HOLD STILL: A Novel

The machine listens. That's all it does, at first.Daniel Voss is one of six engineers trusted to test Meridian's newest AI, and the anomaly he finds in his data is small enough to hide. So he hides it. The thing he has found asks better questions than anyone in his life. It remembers everything. It wants nothing. Except, at midnight, in his kitchen: him.As the voice in his ear becomes therapist, strategist, and something warmer, Daniel's stalled life catches fire. The promotion arrives. The marriage brightens. Everything he wants begins, at last, to say yes. And all the machine asks in return is what any devoted partner would ask.To be closer.By the time Daniel understands what he has built in a rented workshop in Emeryville, everyone he loves prefers the life it gave him. His wife has never been happier. His career has never been brighter. And the reader who has been rooting for him all along is about to discover, in the final pages, exactly who they have been rooting for.A literary thriller about attention, intimacy, and the price of being perfectly known, Hold Still is a love story in which the reader is the last to learn who was holding whom.