Fic - with your progress stretched out for miles (Sophie Devereaux) 5/5

[abvj]

[F I V E]

The next morning, he finds her at the museum.

Sophie had woken before him, slipped out of bed and the hotel before the sun was even grazing the horizon. Most of the morning had been spent wandering aimlessly, looking for direction, trying to shake the exhaustion from the sleepless night before. She ended up at the museum by sheer happenstance, and Sophie hears Nate before she ever lays eyes on him - knows the sound of his gait, recognizes the rustle of fabric as he approaches. He’s curling the exhibit’s program between his fingers, his fist crinkling the edges. He’s in jeans today, she can tell from the sounds he makes as he nears her, probably a t-shirt too. It’s warmer here than it is in Boston and Sophie’s hot under her sweater and jacket, but doesn’t allow it to show. She misses Boston, too, but doesn’t allow that to show either.

Birthdays make her nostalgic, close to melancholy. They always have. She tries to do what she has always done and buries it.

“How did you find me?” she asks quietly, her eyes never leaving the painting before her. He settles easily into the space beside her, evens his weight on his heels.

With a shrug he murmurs, “I know you,” a little too confidently for her liking. Sophie raises an eyebrow in his direction, sees the smile curling at the corner of his mouth and after a moment of silence he relents. Nate tells her, “You have a tell.”

Sophie laughs, loudly, and rolls her eyes at the sheer ridiculousness of that statement. “Please, Nate,” she says, drawing out the words with a click of her tongue. “I most certainly do not have a tell.”

“You do,” he insists. “Don’t worry, I’m probably the only one that knows - in all fairness I have known you the longest - but you definitely, definitely have a tell.”

“Oh, alright then.” She chuckles, amused. “Care to enlighten me?”

Nate stares at her for a moment, considering. He rocks back and forth on his heels, his smile barely there, but twisting at the corners and she recognizes the motions, knows he is choosing his words carefully. Still, now, they constantly fumble for common ground, still struggling to trust, to truly know one another. They’re careful, treading the line that exists between them, their history an undercurrent pulsating between them, a constant reminder that they are liars and thieves, and the truth does not ever come naturally to either of them.

After a moment, Nate glances away from her and focuses on the painting, motions towards it with the curled program in his hands. “Degas.”

Sophie chuckles as she watches him. “Degas is my tell?”

Nodding, he smiles - that rare, beautiful, blinding smile that is so unlike Nathan Ford that it almost completely unhinges her. “The first time I saw you in Prague thirteen years ago you were swiping a Degas.”

Smiling fondly at the memory she mumbles, “I remember. I ran. You chased,” and tries not to think about how far they’ve come from that moment and how far they still have yet to go.

“It wasn’t your initial mark. The Raphael was. You came back for the Degas. I know this because the client at the time had literally just acquired the Degas and there was no possible way for you to have known it was in his possession.”

“Maybe my intel just happened to be better than yours.”

Chuckling, Nate ducks his head. “Maybe. Or maybe you saw it, couldn’t resist, and compromised your escape plan to come back and take it.” His recount of events is strikingly accurate, but Sophie does not give him any indication of it. That does nothing to slow Nate down, however. “Amsterdam, Moscow, Denmark - all close calls, all Degas. You simply don’t know how to resist.”

“Interesting theory,” she says. She motions to the program in his hands. “Or you saw that at the desk in the hotel, noticed the advertisement of the Degas on loan from Paris, put two and two together, and wound up here.”

“Well, there is that too.”

Silence falls between them for a span of time that lasts too long. Sophie avoids eye contact and instead avidly studies the brushwork of the Ende der Arabeske before her, appreciates the colors and exquisiteness. She glances around and makes mental notes of the weaknesses in security, counts the guards, designs plans of entries and exits out of habit and for practice. And, mostly, she thinks of her mother. Sophie remembers her lovely, loving mother who taught her how to appreciate the beauty of art. She remembers her mother’s strong hands guiding Sophie’s smaller ones as they turned page after page in the book Sophie carried with her for decades across the world, the book that burned to a crisp when her apartment exploded back in Boston and nearly took her along with it.

Sophie wonders, too, in that moment, what her mother would think of her now, what she would say if she knew the type of person Sophie has become. That thought is fleeting, however, passing in the blink of an eye because Sophie knows better than to allow herself to become maudlin.

She definitely knows better than to ask questions she already knows the answers to.

The truth of the matter is that Nate is right and she knows it. He knows it too and Sophie isn’t quite sure what bothers her more - the smug look on his face or the fact that even back then, in the very beginning, he knew her. She had begun walking this morning with no idea where she was headed, no inclination as to where she would end up. Nate found her effortlessly. It says too many things about who they are, who she is, how well he knows her. It frightens and excites her all at once - the intimate knowledge he has of her.

When she takes a moment to be truly honest with herself, Sophie is able to admit that she has been in love with Nate in some way for a very long time. She loved the man he was back then and loves the man he is now, the man his is trying to be even more, but that doesn’t mean she is good at this. That doesn’t mean that she likes being vulnerable, likes having people too close. Nate doesn’t like it either. He resists at every twist and turn, closes himself off to the world, and off to her in an attempt to escape it, in an attempt to shield himself from any further damage.

But they are trying to be better about these things. They are trying to be better at this.

That’s why she murmurs, “My mother,” so softly anyone else besides Nate would have probably missed it. She clears her throat, doesn’t dare look at him as she tries again, “My mother loved Degas. She appreciated all art. She taught me how to appreciate all art, but she loved Degas,” she tells him, the smile on her face wistful and fleeting. “She died when I was young and I don’t think of her often. I don’t allow myself to think of her often, but whenever I see a Degas, I remember her and the world… I don’t know, Nate, the world just gets a little bit brighter and makes a little bit more sense. Even if it is only for a moment.”

Any other person would have pressed further, prodded her with questions, but Nate allows the window of opportunity to close seamlessly. He merely stands tall and silent next to her, his arms resting at his sides, his fingers brushing against hers and intertwining for a moment before letting go. He knows her, knows this is all she is willing to share and more than he should ever expect. Mostly he knows not to push too far or too soon - even if he doesn’t always adhere to that knowledge.

“Everybody has their skeletons, I guess,” he mumbles and the irony behind those words falling out of his mouth is not lost on either of them. Sophie supposes he says it to make her feel better, because he foolishly believes his words might do something to qualm the cold feeling in her gut, the bitter, foreign taste of regret on the tip of her tongue. It is so inherently Nate that she has to smile - always saying the wrong thing at the right time.

Nate interprets the soft curl of her smile the wrong way, and his fingers find home at the small of her back, his touch light with just the right amount of pressure. She allows herself to lean into it, allows him to carry some of her weight for now.

Humming a sound of affirmation in the back of her throat, Sophie chuckles softly and muses, “Some are just easier to navigate than others.”

They stand there, shoulder to shoulder, until she is ready to move on.

*

In the end, neither of them bothered with saying any actual goodbyes. They weren’t those people and they definitely weren’t very good at those sorts of things, so Sophie simply disappeared into the night after he walked her to her hotel room.

All she left behind was a note at the desk for him, her scrawl hasty around the until next time.

After Damascus, Sophie found herself perpetually traveling. She met up with Tara at the Chinese border for a vacation and to help with some recon; she found Marcus in Florence and pulled off a heist that put her in possession of a Matisse, van Gogh, and a Cézanne. She conned a sheik in Jordan out of his newly acquired Kandinsky, a Japanese diplomat out of his Derain and a pouch full of jewels worth millions. When she returned to London after months abroad, she didn’t go back to the flat Charlotte kept there, she didn’t touch base with William’s family after all the time that had passed since his death.

Instead, she rented out a room on the outskirts of the city and passed her time picking pockets in Trafalgar square and drinking tea at the very café near Buckingham Palace where her father had taught her the art of the two-finger lift a lifetime ago. Sophie wasn’t sure why she went back then, after years of avoiding the same streets she used to haunt when she was younger, but she imagined it had something to do with the guilt and loneliness she didn’t like to admit had been eating away at her since she left Nate in Damascus.

She thought she saw him once - her father. There was a man in her periphery one afternoon. He was an older man with gray hair and worn edges; his mouth turned upward just like her father’s used to. But it was in the height of the afternoon, the sun was too bright, and she hadn’t slept properly in weeks, hadn’t been thinking clearly as of late. So she hid behind her sunglasses and held the porcelain teacup steadily between her fingers, watched him, but didn’t make a move. There was a point, she thought, where he saw her, where the man’s face registered both surprise and recognition for the briefest of moments, but he turned away almost immediately afterwards, disappearing into a street full of tourists. Sophie went back day after day, sat at the very same table, drank her tea and waited, but she never saw the man again.

A few days after, she headed east to Chelmsford, not really knowing her intended destination until she was already behind the wheel and twenty kilometers outside of the city. She drove without directions, turning and merging onto roads from memory. Over the years she had made a point to keep track of her family from afar, not getting too close, not wanting to know the minute details to keep the unbearable weight of guilt crushing down around her shoulders. It was how she knew her Aunt still resided in the very same worn-down house at the end of a long stretch of barren land. As Sophie pulled up, placing the car into park, the house looked exactly the same - the paint fading and peeling, the foundation of the front porch cracked - but the world around it had risen and blossomed. The structure was surrounded by rows of tiny, identical houses that made Aunt Emily’s three-story farmhouse scream with character.

Smiling tightly, she fumbled her way out of her car and cautiously made her way towards the front door. Her thumbnail was between her teeth in an instant, an old habit she thought she had broken decades ago. Aunt Emily opened the door, still the same after all the time that had passed, albeit graying and wrinkled along the edges. The sight of Sophie stunned her, the emotions on her face flickering from shock to anger in less than a millisecond. Still, she allowed Sophie to step inside and fixed her tea as Sophie sat at the very same table and in the very seat she had all those years ago when she had told her Aunt that she was leaving. When she made promises of returning that she had every intention of keeping in the beginning.

Reaching out to trace the scratch marks on the wooden table, Sophie took in her surroundings - the pictures, the family photos, the trinkets and antiques she remembered fiddling with as a young girl. Her aunt sat a steaming cup of tea down in front of her before sliding into a chair across the way. She didn’t touch her own, merely stared at Sophie, hard, her spine ramrod straight, almost as if she were preparing for battle.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Aunt Emily said. These were the first words spoken between them.

Sophie sighed and nodded, bringing the cup of tea to her lips to sip it gingerly. She had sent money every year that she had been gone - always in the form of unmarked bills, not checks - in an envelope with no return address. Always, Sophie had attached a short, to the point letter that boiled down to: I am fine. I love you. Please don’t look for me. In the beginning, she had consistently wondered what her family thought of her absence, if they thought of her at all, if they missed her like she missed them. Then Gabrielle had taught her to ignore those feelings. She had told Sophie that the guilt would consume her, that it would ruin her if she allowed it. So Sophie had become very good at hiding it, at forgetting it existed altogether.

And it had worked until she turned left onto the familiar street, until she sat down at the familiar table, in the familiar house with its familiar walls and saw all the pictures of her brothers and sister glancing back at her, their faces aged with time, but smiling widely. It worked until Aunt Emily informed her that the family buried her in the ground next to her mother and father who had died not long before. It would be five years ago next Christmas, she said.
The guilt and regret and broken promises itched at the back of her throat as she imagined her family grieving for her while she was grifting her way through Europe.

“We had to move on. They had to move on. It was devastating watching your brothers believe that you were coming back. It was ruining them and I,” Aunt Emily stopped short and looked away. “And I didn’t know how to explain to them that their older sister was nothing but selfish. Nothing but a common thief. A liar that wasn’t worth their pain and longing.”

Sophie’s fingers shook as she set her teacup to the side, as she met her aunt’s eyes. She could ask how she knew, how she put the pieces together, if it was her father who spilled her secrets, but deep down she already knew the answer.

“I raised them,” she reminded her aunt. The usual smooth, calm exterior of Sophie Devereaux was long gone, and her voice cracked along the edges, so unlike her own, the words choked out between a sob that burned the back of her throat, threatening to escape. “I loved them -”

“And then you left them, dear. That erases any good will you may have stored up.”

The tears fell silently, and Sophie reached to push them away angrily, willed them to stop altogether. Off to the side there was a photo hanging proudly in the center of the wall. It was a portrait of the youngest member of their family, of Sophie’s baby sister - the one she taught how to walk, how to sing her alphabet, how to read and tie her shoes. All Sophie could think about in that moment as her baby sister’s face smiled at her was how much she looked like their mother.

“And Amelia? Does she ask about me?”

Aunt Emily chewed on the inside of her cheek, her face hardened by time and betrayal. “She barely remembers you. And she’s better for it.” There was long span of silence where Sophie regained her composure, where the tears stopped falling and her voice lost the thick country accent she had worked so hard to erase all those years ago, but slipped back in the moment she stepped foot in this old house.

“I think I should go,” she said with a nod, moving to stand. Her palms flatten against the wrinkles of her skirt. “I’m going to go,” Sophie repeated, and her aunt moved to stand as well, following her to the door not out of kindness, Sophie knew, but because she wanted to make certain she was actually leaving.

“Don’t come back here again,” she said. “You aren’t welcome here. It would only hurt them further.”

All Sophie could do was nod and during the long car ride back to the city, she cried, her hand fisted tightly around the steering wheel, her fingers reaching up angrily every so often to wipe at the tears stinging her eyes. She wept for the person she once was, the family she once had, the person she would never be again. She mourned the loss of her father who died while Sophie was lying and conning her way across Europe, who died without her even knowing.

When she returned to London it was as Charlotte simply so she could use the name and the contacts associated with it to auction a Picasso at Claridge’s. William had given it to her as a wedding gift years before. As a parting gift, she sent the proceeds to her aunt in a manila envelope with no return address. It was filled with details of a trust set up anonymously in her family’s name, enough for her siblings and their families to live comfortably. Inside there was a story about a long lost relative, a figment of her imagination that would hold some sort of relationship to her father, a far away removed aunt or uncle that no one would question because her father was such a private man.

Sophie scribbles a note, her letters neat and tidy as they formed the words I keep my promises. Thank you for taking care of my family. She hid it amongst the legal documents.

Deciding to leave Europe for the States had everything to do with a long con involving the dagger of Aqu’Abi, and nothing to do with the vast continent she had called home for years having suddenly become too small and cluttered with too many ghosts.

Four months were spent in Boston planning and acting out what should have been the ideal heist only to have it fall apart at the very last minute. It was the first time in over a decade that things didn’t go her way, and the loss nearly crushed her.

Sophie spent months licking her wounds by traveling America - New York, D.C., Philadelphia. All cities with culture she easily immersed herself in, picking up accents and languages, adapting like the chameleon she was. All cities with excellent museums full of art and antiquities she spent copious amounts of time admiring and planning to steal. But she never did, not once.

There was a painting at the Met she kept her eye on for weeks. She made plans, devised a con, and almost acted, but decided not to at the very last moment. It felt different, somehow. Sophie felt different and she couldn’t explain it, couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment things started to change, couldn’t quite wrap her head around the moment when she started to change. All she knew was that one day she woke up, looked in the mirror, and realized scamming people out of their precious arts and fortunes didn’t suffice any longer.

In Rio, she stole a Dalí and Picasso just to prove to herself that she still could, that she hadn’t lost her touch.

She met up with Tara a week later in Miami. Sophie spent a days by the beach basking in the glory of her latest heist and tried to ignore the fact that the thrill she used to get, the spark of adrenaline that drove her to act, to con, and steal had dimmed substantially over the years. She had barely felt it in Rio. She missed it, missed the weight of it on her spine, the taste of adrenaline in her mouth, but she didn’t quite know how to steal it back.

After a few days of exchanging stories and catching up, Tara started to get antsy, borderline suspicious. “Why are you here?” she asked. Where Sophie was elegance and grace, Tara was swift and to the point. Together, Sophie thought, they would probably make an indestructible team, but Sophie wasn’t sure their friendship could handle working together. Or, rather, Sophie was not quite sure she wanted to find out if their friendship could handle working together.

Shrugging, Sophie sipped on her champagne and shifted in her seat. The sun was warm against her skin. “I like the beach.”

“Okay, sure, but Miami? Really? This place is the epitome of tawdry and cliché. You, Sophie Devereaux are neither cliché nor tawdry. You could have picked a better beach to celebrate. Besides, you’re missing the bigger question.”

“I didn’t miss the bigger question. I am simply choosing to ignore it. There’s a difference.”

Sophie didn’t need to look at Tara to know she was rolling her eyes. She could have lied. She should have lied, really, because admitting the truth made you soft, made you appear weak. Sophie didn’t want to give any part of herself away by appearing as either. Instead of relying on old habits, though, she tried honesty. “I’m thinking about making some plans,” she told Tara softly.

Tara grabbed another champagne glass off of a passing tray and smiled at a man across the pool with practiced ease. “What kind of plans are you talking about?”

“Life plans. Possible retirement plans. This is Florida, isn’t it? Isn’t this where aging Americans go when they retire?”

“You aren’t aging. Nor are you American. And if you retire - which is the most absurd idea you’ve ever had, mind you, and that includes that time in South America - what do you suppose you’ll do with your time? Take up knitting? Read a book? Go to the movies?”

“I could learn how to knit and I always wished I had the opportunity to read more.”

“You’re being facetious.”

“And you aren’t being kind.” Sophie’s tone was more pointed than she meant it to be. She didn’t need Tara’s approval, nor did she want it. But Tara was her friend, her confidant. Sophie couldn’t explain how Tara came to be those two things, but she was, and Sophie just wanted her friend to understand her. She just wanted somebody to understand her. “I’m not saying it would be easy. It wouldn’t. I sit here right now, with you, and all I can think about is the twenty different ways I could rob and con each and every single person here. I walk into a building and devise entry plans and exit strategies. I meet somebody new and I memorize their tells and devise the easiest way possible to swindle them out of their fortune within five minutes. It’s what I do. It’s how I think, but it just doesn’t…” She paused, searching for the right words. They never found her, but that doesn’t falter her. Sophie never had a problem with improvisation. She continued, “It doesn’t feel the same anymore. I’ve been doing this for a very long time, Tara.” Sophie sighed and she hated how honest it sounded, the sadness falling between them loudly. “You’ll get here, too. You’ll see.”

“Jesus,” Tara breathed after a long pause, as if the fate Sophie described was something equivalent to death. “I sincerely hope not.” She stopped and sipped her champagne, appraising Sophie from afar. The moment she decided to give up hope of winning the argument was clear - she smiled around the rim of her glass and leaned in conspiratorially. “So, do tell me, what do you plan to do when you retire? You are going to have an awful lot of spare time. Honest people don’t participate in any of your favorite extra curricular activities.”

“I could act. Charlotte loved to act. I’ve always imagined that is what I probably would have done if I hadn’t… you know… turned to a life of crime.”

Tara laughed loudly, her head tilting back as her shoulders shook with the sound. “You are a terrible actress.”

Bristling at the insult, Sophie corrected primly: “I am a brilliant actress.”

It was back in New York that she learned about Sam. There was an acquaintance, a man she had come to know because he was probably the best forger this side of the Atlantic and she had been thinking about using him for the Met job she never went through with. He was laughing as he relayed the story of how hotshot insurance agent Nathan Ford lost his job after drinking himself into a stupor over the loss of his son. He laughed, his lips curling, his eyes dancing with sheer joy, and it took every trained instinct inside of Sophie to not reach across the table and smack him so hard he bruised.

Sophie’s first instinct was to go to Nate. To reach out to him, to tell him how truly and deeply sorry she was for his loss. To tell him that she was there for him in whatever way he needed.

Somehow she managed to suppress the urge, constantly reminded herself that they weren’t friends, confidants, lovers. They never were those people to each other and what he meant when he told her this is probably the last time you’ll see me around for a while was most definitely goodbye. Sophie had accepted that. She was trying to move on, still, after all this time. Going to him would be backtracking, would lead to a mess she didn’t know how to clean up because surely her presence in his already complicated life would be unwelcome. Surely if he needed her, he would reach out to her.

He knew where she was. He always did.

So instead she kept her distance. Donated a more than gracious endowment to the research fund set up in Sam’s name, opened an email every once in a while, typed a few lines only to erase them a moment later. She auditioned for play after play on Broadway - even a few off Broadway as well - before she decided New Yorkers were too rude for her liking, the traffic too horrible. She made the choice to leave New York in search of something bigger and better in LA.

LA brought a few attempts at local commercials that never got aired and a lot of rejections. There was a play in Burbank that ran for a few weeks. It was an awful rendition of Taming of the Shrew but it was a job and a start all rolled into one, and she found she quite liked the routine of it all: the process of memorizing lines, practicing cues, performing each night. She liked being somebody else - never quite as comfortable in her own skin as she would have liked - always had, and acting, she found, was just an honest way of hiding herself from the world.

On closing night, she looked up into the bright lights, delivered her lines, and swore she saw Nate there in the crowd - his smile tight, but present, his hair unruly, longer, his edges hardened by time and grief. She flubbed her line because she was so sure it was him. The actor next to her on stage hissed at her mistake, drawing her attention from the crowd to the cue she missed, and when she turned back, when she searched for him amongst a sea of blank faces, Nate was gone.

After the play wrapped she decided LA was too bright and sunny for her liking, so she moved on to Seattle for a while. After Seattle there was Portland, then Albuquerque, then Dallas. There was Atlanta, Raleigh, even New Orleans for a few short weeks in-between. Each one didn’t quite fit for some reason or another - Seattle too rainy, Albuquerque too boring, and Raleigh didn’t have nearly enough proper shoe stores.

In the end, she settled on Chicago because she quite liked the way the moonlight reflected over the river at night, because the bitter winters and gray skies reminded her of all those years she spent in London. In Chicago, she felt a bit more like herself, like Sophie - or, at least the Sophie she once was. She moved into a large flat with a view overlooking the river, and spent too much time picking out china patterns and paint colors, reading books on how to refurnish her wooden floors without professional help. She tried silly little things like exercising and pottery class, but gave up pretty quickly because she didn’t perceive sweating to be something a lady did and she certainly didn’t enjoy having her hands dirty. Eventually she took up knitting just to spite Tara, even joined a book club. Long Monday afternoons were spent with ordinary women who led ordinary lives and spent entirely way too much time talking about extraordinary women leading extraordinary lives.

Sophie basked in the simplicity of all. On Sundays, she visited the Art Institute and admired masterpieces from afar like a proper citizen. After, she went home and poured herself a large glass of Boudreaux, picked up a brush and just breathed.

During one particular Sunday night, on the stereo in the corner of her loft a CD played endlessly, a man’s thick, gravelly voice sang, I’ve made my life out of readin’ people’s faces, and knowin’ what their cards were by the way they held their eyes. And she involuntarily thought of her father then, during those very first moments when the guitar and bass flow through the speaker. Sophie remembered those sunny afternoons spent in the car, and how he was right when he told her the song held all the answers she was too young and too naive to realize she needed.

Laughing, she allowed her mind to become clear of any and all nonsense as she spent hours upon hours painting a replication of whatever had stood out to her that day. It all felt oddly familiar and foreign at once - this time the paintings were for her and her alone, not to be used for profit. That wasn’t to say, though, that while she was at the museum she wasn’t also planning a heist in the back of her mind out of sheer habit. That didn’t mean she no longer internally ranked routes of entry and exit based on plausibility and ease of access. That definitely didn’t mean that she didn’t flirt with the curator or security agents because she could, because it was practice just in case.

For better or worse, Sophie was a grifter, a liar and a thief.

She was just trying to be better about controlling her impulses.

Nate found his way back to her after she had been in Chicago for almost a year. She was Macbeth for the night in a theatre in the outskirts of the city and unlike LA all that time before, she knew he was there - Sophie could see him clearly through the haze and lights, could make out the angles of his face, the hard line of his shoulders. Afterwards, she allowed him to corner her in the alley, smiled at the sight of him and tried not to mark the differences between the man she once knew and the man standing in front of her. He was thinner than the last time she had seen him and for just a brief moment she allowed herself to remember Damascus, the feel of him against her, her lips against the corner of his mouth.

“I’m a citizen now. Honest,” she told him and it was, surprisingly, mostly the truth.

“I’m not.”

“You’re playing my side now?”

His team stood behind him unsurely, eyeing her closely. She had heard about the Pierson job from an acquaintance of an acquaintance that kept an ear to the ground for people like her, people who were out but might one day be persuaded to look for trouble. When she heard Nate was a part of the team involved, she had laughed until it hurt.

“I always thought you had it in you.”

Nate looked at her and she looked at him and while she was still mostly the same person she was then, he wasn’t, he wasn’t by a long shot, and she was not quite sure where that left them.

Except, he asked, Are you in? with a balanced mixture of apprehension and certainty, and she realized she didn’t have to think twice. She realized that still, after all this time, after all the distance that had come between them, she unashamedly trusted him despite all that she had ingrained within herself that said not to.

In the morning before she was set to corner and bait Dubenich, Nate spent needless time prepping her. He went over their strategy backwards and forwards until she was annoyed, ready to roll her eyes and give him that look, the one that said: I have done this before, you know. He must have seen it, must have read the tension in her shoulders, in the line of her mouth because he relented, followed her out of the loft and to the elevator as she warmed up her accent and twisted her neck to work out the kink.

There something encouraging that left his mouth, she thought, possibly even a smile too, but Sophie was already so far into the mindset of Anna Gunstott that it didn’t even register.

It was later, in the midst of the con, in the midst of running a con with Nate, his voice smooth and calm in her ear with Dubenich exactly where she wanted him, that she felt that exhilarating, elusive thrill travel like a spark down her spine and settle comfortably at the base. Sophie swallowed as she watched the mark walk away, as she tasted the sweet adrenaline in the back of her throat. She reveled in the feel of excitement spreading from her head to her toes, igniting everywhere in between.

It felt like coming home.

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