EXCERPT
The best thing about heartbreak is how spectacularly predictable it is.
I’ve watched it play out enough times to know exactly what to expect, how to react. First, there’s flat-out denial. He won’t hurt me, I swear. He isn’t like that. He was just getting lunch with her, and he said himself she was only sitting on his lap because there weren’t enough seats in the cafeteria. He never lies about anything, so why would he be lying to me now?
If well-meaning friends remind you about the twenty-five instances where he was, in fact, lying, you pretend not to hear them. You’re too busy clinging to whatever’s left of your time together, holding out hope that you can find a cure, even if the relationship is gray in the lips. . . .
Until at some point, the denial collapses under the weight of suspicion, and that’s when the anxiety kicks in—the second stage. Casual messages from months ago turn into vital evidence, every punctuation mark analyzed for proof of how he texted when he loved you, if he ever loved you, and when he stopped. In a selfie, the blurry reflection of a girl standing beside him in a coffee-shop window becomes a killing blow. The rage hasn’t arrived, not yet. But it will, during that third stage, in a violent spiral of midnight venting sessions and deleted conversations and tossed pillows.
My friend Haili is clearly still stuck in the second stage of heartbreak—by far the least fun of them all.
“Maybe this is a bad idea,” she mutters to me, the worried line between her brows illuminated by the warm hotel lobby lights. She’s fiddling with the diamond charms on her wrist, a nervous gesture I’ve seen her perform like a ritual a hundred times in the decade I’ve known her. “Maybe I should just ask him. . . .”
I shake my head. “You’re never going to get an actual answer if you just ask about these things. Like, okay, what could he possibly say? ‘Yeah, you’re right, I snuck out to get dinner with another girl even though we’ve been a thing for two months already’?”
“But . . . what if he gets mad at me for following him here?” she whispers. “What if he never wants to talk to me again?”
Even though this is yet another expected symptom of second-stage heartbreak, it’s still mind-boggling how the sufferers tend to focus on how the other person feels.
A memory sneaks up on me: my own mom, sobbing to her friend on the phone when she thought I was out of the house, a silk bathrobe draped around her shaking shoulders, the crack in her voice as she spoke. He doesn’t love me anymore. Why doesn’t he love me anymore?
I shove it away. Lock it up before bile can rise to my throat.
“The question isn’t whether he wants to talk to you,” I tell Haili firmly, loudly enough to drown out the rattling in the back of my brain, and give her slender arm a squeeze. “You should start thinking about whether or not you’ll ever talk to him again.”
“I . . . okay.” Even through the dark tint of my sunglasses, I can see her complexion turn pale. “Okay, let’s go find him.”
I make a beeline for the front desk, through the bamboo groves designed to look like they’ve sprung right out of the black marble floors, and around the indoor pond that’s been trending as the new aesthetic photo spot on Xiaohongshu. Everything here is sleek wood, subdued colors, sophisticated in a way that isn’t too try-hard. Perfect influencer bait.
Two businessmen stop and stare at me as I brush past them, but I don’t slow my steps. The trick to fitting in anywhere is to act like you already belong there. Walk with purpose, shoulders straight, eyes ahead.
“Hello.” I greet the receptionist in my brightest voice. “Can you please point us in the direction of the Sky Restaurant?”
The receptionist glances up from her laptop and offers a smile almost as fake and wide as mine. “Yes, sure.” Then her attention slides past me, to Haili, and I follow her gaze with a wince. Haili looks like she’s on the verge of having a breakdown right in the middle of the perfect lobby. “Is your friend . . . okay?”
“She’s fine,” I say. “She’s just really hungry. We haven’t eaten since breakfast.”
“Right,” Haili squeaks out unconvincingly. At least she’s stopped gnawing on her lower lip. “I’m really, really hungry. Super hungry.”
But the receptionist studies us with growing suspicion. “Sorry, before I let you through—could I actually have your room number first?”
I feel Haili stiffen beside me.
“Um,” Haili says. “We don’t . . . we aren’t staying here—”
“I see.” The receptionist’s smile slips all the way off her face. “Well, I’m sorry, then. The restaurant is only open to our guests and VIP members.”
“That’s okay,” Haili begins to say, but I make a quick motion behind my back for her to leave it to me.
“I’m one of your VIP members,” I say smoothly, though I’m unsure if that’s true. Of course, this in itself wouldn’t have been an issue a few months ago. My father’s a titanium member at practically every major hotel and airline in the world; if I ever needed to pop into the lounge or visit a restaurant like this one, all it’d take was a quick phone call from him for the staff to let me through. But that might prove a little harder now, seeing as I’ve blocked his number and cut off every channel of communication between us.
“Do you have your membership card with you?” the receptionist presses. “Or your membership number?”
No, and no. But a quicker solution springs to mind—just a considerably more obnoxious one. “You can search for my name,” I tell her.
“Pardon?” The receptionist blinks at me.
“I’m sure I’m in your system,” I say. “It’s Chanel Cao.”
I Could Give You the Moon Copyright © 2026 by Ann Liang. Reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
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