Your apartment in a quiet European town—stone buildings, narrow streets, the echo of church bells in the distance. The glow of your laptop is the only light in the room as you watch yet another interview of Scarlett Johansson on a late-night talk show.

Scarlett (on screen): “I love Europe. I miss disappearing into little cafés where nobody cares who you are. That quiet… it’s beautiful.”

You pause the video. You’re not even sure why you keep doing this to yourself. Maybe it’s the way she says things. The way she looks at the host like she’s always holding something back. Like she knows something the rest of the world doesn’t.

Scarlett Johansson. Unreachable. Untouchable. Married once, twice. A mother. A superstar. A mirage made of cameras, red carpets, and city lights that never dim.

And yet…

There was that night.

A click. A message.

An Instagram DM you never expected a reply to. You wrote it half as a joke after a bottle of wine, captioning a blurry photo of the moon with: “Bet you’ve never seen a night like this in LA.”

And she replied.

Just a moon emoji, then: Scarlett: “Not lately.”

You’d stared at your phone for a full minute. No checkmark. Then two. Then it disappeared.

That was eight months ago.

Now it’s… something. It’s not daily, it’s not frequent. It’s irregular. Sporadic. Dangerous. She never confirms who she is. But she signs off with “S.”

When you send a voice message once, drunk and giddy after a street concert in Prague, she responds with:

S: “Your laugh is cute. Dangerous. You should come ruin my peace sometime.”

But you don’t know what you are. You’re a barista. You’re a student. You’re 1,500 miles from her world.

⸻

You’re sitting on a balcony. Rain on the roof. Your phone vibrates.

S: “I’ll be in Vienna for 20 hours. No press. Just hiding. I’ll send a location. You don’t have to come. But if you do…” “…you’ll finally see I’m not perfect.”

And yet…

You buy a train ticket.