Please Hold

"The Thursday Murder Club meets Black Mirror in this witty, fast-paced speculative workplace thriller about the high-stakes world of corporate time travel, ancient cover-ups, and the customer support agents who have to sound calm for a living."

Epoch Escapes exists to provide safe, structured, and responsible access to humanity's shared past. But when a modern tourist stands up in a Titanic lifeboat on the worst night of someone else's life, it's just another Tuesday for customer support.

Mara Ansari is a Tier Two Support agent at Epoch Escapes, a corporate time-travel conglomerate. For five years, she has been "the voice in the ear," using a perfectly trained, unbothered customer service voice to talk panicked, wealthy clients down from historical disasters, preventing butterfly-effect paradoxes before coffee. It's an unglamorous, high-casualty grind, but Mara is the absolute best at invisible prevention.

Mara's meticulous care isn't just a career path-it's survival armor. Five years ago, a catastrophic, miscalibrated temporal extraction in a collapsing library cost her everything. She has spent half a decade telling herself she took this job to prevent systemic failures, but deep down, she's just trying to become the person who should have saved her own family.

When an elite billionaire client begins executing a pattern of unauthorized, multi-century trips to history's most famous burning archives, Mara flags the anomaly-only to be slapped with an anonymous corporate reprimand and locked out of the files.

With the help of an earnest new trainee and a brilliant corporate rival, Mara starts tracing a paper trail the company has spent years trying to rewrite. The digital records are perfectly polished, but the cold truth remains buried in the basement: someone high up is letting the timeline shift. As her dead brother's past and a rogue client's countdown crash together at the exact same historical flashpoint, Mara must risk an unauthorized, single-occupant deployment to face the one person she never expected to see again.

Perfect for fans of character-driven soft sci-fi and witty dark humor, Please Hold is a brilliant, layered novel about institutional negligence, generational grief, and the extraordinary lengths we go to for the voices on the other end of the line.