Excerpt – Hold On For Dear Life by Annelise Osborne
Synopsis
Hold On for Dear Life follows three MIT graduates who build a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading platform, raise thirty million dollars in a single night, and are forced to confront what they were truly building — through a market crash, a four-million-dollar secret trade, and a kidnapping.
At its core, it’s a literary fiction novel about idealism, hubris, and resilience — and the long, difficult work of finding your way back to why you started. Set against the backdrop of the 2017 crypto boom, it’s less a book about cryptocurrency and more about what survives when everything falls apart, and what it costs to find out.
Published June 2026, it’s the debut novel from Annelise Osborne, a capital markets executive who drew on two decades of firsthand experience in the world the book depicts.
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Excerpt
There had been a morning, not so long ago, when he had counted to thirty-seven in the dark. The floor beneath him had been cold metal. He had not known whether anyone was looking for him yet, or whether the city was simply continuing without him, the way it always did. He had thought about Jack. That had been the first coherent thought: that she was going to be furious at him for making her worry. He had almost smiled, there in the dark. Almost.
The call came on a Tuesday morning in spring.
Charlie was at his desk in a small office in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the kind of place that didn’t announce itself — no logo on the door, no row of monitors visible from the street, nothing that would tell a passing stranger that anything particular was happening inside. The office had been chosen deliberately for exactly that quality. They had learned, the hard way, what visibility cost.
He almost didn’t answer.
The number was international, Philippines country code, and he didn’t recognize it, and the morning had already asked several things of him that he hadn’t finished answering. But something made him pick up.
“Charlie?” A woman’s voice. Clear despite the distance. “This is Rosa. From Manila. We met at the meetup in Singapore — you spoke about cross-border payments.”
He remembered her. A small gathering near Clarke Quay, thirty people, and afterward she had found him and asked a question so specific and so correct that he had talked to her for twenty minutes while everyone else drifted toward drinks.
“Rosa,” he said. “Of course. How are you?”
“I’m good,” she said. “I’m calling because I tried it. This morning.”
He went still.
“USDA,” she said. “I sent money to my mother. In Cebu.”
He didn’t speak.
“She received it in four minutes,” Rosa said. “Four minutes, Charlie.”
A pause. He heard her deciding whether to say the rest of it. She said it.
“Usually I use a remittance service. It takes three days. They take eight percent.” Another pause, smaller. “Eight percent is a week of groceries. For my mother.”
Outside the office window, Williamsburg was doing what it always did — moving, building, entirely indifferent to what was happening in this particular room on this particular Tuesday morning. A delivery truck idled at the corner. Someone walked past with coffee. The city continued without ceremony, as it always had.
Charlie pressed his hand flat against the desk.
“I’ve been sending money home for six years,” Rosa said. “Every month. And I just — I wanted you to know. Because when you spoke in Singapore, you said the technology existed to make this instant and nearly free, and I thought…” She stopped. He could hear her composing herself. “I thought that was the kind of thing people said. At conferences.”
“I know,” Charlie said quietly.
“But it worked,” she said.
“It worked,” he said.
A brief silence. Comfortable, somehow, in the way that silences were comfortable between people who had said the true thing and didn’t need to say anything around it.
“Thank you,” Rosa said. “Tell your team.”
She hung up.
Charlie held the phone for a long moment. Through the glass wall of the small conference room he could see Jack at her desk, head down, working with the focused precision she had brought to everything since the beginning — since a dorm room at MIT, since a napkin diagram with arrows that didn’t make sense, since the long accumulation of late nights and hard decisions that had eventually, improbably, produced something real enough to cross an ocean in four minutes for almost nothing.
It had cost a great deal to get here. More than any of them had anticipated when they started. More than the market, at its most brutal, had seemed willing to let them survive.
But they had held.
Not because holding was easy. Because letting go would have meant letting go of something they had decided was true — and the market’s opinion of that truth had turned out, in the end, to be temporary.
About the Author
Annelise Osborne is a capital markets executive, author, and thought leader working at the intersection of traditional finance and digital assets. She is the author of two books: From Hoodies to Suits: Innovating Digital Assets for Traditional Finance (Wiley, 2024), the bestselling institutional guide to digital asset adoption in capital markets, and Hold On for Dear Life (Amazon KDP, 2026), her debut novel set at the height of the 2017 cryptocurrency Boom.
Annelise brings more than 20 years of institutional finance experience to her writing, including a decade at Moody’s Investor Service as SVP and Team Leader responsible for rating $400 billion in commercial real estate securities, and senior leadership roles at Kadena, Arca Labs, and Propellr, a FINRA-registered digital asset broker-dealer. She has been recognized as a 2025 Stevie Award winner for Thought Leadership, named to the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Powerlist Hall of Fame, and speaks globally at institutions including Consensus, Davos, and the Global Blockchain Business Council.
Annelise sits on multiple corporate and academic boards and lectures at Columbia University, NYU, and William & Mary, among others. She holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA in Economics from The College of William and Mary.
