Fool Me Once

“She had the kind of face that lit up a room when she entered, which made it a great mask for the torment beneath.”

Maya’s appraisal of her best friend, Eileen, is both kind and cruel. Throughout the novel, Maya is critical of Eileen, whom she unconsciously blames for her husband, Ricky’s, abuse. Here, she compliments Eileen’s beauty and capacity to keep up appearances, which she did when Ricky was still a part of her life. Eileen’s “mask” represents Gender Expectations and the Performance of Identity since she does not present her true self or reveal her abuse to others.

“Sometimes, when she was with the other moms, the sounds of the rotors more than the gruesome visuals would come roaring back. Ironic, she thought, that this in-your-face, never-back-off parenting was nicknamed ‘helicoptering.’”

Even though she interacts with very few in the novel, Maya has a constant, internal tension with other moms in her socioeconomic bracket. Her military career sets her apart from them, as it has granted her a more clear-eyed version of the world in her opinion. After experiencing real violence in an actual helicopter, Maya can’t take the other moms’ military euphemisms. Her struggle introduces the challenges of The Reintegration of Veterans Into Civilian Life.

“Death follows you, Maya…maybe death found you in some shithole in the desert. Or maybe he’s just always been inside of you and somehow you let him out or he followed you home.”

Eddie unconsciously picks up on the violence that “follows” Maya when finding a pattern in the deaths around her: She is indirectly responsible for Claire’s death and directly responsible for Joe’s as well as the Iraqi civilians’. The blunt language of this speech, including “shithole,” characterize Eddie’s suffering since Claire’s death.

“It isn’t as though the more competent warriors had a better chance of surviving. It was a crapshoot. War is never a meritocracy for the casualties.”

Shane argues that war does not discriminate when dealing death. The colloquial phrase “crapshoot” conveys Shane’s jaded attitude as he adjusts to civilian life. As Maya investigates crimes throughout the novel, this nihilistic outlook extends to Maya’s loss of Claire and Joe and the others dead because of Joe.

“You can try to predict, but until the grenade is actually thrown, you don’t have a clue.”

Maya’s view of human nature is informed by her time on the battlefield. Coben uses militaristic language when describing Maya’s feelings to convey her difficulty reintegrating into civilian life and to underscore her PTSD. She carries this attitude home with her, not modulating her behavior to fit in with the other moms or within the Burketts’ elite orbit. Her experience leads Maya to expect the unexpected—no matter how unthinkably grim or nakedly selfless.

“You travel halfway around the world to some hellhole to fight a crazed enemy. You’d think that was where the danger would originate from…But no. the enemy had struck, as enemies often do, where she had least expected it: back home in the good ol’ USA.”

After fighting “evil” overseas in a foreign land filled with “enemies,” Maya sees the stark contrast between her life then and now, in a cushy New Jersey suburb. However, the novel portrays the violence that lurks beneath a veneer and suggests that the safety provided by a comfortable American life is just an illusion. Coben highlights this illusion when Maya imitates American cadence and reflects on “the good ol’ USA.”

“That firecracker girl you knew in high school—where is she now? It didn’t happen to men as much. Those boys often grew up to be masters of the universe. The super successful girls? They seemed to die of slow societal suffocation.”

Maya is critical of Eileen for staying married to abusive Ricky and has watched her friend diminish throughout her marriage and motherhood. Maya often contrasts herself with other women in her life who seem content in their safe, suburban lives. In Maya’s eyes, women are forced to shape themselves into the mold society demands, highlighting Gender Expectations and the Performance of Identity; bright young men take over the world while firecracker girls abandon their power to fit in.

“Maya had figured that victims of domestic abuse were more…victim-y? Weak women get into these situations. Lost or poor or uneducated women, women with no backbones—those are the ones men abuse. Strong women like Eileen? No way.”

As Maya configures her feelings about Eileen’s experiences, Coben represents her thoughts with irregular syntax and colloquial diction. She uses the term “victim-y,” suggesting that she struggles to articulate herself and reconcile her views with reality. Coben also uses ellipses and dashes to represent her faltering thoughts.

“Big secrets don’t stay secret. They have a way of coming back when you least expect them, rippling and reverberating and causing—again she recognized how often military lingo slips into her regular vocabulary—massive collateral damage.”

Here, Maya articulates a key theme of the novel—The Lasting Consequences of Trauma and Secrets—while acknowledging how ingrained the military is in her everyday life. It’s how she processes the world and makes sense of behavior, including her own. The novel is full of secrets, nearly every character bending or omitting the truth to themselves or others. The passage conveys the novel’s overarching perspective that keeping secrets only perpetuates harm.

“It was an odd thing with Judith, how easily she slipped from warm maternal figure to professional shrink to, as she was right now, starchy old-world matriarch complete with a British-tinged accent.”

Many characters in Fool Me Once perform versions of their identity throughout the novel. Judith is able to perform her gender identity in different ways to suit her needs throughout the novel. Maya notes that Judith alters her persona to fit into the situation at hand. Critical of women who diminish their power after marriage and motherhood, Maya recognizes and appreciates the spark of Judith’s old rebellious self even when acting like an austere matriarch.

“We may still want to fight the war. But we should know. Businessmen lie and cheat. Sports figures lie and cheat. Governments lie and cheat. We shrug. But imagine a world where that didn’t happen. Imagine a world where we have full accountability instead of unjust authority. Imagine a world where there are no abuses and secrets.”

Coben uses the anaphora of “lie and cheat” to emulate how ubiquitous these behaviors are and hence suggest how normalized they have become. He follows this with a different anaphora, “imagine a world,” to characterize Corey’s idealism and give his character arc a tone of hope.

“It’s like one of those movies where only the hero can see the ghosts and everyone else thinks the hero is crazy.”

When Maya, Shane, and her fellow veterans hang out at their gun club together, conversation turns to civilian lovers and friends. Maya can’t help but think about or even relive her wartime experiences in talking to civilians who have no understanding of how haunted she is. But being with friends—who also see the ghosts—is a relief.

“The sun was shining as though on a director’s cue. Here was the American dream, spread out before Maya like a warm blanket, and the overwhelming feeling for her was that she didn’t belong here, that her very presence was a dark cloud blocking out that glowing light.”

Maya is skeptical of the American dream before her because she is aware of its high costs. The simile of the “warm blanket” emphasizes the temptation that Maya feels for comfort. However, Coben modulates this image of comfort to one of a “cloud,” portraying Maya’s mental state that turns comfort into darkness.

“What she had done in a combat helicopter over Al Qa’im, like those sounds that wouldn’t ever leave her, started an echo, a reverberation, and eventually that echo found its way to her sister.”

In this passage, Coben conveys The Lasting Consequences of Trauma and Secrets. Maya’s murder of Iraqi civilians led to the end of her career when the video was leaked to Corey’s site. When Claire tried to bargain with Corey to not release the audio of the incident, he pressed her into service. Her investigation into Joe and the Burketts’ misdeeds resulted in her death. What happened in battle started a deadly chain reaction.

“Maybe that was the deal you made. You can participate or you can protect, but you really can’t do both.”

Maya often reflects on her inability—or unwillingness—to reintegrate fully into civilian life. Privy to the costs of freedom, Maya doesn’t feel that she can participate in society with a clear conscience. Coben’s use of second person here is immersive; it indirectly addresses the reader to prompt them to consider whether they participate or protect.

“The mind can want so, so badly that it manifests delusions. Conspiracy theories, paranoia, visions—the more desperate you are, the more susceptible.”

Judith says this to Maya regarding Caroline and her unresolved trauma about Andrew’s death, now compounded by the loss of Joe. However, she also attempts to make Maya question her sanity with the doctored nanny cam video of Joe. Coben piles together the three examples—“[c]onspiracy theories, paranoia, visions”—to convey that Judith attempts to bombard and overwhelm Maya.

“Was a person like this—a person surrounded by death, a person who had fooled even those closest to her into believing that her condition was based, in part, on feeling guilty—someone whose judgment you trusted?”

Maya questions if she can believe herself or if anyone else can or will believe her as she spins a web of lies. Judith’s mission to make Maya trip up by questioning her mental health is working. Coben slowly hints at Maya’s actions throughout the novel, including here when she insinuates that she feels no guilt, to build tension regarding the truth of Maya’s past.

“Money buys seclusion. Money buys fences. Money buys various degrees of insulation.”

Class is a significant motif in the novel. The excesses of Franklin Biddle Academy’s lush campus are a stark contrast to places where Theo Mora grew up. The novel suggests that the wealthy have the means to insulate themselves from failure and repercussions. This anaphora of “money buys” suggests that these systems perpetuate themselves through generations.

“They say you can’t bury the past. That was probably true, but what they really meant was that trauma ripples and echoes and somehow stays alive.”

Maya reflects on The Lasting Consequences of Trauma and Secrets. The image of the ripples encapsulates the rising action of the novel. Maya’s actions in combat indirectly led to Claire’s death, Joe’s murders of Theo and Andrew cannot stay hidden forever, and Maya’s trauma reawakens every night with her PTSD flashbacks. In not confronting their pasts—seeking help or facing justice—Maya’s and Joe’s deaths are rooted in what came before.

“The tears were designed to act as a weapon—to make the kidnappers relax; to make them underestimate her; to give her time, before getting out of the car, to plan exactly what she would do.”

Maya is perpetually annoyed when people underestimate her due to her gender. However, she also realizes that she can use this to her advantage, as she does here. When Neil’s goons try to kidnap her, Maya disarms them with a performance of a grieving widow, which allows her to reach for her real weapon—a concealed gun that she fires at will. Her actions emphasize the performativity of gender that Coben explores throughout the novel and suggests that these men are also victims of patriarchal standards.

“What haunts me, Shane, what lingers inside me, is the knowledge that if I was up there again, I would do the exact same thing.”

Among the information Maya withholds from Shane, the most complicated is the truth about the rescue mission. She admits that she would do it all over again, which is in line with Maya’s valuing of certain lives over others. It’s a damning, cathartic admission that highlights her antiheroic qualities and marks the beginning of her end.

“There are moments in life when everything changes. It was again like one of those optical illusions. You see only one thing, and then you shift something just a little, and everything changes.”

When Maya holds the gun Joe used to kill Claire, she knows immediately what he’s done. Coben slows down the temporality of the novel here, which had been building with speed toward the climax, as he dwells in this “moment” and reveals Maya’s secret. This shift in pace underscores the revelatory nature of Maya’s memories.

“Compared to what she had done in the past, the collateral damage to those two was negligible.”

Throughout the novel, Maya rationalizes her behavior by framing harm as “collateral damage”: She believes that killing Joe was justice for Claire and Andrew, that the Iraqi civilians killed were an acceptable price to pay to save American lives, and that Fred Katen and Emilio Rodrigo’s fates are unfortunate side effects of her righteous mission. This is one of her antiheroic qualities, which Coben uses to critique the values of the American military and its so-called “War on Terror.”