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Astrid’s been working her new job for a week and a half when she meets the man who promoted her. He saunters up to her desk like he owns the place.
In fairness, he as good as does. She stands instantly. “Chief Sterling.”
“Agent Pickford,” says James Sterling, section chief for Interpol. He grins at her. “At ease.”
She eases her stance but doesn’t sit. “Is there something I can help you with, sir?”
“Just wanted to see how you were doing,” says Sterling. “I heard you had quite the adventure at the Royal Museum a few weeks ago.”
“Yes, sir,” says Astrid. She thinks she knows what he’s getting at. Almost no one is aware of the full details of how she apprehended Arthur Wilde -- it was fairly obvious when she arrested the wrong people to trick him into complacency, but the details of her mother’s role in his capture are still secrets she’s keeping.
But there had been a look in her mum’s eye when she’d mentioned James Sterling. Astrid knows Sophie’s life relies on her own acting skills, but she thinks there are still parts of Sophie she can read. She wouldn’t have taken Sophie’s word in the museum otherwise.
“Would you care to fill me in?” asks Sterling. “I could of course read the file, but there’s just something about the telling. Join me on the terrace, perhaps?”
Ah. The terrace: in full view of the guards, but without cameras or microphones. The perfect place to have a private conversation in safety.
“I would be happy to, sir,” she says, stepping out from behind her desk.
On the terrace, the wind whipping around them loud enough that Astrid is sure they can’t be overheard, James Sterling turns to her. “So,” he says. “Sophie Devereaux?”
He’s still got the same manners, but there’s something more genuine about him. Like he’s not showing off anymore -- like he’s actually interested in her words.
She doesn’t volunteer anything. She wants to see how far this goes. “Something like that, sir.”
“I’m sure the timing of your promotion didn’t escape your notice.”
“It did not, sir.”
Sterling’s expression doesn’t change, but his tone gets a little impatient. “You’ve chased Parker and Hardison halfway across Europe multiple times. Then you discover the name Sophie Devereaux. I’m a patient man, Pickford, but it’s been long enough. You and I are on the same side. Tell me: what did you get caught up in?”
He’s appealing to her sense of duty. He has a good handle on her, even though they’ve never met. Ultimately, her sense of duty why Astrid does this work. Why she’s still doing this work, even after she found her father’s justice.
She takes a deep breath. “Arthur Wilde was at the museum for revenge. His old boss, Ramsey, who we also caught. And the woman he felt was responsible for his capture: Charlotte Prentice.”
She hesitates -- as far as she knows, no one’s ever drawn a connection between her stepmother and the rest of Sophie’s identities. But Sterling is watching her like he already knows what she’s going to say. “Charlotte Prentice... who’s now known as Sophie Devereaux.”
Something in Sterling’s face relaxes to hear it confirmed. “And she was there.”
“Yes, sir,” says Astrid.
“She helped you capture Wilde, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“And she told you her name.” Sterling’s lip curves slightly. He shakes his head. “It’s unorthodox, Agent, but that was why I poached you. Anyone who works a case involving Devereaux and her team and comes out of it successful -- that’s an agent I want in this department.”
Astrid flushes. “Sir-- I have a bit of a... personal advantage there.”
“Oh?” says Sterling, carefully light.
In for a penny and all.
“Charlotte -- Sophie -- was my stepmother.”
For one moment, Sterling’s face is caught in perfect, full surprise. “Oh.” He recovers with remarkable swiftness, his face returning to a carefully neutral expression. “Ah.”
She can’t help a nervous laugh. “You weren’t expecting that, then, sir?”
“Not exactly,” says Sterling. “Around when was this?”
“More than twenty years ago,” she says. “I was young. She married my father. She was very-- very kind to me. Then she disappeared. My father was never the same.”
“She’s why you joined Interpol,” Sterling says. Not a question -- a realization. Methodically fitting the new pieces she’s handed him into a bigger picture.
She nods, biting her bottom lip.
“Did you expect to see her at the museum?” he asks.
“No,” she admits. “I actually had an entire conversation with her without realizing who she was.”
“Well, they say she’s the best.”
“Do they?” asks Astrid. He seems to know much more than she does. “I’ve been chasing Charlotte Prentice for my entire career. Not Sophie Devereaux. I don’t know anything about her. Charlotte was a ghost -- Sophie has an Interpol file and the personal interest of a section chief.”
Sterling sticks his hands in his pockets. He glances up at the sky. “Well, it seems you’ve got a lot to catch up on.”
“Yes, sir,” she says, taking the nudge for what it is. “And sir-- if I may ask?”
He gestures for her to continue.
“How do you know Sophie?”
He says, “She fell in with a friend of mine. From before my Interpol days. That team she runs with -- he’s the one who built it.”
“Okay,” says Astrid. “Which one’s your friend? The violent one?”
Sterling cracks a small smile, shaking his head. “No.” He looks out across the skyline. “My friend passed away a few years ago. If I’m being honest, I’m glad to hear that Sophie’s out and about again. It was a hard loss.”
Astrid nods. “I know about hard losses,” she says.
“Astrid!” says Sophie, giving her a hug hindered by bags. “Welcome!”
Astrid buries her face in Sophie’s neck for a moment, clutching at her back, then draws back, balancing the backpack on one shoulder and tote bag on the other. “Thanks,” she says, rather awkwardly. She glances around.
The villa she’s been invited to is lovely: high ceilings, brightly-patterned rugs, hardwood floors. It’s also in America, where she has limited jurisdiction, and in the middle of a forest besides. She knows defenses when she sees them.
Sophie’s watching her. Astrid clears her throat, focusing back on her. “Is the rest of your team here?”
“Not yet,” says Sophie. She gives a conspiratorial smile as she takes Astrid’s tote bag from her. “They’ll be here in a few days. But I thought...” Something in her is nervous. “We might want a little while to ourselves.”
“Yeah, good idea,” says Astrid. They stand there for a few moments before she finally says, “What were you thinking we’d do?”
She really should’ve thought about this before she arrived, but most of the flight here was occupied by anxiety: that Sophie wouldn’t be there, that it would be a trap, that they’d want her badge and her information. Sterling hadn’t seemed concerned when she’d told him about this trip, so she probably doesn’t need to worry, but Astrid hasn’t gotten this far just to abandon her sense of self-preservation.
Sophie folds her arms, tapping her fingers on her sides. It’s oddly reassuring to see her anxious, too. “I was thinking we could do a little exercise,” she says. There’s a strange note in her voice, one Astrid remembers from the museum. “You ask me whatever you’d like, and I tell you the truth.”
Half an hour later, they’re in the villa’s kitchen, Astrid chopping vegetables while Sophie collects dishes.
“Anything?” she asks. She tries to keep her focus on the food she’s cutting and fails.
Sophie shrugs, graceful as always, as she sets intricately-decorated glass salad bowls on the counter. “Anything that’s mine to share. I won’t tell you where Hardison and Parker are keeping the painting you want from them, for instance.”
Astrid flushes. “Fair.” She sweeps celery to the side with her knife. She’s been looking for some answers for a very, very long time. “Did you go right back into thievery when you left us?”
Sophie tilts her head back. “No. I really was running -- I came to the States, changed my name. Found a tiny apartment and a job as a jewelry saleswoman.” She grins in reminiscence. “I didn’t last two months. It was silly, really, thinking I could work among all of that glitter without getting itchy fingers.”
“You weren’t worried about being found?”
“Oh, darling,” says Sophie. “There are a thousand grifters in every city. It was America in the year two-thousand and all I was doing was replacing mined diamonds with lab-growns.” She smiles and shakes her head, as if the very idea is silly. “No one was paying attention to me, even those who knew what I was doing.”
At that point, Astrid was already looking for her. She fights to keep bitterness out of her tone. “Was that Catherine Clive?”
Sophie glances sidelong at her, setting cups down next to bowls on the counter. “No, it was Christie. I think Catherine must have been the name I used for the plane -- I don’t even remember, it was so long ago.”
“And then you moved on? Kept moving on, leaving us behind?”
“Yes,” says Sophie. She closes the cupboards and leans against the counter, gazing at Astrid. “There were always bigger jobs. Always bigger risks, better scores... I won’t pretend to be someone I’m not.”
Astrid laughs sharply, struggling with a last piece of carrot. “Isn’t that your whole thing?”
Sophie doesn’t answer -- just watches her, sad. Suddenly Astrid can’t take it. She yanks the knife up, stabs it in the cutting board, and walks away as fast as she can manage.
Sophie taps on the side of her doorframe, a tray in her hands. “Stew’s ready. Would you like some?”
Somewhere, deep inside of her, Astrid manages to find the grace to smile at her from the desk chair. “This is familiar.”
“I wasn’t going to say it,” says Sophie. She doesn’t step inside -- Astrid suspects she won’t until asked.
She doesn’t ask. “You know, I’m a full-grown adult? I haven’t had a parent in fifteen years, and I haven’t been parented in twenty. I don’t usually...”
She breaks off into a frustrated laugh. Sophie asks, “Let yourself get upset like this?”
“Act like a child.”
“Well,” says Sophie, leaning against the doorframe. “Even if it weren’t my fault that you had to grow up so fast, I wouldn’t mind you indulging in a bit of childishness. I know I have no right, but... if you’d like, it can still be my job to be the one standing here with stew while you sulk.”
Despite herself, Astrid softens. Sophie repeats, “Only if you’d like.”
For a long moment, Astrid doesn’t say anything, waiting for Sophie’s expression to change. But it doesn’t. She doesn’t turn around and leave. She just stands there, patient, like she could wait for Astrid forever. Like she’s already been waiting for twenty years.
“You’ve changed a lot, but you’re still the same, aren’t you?” asks Astrid. Realizing the ambiguity, she hastens to add, “The way you care, I mean.”
“Perils of making my living by reading people,” Sophie says lightly, but her smile looks like truth.
Astrid mops up the last of her stew with some bread. “So how do you know Sterling?”
Sophie chuckles. “That’s a fun story. I’m glad you asked before the others showed up -- they’ve always hated him.”
“And you don’t?”
“Well, who doesn’t?” asks Sophie. “He’s just so delightfully smug. All the time!” She smiles at Astrid, who smiles back. “It drives us all mad.”
Through a mouthful of stew, Astrid says, “He said you worked with a friend of his.”
Sophie’s grin fades. “Ah.” She glances down at her own bowl. “Nate.”
Astrid isn’t sure how much to push. “Sterling said it was a hard loss.”
“It was,” says Sophie. Her expression is still a little muddled -- going in several directions at once -- but her voice is clear. “Nate was the leader of our team, and he was my husband. He and Sterling worked together before Nate-- left the company. Sterling later left, too, to join Interpol.”
“This was IYS?” At the surprise in Sophie’s eyes, Astrid sighs. “He is my boss. And I’m not blind. Your friend who pretended to be the insurance investigator specifically named IYS.”
Sophie cracks a smile, shaking her head. “He did, didn’t he?”
“So this Nate--” Astrid thinks back to the files she’d found. She has a feeling she looks like Sterling did: finding a picture in the new pieces she’s being handed. “You mean Nathan Ford, don’t you?”
Sophie says, “The one and only.”
“He was the leader of your team?”
“More or less,” says Sophie, inclining her head. “Sometimes one of us would have to hit the brakes, for his sake and ours. He was a very... flawed man.”
“But you married him anyway,” Astrid says.
“Of course I did,” says Sophie. “He retired for me. For a thief, there’s nothing more romantic. All of us know retirement never really lasts. It was the fact that he was willing to try -- that both of us were willing to try, really -- that made it mean something.”
Something about that hits Astrid in the heart. “Was he the one who formed your team?” she asks.
“More or less,” repeats Sophie. “He was hired to supervise the others -- Parker, Hardison, Eliot -- on a job. It went bad. He brought me in... the rest, they say, was history.” She closes her eyes. “His plans were incredible. That was what it was, really, that kept us with him. Our first job was the score of a lifetime, but it was nothing compared to the adrenaline of being part of that well-oiled machine.”
Astrid lets her talk, nibbling on her last piece of bread.
“The thing was... we told him he could choose the jobs. And every job he chose, every single one, was to help people who the system had failed. It was a good idea. It made us better -- he made us better.” Sophie smiles softly at her. “Any change you see in me -- it’s because of the work our team did. Is doing, really, still.”
Astrid studies her. “This is why Sterling isn’t trying to hunt you down.”
Sophie nods. “I don’t think he’s ever agreed with us, not even now. But he understands. We stay out of each others’ ways, especially after losing Nate.”
Astrid mulls that over -- the idea that there’s more than one way to do good. She doesn’t think she agrees with their methods, and she’s not sure she understands, either. But maybe she will.
“Tell me about some of your jobs?” Anticipating what Sophie’s going to say, she adds, “The ones that are past their statute of limitations, if you’d like. Just the kinds of things you do.”
Sophie smiles at her.
The next morning, they go on a walk along the nearby trail. Astrid is grateful for the excuse to not make eye contact as she asks, “What’s your real name?”
Sophie glances at her, both of them side-by-side picking through mud and sticks. She says, “If you press it, I’ll tell you. But I’d like to ask you not to. I know--” She stops walking, closes her eyes. Astrid stops too.
Sophie says, “I know I said I’d tell you the truth. But the truth is that the name I was born under isn’t my name. No one I love has ever known it. You and your father knew me as Charlotte -- that made it my real name. My team knows me as Sophie, and that makes it my real name.”
“Your parents--”
“I haven’t used the name I was given at birth in thirty years,” says Sophie, quiet and clear. “I don’t have a single blood relative who’d recognize my face, or be happy to see me if they did. That chapter of my life is closed, and everyone involved is happier to see it gone, believe me.”
There’s a long moment of silence. “Arthur Wilde called you Sophie,” Astrid says eventually, for lack of anything else. “But you were going by Charlotte when you knew him.”
“Grifter’s law,” says Sophie, with no expression at all. “I didn’t know him as Arthur, either -- it was just the alias he was caught under. He decided to stick with it, for what reason I couldn’t tell you. Yes, we betray each other, but old names -- buried histories -- stay in the past, for everyone’s sake.”
“Is that the case for the rest of your team?”
Sophie gives her a tight smile. “Not really. None of them-- they’ve never run in grifter circles. I don’t think Parker was born Parker, but that’s for her own reasons. Not the little rituals we grifters have invented to keep ourselves sane.”
Astrid watches her for a moment, then nods. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I believe you,” says Astrid. “I won’t press.”
Something in Sophie’s shoulders relaxes, something Astrid hadn’t even noticed was tense. “Thank you.”
It’s only that evening that Astrid feels recovered enough to go back to their exercise. This truth-telling exercise was a good idea, but a taxing one for both of them: she thinks Sophie probably also appreciates a lighter afternoon filled with Scrabble. They spend dinner talking about Astrid’s own life, and it’s good.
But it’s not over. After dinner, when they’re washing dishes side-by-side, it feels like the right time.
“Would you stop?” she asks, scrubbing down the side of a plate. She glances sidelong at Sophie. “If I asked?”
Because that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? If she’d known, before Charlotte had left -- if Sophie had told her the truth. She wouldn’t have turned her in. She would’ve asked her to stay.
Sophie has to know that. Her hands still, halfway through drying a cup. “Are you asking?”
There’s a strange note to her voice. Astrid shuts her eyes, feeling more like a child than she has in many years. “I’m not sure.”
The sound of Sophie’s towel resumes. She says, “Why would you ask me to stop, if you did?”
Astrid chuckles, the bitterness rising up out of nowhere. “Can’t you guess?” When Sophie doesn’t say anything, Astrid says, “You’re my mother. You left.”
Sophie sighs. “Darling, asking me to stay now won’t change that.”
“I’m not looking to--” Astrid has to stop to catch her breath, reign herself in. She exhales. “I know that. I’m not a child. But you want to prove you’ve changed, don’t you?”
She opens her eyes. Sophie is watching her with something that looks like disappointment. Astrid burns with resentment. “Don’t you?”
“I do,” says Sophie, carefully, choosing her words like a grifter. “I-- Astrid, I would try. Do you believe that I would?”
“I believe you’d try,” Astrid says, trying to unclench her jaw. It doesn’t really work.
Sophie watches her for a moment longer. “Yes, I know you do,” she says slowly. “But that’s what’s wrong, isn’t it? You know that I’ve always tried my best. And you know that my best wasn’t good enough.”
Astrid shakes her head. “No,” she whispers. Her voice breaks, shamefully, halfway through the syllable.
“Oh--” says Sophie. She wraps her arms around her. “Darling.”
Her hands are wet, Astrid notes vaguely, her face pressed tightly into Sophie’s shoulder. Both of their hands are wet. Why did she think it was a good idea to bring this up while doing the dishes?
“I’m sorry,” says Sophie into her ear. “I am so sorry for leaving you behind, Astrid. I did what was best for me, and it wasn’t best for you, and I will never stop regretting that.”
Astrid presses her face tighter to Sophie’s jacket.
“I think-- here is the truest thing of all,” whispers Sophie. “I can’t be what I’m not. I can’t retire for you. But I would try. I would try just like I tried for Nate, just like he tried for me. And I know it isn’t good enough. But it’s what I can give you.”
She pulls back so she can look Astrid in the eyes. “If that’s not good enough for you... I understand. I would like to be in your life in whatever way you want me. I know that trying isn’t enough. But it’s what I can do.”
Astrid stands there, looking at the mother she’s been looking for for her entire life, and mostly tries not to sob.
“I don’t need you to be someone you’re not,” she says, after a moment. “You’ve always been you, even when I didn’t know what that meant. And you’ve always been my mum.”
Sophie hiccups, her eyes just as wet as Astrid’s. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” says Astrid. She reaches out and puts her wet hand on Sophie’s cheek. “The rest, I think we can figure out.”