, find the clause nobody thought to use, and offer welcome instead of surrender. Before the last high fire of spring burns down, she will have to write an erased woman back into her own town's history, hand a stranger a seat at a hearth Roz once meant to sell, and decide, at last, whether the life she has spent two years building is worth sharing rather than defending.
Hardy Perennial is the third novel in The Juniper Hollow Witch series: a warm, wry, book-club-clean cozy paranormal about an honest debt, an erased founder finally restored to the record, a very good cat, and a midlife heroine who closes out her hardest year by learning that some things are only ever kept by giving them away. No murder, no gore, a guaranteed warm ending, and a hearth, and a Keeping, finally whole.