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Sophie Devereaux has never been the kind to linger. She's been in love before - once, with a fake name and a pretend history, swept off of her feet. It was childish, a fantasy gone too far. It hadn't ended well, and she's only been to the grave site once.
So when Nate Ford began chasing her across the world, she had thought it to be just... fun. Exciting. At first, anyway.
So it doesn't make any sense when she wakes up one day and realizes that, somehow, she's fallen in love with him. Sophie had shot him once. He had fired right back, and now she has a little star shaped scar on her upper back. They'd only shared a few meals together. Sophie had helped him con a couple of marks before, playing at being on the legal side of life. Really, she'd just been taking out the competition, as it were. Occasionally they drank together, her with a wine glass and Nate with whiskey, in whatever European city they had managed to find each other in. He told her about his family, and what was left of her heart broke a little.
Sophie is a lot of things. In fact, the list of what she isn't is a lot shorter than the list of what she is. But on that shorter list in her mind, at the very top, it states that she is not a homewrecker. Not really.
Nate is a good man. An honest man. He should stay that way.
So they keep the flirty banter. But Sophie doesn't invite him up to her room anymore. She doesn't make the suggestive comments she's thought about time and again. She steals things and tries not to hope that Nate is the one they send after her, and she pretends that she doesn't care when Nate stops being the one who investigates her crimes. It doesn't matter who they send - none of them will ever get as close at Nate did.
Sophie hears about Nate’s son from another grifter. She wants to go to him, to knock on his front door or call and say that she’s so sorry. She settles for visiting the brand new headstone with a bouquet of flowers.
She sees him on her way out, but he doesn’t see her. He can’t, not with the way that his eyes are closed and he’s leaning against the window of his car at an uncomfortable angle. There’s a bottle of whiskey clutched in his hand, held to him like it’s a teddy bear.
Sophie knows his wife’s number. She even knows his wife’s name. She’d paid a hacker to get the information, some young hotshot who was easily considered to be one of the best. He had expressed his sympathies for Nate as well, which had been surprising. So Sophie blocks her own number and calls the one that she's got for the landline in Nate's house.
"Hello?" Maggie says. She sounds exhausted.
Sophie hesitates. In the end she doesn't bother trying to disguise her voice. "Nate's at the cemetery," she says quickly. "He's drunk, passed out in his car. I thought you might want to know."
"Oh, thank god." Now Maggie sounds relieved. Sophie wonders if Nate's been gone all night. "Thank you, thank you so much. Who is this?"
Another hesitation. Then Sophie just closes the phone without replying, because it doesn't matter who she is. She walks to the car she had rented under another name, and goes to catch a flight to anywhere but here.
Sophie is surprised to see Nate at the end of that alley, just as much as she's not surprised. She always thought she'd see Nathan Ford again, one way or another. He's applauding, wearing that jaunty little smile, eyes sparkling like he knows something she doesn't.
It's not a lie when she tells him that she's an honest citizen now. She's got a nice apartment downtown that she pays for with what she's stashed into one of her Swiss bank accounts, through a series of wire transfers to an American account under the name that's on the lease. She doesn't have a day job, because she doesn't really need one. She just performs off-off-Broadway, and fights the urge to con everyone she comes across.
When Nate smiles and says that he isn't so honest anymore, there are a lot of things that come to her mind. "It wasn't as fun without you chasing me," is something that she doesn't say. "I missed you, I heard about your son and the divorce, I'm so sorry," is another, as well as, "I love you, I've always loved you, are you ready for me now?"
They're all honest, all true, but they're also exactly the wrong things to say.
So Sophie settles for another truth. "I always knew you had it in you," she says, soft and pleased. It's a truth wrapped in another truth, similar to the way that she hides lies in truths and vice versa when she grifts.
From the genuine smile she gets in return, from the blush and the way that Nate looks down, Sophie knows that he hears the real meaning behind the not-so-important one.