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Proof of Work
Paperback
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ISBN13: 9798193973744
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 21 2026
Pages: 228
Weight: 0.68
Height: 0.52 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 21 2026
Pages: 228
Weight: 0.68
Height: 0.52 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Marcus Hale remembers a Tuesday. An ordinary one - cereal with his daughter, a kiss goodbye in the driveway, a bike ride to clear his head before work.
He wakes up ten years later.
The daughter he left at ten is twenty now, a careful stranger with his jaw and a decade of grief he wasn't there to share. His wife remarried years ago, raised their child alone, and built an entire second life in the same house where his old office sits locked and untouched - exactly as he left it, for reasons even she can't fully explain.
He wakes up ten years later.
The daughter he left at ten is twenty now, a careful stranger with his jaw and a decade of grief he wasn't there to share. His wife remarried years ago, raised their child alone, and built an entire second life in the same house where his old office sits locked and untouched - exactly as he left it, for reasons even she can't fully explain.
And in that basement, still humming quietly after ten years of undisturbed silence, sits the computer where Marcus once mined Bitcoin as a hobby, back when it cost pennies and nobody took it seriously.
He doesn't remember the password. He barely remembers the man who set it.
What follows isn't just a race to recover a fortune - it's the considerably harder work of finding his way back into a family that already, painfully, learned to live without him. A daughter who has to decide whether guarded trust is worth the risk twice. An ex-wife who never quite finished grieving a man who technically wasn't dead. And a decade-old promise, buried in memory fragments and an overlook where two teenagers once thought forever meant something simple.
The number waiting behind that password is real. So is everything Marcus stands to lose chasing it - and everything he might, against every reasonable expectation, actually get to keep.
Proof of Work is a story about the fortunes we build without meaning to, the people we owe more than money, and what it actually costs to come back from ten years gone.
He doesn't remember the password. He barely remembers the man who set it.
What follows isn't just a race to recover a fortune - it's the considerably harder work of finding his way back into a family that already, painfully, learned to live without him. A daughter who has to decide whether guarded trust is worth the risk twice. An ex-wife who never quite finished grieving a man who technically wasn't dead. And a decade-old promise, buried in memory fragments and an overlook where two teenagers once thought forever meant something simple.
The number waiting behind that password is real. So is everything Marcus stands to lose chasing it - and everything he might, against every reasonable expectation, actually get to keep.
Proof of Work is a story about the fortunes we build without meaning to, the people we owe more than money, and what it actually costs to come back from ten years gone.
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