Disclaimer: I don't own Leverage.
She's twenty-seven when she decides to become Sophie Devereaux. She's not sure exactly who this Sophie character is—at first she thinks she's blonde, so she dyes her hair, takes one look in the mirror, and decides otherwise—but she knows she's going to like her better than she likes the person she's been.
She works hard to eliminate the Kiwi from her accent. (She's always been good with accents, but while an American might have been fooled by her old one, a real Brit would be able to tell.) She learns to tone down the ferocity in her smile, to inject kindness into her eyes. She's been a wild thing all her life, but no longer. Sophie Devereaux would never go bungee jumping or ride a mechanical bull in a dingy bar. Sophie is a lady. She doesn't walk, she glides.
Within Sophie, of course, are a large subset of different personas. Some of them are similar to the person she used to be, but none are close enough to create any kind of mental dissonance. Her old life is packed firmly into a box at the back of her mind, just as she's packed away the various trophies and trinkets from that life in storage units around the globe.
For Sophie Devereaux's first grift she becomes the Duchess of Camalor. She leaves in a hurry, pursued by dogs, after using a dessert fork on her salad.
She's been Sophie Devereaux for a few years when she meets Nate Ford. By then, she's started to think about dropping Sophie and adopting a new identity. It's not that she doesn't like Sophie—she does—but something about her has always felt off. That gentle smile, those kind eyes, they still feel forced, even after all this time. Never mind that they've won her countless jewels and precious pieces of art.
But then Nate Ford catchers her in Damascus—this is two years after he chased her, unsuccessfully, in Prague—and when she turns around to introduce herself, she finds herself falling into those intelligent blue eyes of his, and for the first time the name "Sophie Devereaux" falls effortlessly from her lips.
It isn't love at first sight. For one thing, they've seen each other before, though only from a distance. For another, though Sophie Devereaux is an unrepentant romantic, she's also a practical woman, and falling in love with one's natural enemy is very clearly a bad idea.
She spends a few days with Nate in Damascus, ostensibly as his prisoner. In reality, she's fairly certain she could escape at any time—Nate doesn't want her, not really, he was after the painting and now he has it—but she chooses not to because somehow Nate makes her feel as if Sophie Devereaux is a real person, and she wants to capture that feeling so she can bottle its essence and use it when Nate's not around.
She's disappointed at first when she learns that he is married—he firmly refuses to discuss his wife with her, which makes her wonder, amused, whether he thinks she'd be fool enough to try to con an insurance investigator's wife—but she decides fairly quickly that knowing Nate is taken just makes flirting with him all the more fun. And flirt she does, subtly, constantly. She flirts with knowing looks, brief twitches of her lips, a hand on his arm. She's not fooling him—he watches her with eyes that see everything—but that's part of the game, too, and she can tell that he's enjoying it as much as she is.
Being around Nate, she begins to learn the role of Sophie Devereaux, as if in the past she'd been the understudy and now, suddenly, she has become the lead. She discovers that Sophie desperately wants to be an actress, but can't act; that there are some foods Sophie is simply too snobby to eat; that Sophie likes paintings but loves statues; that Sophie never wants children but wishes she had a sibling so she could be an aunt.
And Sophie likes Nate. She likes the way he looks. She likes the way he thinks. She likes that he won't cheat on his wife. She likes that he's an honest man who can be savage in his pursuit of criminals. She likes that being around him makes her a better version of herself.
Eventually, Nate announces that he needs to go home. His son, Sam—and, unlike his reticence about his wife, he can't seem to stop boasting about his son, which Sophie finds adorable—is just learning to walk, and he doesn't want to miss it. Sophie kisses him on the cheek before making her escape. (In other words, walking out the front door).
They bump into each other six times over the next seven years, three times because Sophie lets herself be caught and three times because Nate legitimately catches her, to her irritation. (One of the latter times, she shoots him just to express her disapproval, and he very rudely shoots her in the back in return.) The three times she seeks out Nate all come when she begins to feel Sophie slipping away. It's as if Sophie Devereaux is a mask painted on her face in watercolor and Nate is an umbrella.
Once, she goes to Los Angeles with some half-formed idea of buying him dinner. When she finds Nate, though, he's sitting at the dinner table in his nice house with his gorgeous wife and beautiful toddler son and he is smiling a bright, open smile that he has never smiled at her.
When she hears through the grapevine about Sam's death—it takes less than three weeks for word to spread throughout the entire thief community, and the hitter who tells her is so gleeful about it that she slaps him and abandons the job halfway through—she spends an entire afternoon trying to decide whether to send flowers. Eventually, she sends them without a card, because she wouldn't want Nate to think she was taunting him, but she can't not send flowers for that beautiful little boy who made Nate so very happy.
When she sees Nate again, he's not the same person she knew. He's harder, angrier, broken. It's still easy to be Sophie around him, but she's a different Sophie—one with an edge, a sharpness more reminiscent of a nagging wife than a brilliant grifter. It's not Nate's fault—he never made her any promises, and she's certainly never told him about her identity issues—but she can't help but feel betrayed by him nonetheless.
As time goes on and the team gradually develops a rhythm, she begins to feel as if she's drowning, as if Sophie Devereaux is a mask painted on her face in watercolor and Nate is the ocean. Perhaps that's why she decides, after almost a year of fantastic jobs, to con her own team, to send them after the David on the pretense of helping Nate. (No, that's not right—she does want to help Nate, it's just that she wants to help herself, too.) She needs some time away from Nate, time to readjust Sophie Devereaux again, time to relearn how to be comfortable in her own skin.
After a long hiatus, once she feels more like the old Sophie again, she sends out the invitations to the team. (Sophie's singing is even worse than her acting, but she'll endure the humiliation because it's the first step in reforging the team's bonds and because it'll make them more inclined to forgive her.)
She's determined to do things differently this time. Nate's sober, which helps—though his sobriety seems to come hand in hand with viciousness, which worries her—and she's…willing to back off a little, rather than try to force a relationship which might not work anyway. She goes on a few dates, using one of Sophie's aliases, and she flings herself into her work. But always, despite her best intentions, she finds herself watching Nate, wanting Nate, worrying about Nate.
The realization hits her at about the moment she realizes the vase has a bomb in it. Because her first thought is not, I'm going to die, but rather, This is going to kill Nate.
Somewhere along the line, she realizes, she came to the conclusion that she could not be Sophie Devereaux without Nate Ford. A large part of Sophie's identity centers around Nate—her love for him, her concern for him, her desire for him to look at her the way she looks at him. But Nate, though he does care about her, and though he does try, is not a man to be relied upon, especially since in many ways he's as confused about his identity as she is about hers. It was a mistake, she thinks, to embrace Sophie so thoroughly, to smother any trace of the person she used to be, because no matter how well-designed an alias might be, it simply does not have the solidity of an actual person.
So she leaves. She goes on a journey to find herself—or re-find herself, rather—shedding pieces of Sophie Devereaux as a tree drops its leaves in the autumn. What that tree will look like when all the leaves are gone, she doesn't know. She just hopes that when Sophie Devereaux is fully erased there will be a woman left over to salvage.