I did not set out, when I first imagined a girl standing at a washing stone in Silla-era Gyeongju, to write a story about four separate lifetimes. I only wanted to write about a queen who was loved fully, once, before the world took that love away from her. It was only after I finished her story — after I made myself sit with the weight of what it costs to lose someone, and what it costs the people left behind to keep loving them anyway — that I understood her story wasn't finished at all. It had only just begun.
Into the Moonlight asks a question I've never fully been able to answer for myself: does love, if it's real enough, get to try again? I don't know. I'm not sure anyone does. But I found, writing these four women across four centuries, that I wanted very badly for the answer to be yes — not because tragedy isn't also true and worth telling honestly, but because I think most of us are looking, in our own quieter ways, for some proof that the people we've loved and lost are not simply gone. That something of them, and something of what we felt for them, gets to keep going.
Each era in this book asked something different of its two lovers. Yeon-hwa and Ji-hwan taught me that even the deepest love can't always protect the people we're given. Hae-won and Tae-min taught me that duty and love aren't always opposites, and that choosing duty doesn't always mean losing yourself entirely — sometimes it just means carrying an unfinished thing quietly, for a whole lifetime, and finding that carrying it is its own kind of devotion. Soo-ah and Joon-ho taught me that love, chosen deliberately in the middle of danger, can be an act of resistance in itself — that staying, sometimes, is the bravest thing two people can do together. And Ha-eun and Ha-jin, at the end, taught me what I think I was hoping to learn all along: that the pattern can change. That a story doesn't have to keep breaking the same way just because it always has before.
I want to say, too, that I did not write Bo-ram, or any of this book's other quieter betrayals, because I believe people who hurt the ones they love are simply villains. I wrote her because I think most real betrayals happen exactly the way hers did — slowly, understandably, out of pain that was never adequately seen or tended to, until one day the person carrying it has gone somewhere they never meant to go. I hope, if nothing else, this book makes room for that kind of complicated, unfinished forgiveness — for Bo-ram, and for anyone reading this who has ever carried something similar.
Thank you for staying with these four women, and the one soul who kept finding his way back to them, across every era they lived. I hope, wherever you are reading this, there's a full moon somewhere near you tonight — and I hope, when you look up at it, some small part of you feels what they always did: that it already knows you, somehow, though you've never properly met.
With gratitude,
The Author