Fool Me Once

Maya stakes out Hector’s truck until he exits a nearby high-rise with Isabella behind him. When they get into his truck, Maya jumps into the back seat and holds her gun to Hector’s head. Complying, Hector and Isabella put their hands on the wheel and dashboard, respectively. Maya grabs Isabella’s purse, removing the pepper spray from her reach. When she drops the bag onto the floor, a forest green color catches her eye—Joe’s missing shirt.

Maya’s suspicion that Isabella helped fake the nanny cam video is confirmed. Hector played the part of Joe in his shirt, his face digitally altered using footage from Maya’s wedding video. When they refuse to talk, Maya breaks Hector’s nose with the butt of her gun and then smacks him and Isabella. When she aims the barrel into Hector’s shoulder, Isabella yelps and reveals that they helped Rosa fake the video because she believed that Maya killed Joe. When Maya showed Isabella the footage, Isabella did as she was told, saying that she saw nothing and then swiping the SD card. They wanted Maya to start doubting her sanity so that she would be isolated and make mistakes.

Shane appears, having followed Maya via a tracker he placed on her car. She gets out of Hector’s truck and notices that Shane’s eyes are red with worry. Maya takes a deep breath and finally comes clean about the incident that ended her military career. While they waited for clearance to fire upon the SUV, Maya turned off Shane’s radio. He didn’t hear the command telling them to stand down. Maya made the decision to shoot, not caring about the civilians, just their own soldiers. However, she doesn’t regret her choice, even as she relives the events every night during her PTSD episodes. Maya tries to save the soldiers whom they lost over and over again and knows that she would kill the civilians every time. Shane tries to hug Maya, but she dodges him, unable to handle it. She isn’t done confessing. Shane is correct that Maya gave him the bullet to test because she had discovered that the weapon that killed Claire was one of Maya’s untraceable guns. The only person who could have used it was Joe. Maya then used the same gun to kill Joe.

Maya drives Hector’s truck to Farnwood and enters the main house via the back gate, taking advantage of the lax security for employees. Using a burner phone, she speaks to Lulu at Leather and Lace, asking for one more favor from Corey: to set a trap for the Burketts. Sitting alone in the dark, Maya recalls visiting Claire’s grave with Joe when she returned from overseas. His odd behavior made her realize after the fact how little she knew about her husband; their whirlwind courtship had so easily spun into a new, seemingly fairytale life. When she next took out the Smith and Wesson kept in the secret compartment after Claire’s funeral, Maya knew immediately that it had been used. She meticulously cleaned her weapons, and though Joe complained about her keeping guns in the house, “[i]n short, he doth protest too much” (369). Holding the gun that he had inexpertly cleaned, everything that Maya understood about Joe changed. He had killed Claire, and she was “sleeping with the enemy—she felt a fool and worse” (370).

So, she took the gun to the range, fired a shot, and gave the bullet to Shane for testing against the one from Claire’s skull. Maya also swapped the murder weapon for the registered Smith and Wesson, which she placed in the secret compartment. Before the results were in, she left clues for Joe that she suspected something until she finally confronted him one night, claiming to have proof. Kierce was correct: Maya called Joe and lured him to Central Park. Joe knew Maya had nothing concrete, but he provided proof by aiming what he thought was the Smith and Wesson used to kill Claire at Maya. Still, Maya held out hope that “somehow, forcing his hand like this would show her what she had missed, how she got it wrong” (371). But Joe pulled the trigger, and Maya knew that the man she had shared her life, bed, and daughter with had tortured and killed her own sister.

However, Maya had removed the firing pin from the swapped gun in Joe’s hand. She produced the murder weapon and fired. Maya staged the incident, shooting him three times and discarding the clothes that she was wearing. She hugged Joe to look the part of the bloody, grieving widow and ran toward the fountain calling for help with both guns in her purse. No one searched her because she appeared to be a victim as well. She dumped the murder weapon and replaced the registered Smith and Wesson in her safe, which Kierce would later take for testing. Framing Katen and Rodrigo, Maya made sure to say that they were wearing ski masks so that the charges would never stick. Even given Rodrigo’s weapons charge, the “collateral damage to those two was negligible” in light of her other crimes (373). The murder investigation was a mess by design, Claire’s killer had received some kind of justice, and Maya and Lily were safe—until the nanny cam footage destroyed the delicate façade that Maya had constructed.

Judith, Neil, and Caroline return home, surprised to find Maya when the lights come on. Maya launches into her accusations: Judith hired someone to fake the video after telling Rosa’s family that Maya killed Joe, trying to “shake the tree” and trip Maya up (374); Caroline lied about Kierce for the same reason, to make Maya question her sanity. Maya asks Judith how she knew that she killed Joe. Judith cites maternal intuition, but Maya disagrees; Judith knew that Maya had a motive. Caroline is incredulous that Joe killed Claire, but Judith’s anger proves Maya right. Claire was going to destroy them all, so Judith suggests that Joe “tried to reason with her” (376). Maya corrects the euphemism: Claire was tortured and killed. Judith chalks it up to panic; Joe knew that he must “attack the enemy with full force” (376), something that she assumes Maya understands as a soldier.

Neil, doubting the efficacy of Judith’s plan to unsettle Maya into confessing, sent kidnappers after her. Now, however, Maya has confessed in front of the last of the Burketts. Judith is confident that they will build a strong case against her. However, Maya knows something that Neil and Caroline don’t: that Joe didn’t just kill Claire, he killed Theo, Tom Douglass, and his own brother, Andrew. Neil and Caroline are shocked. Even Judith’s last shred of denial that one of her sons killed another is shattered. Now, even if she goes to jail for life, Maya vows to make sure that the EAC Pharmaceuticals story gets out and the Burkett family will be ruined. Judith flips her script and tries to make a deal with Maya, to Neil’s shock, suggesting that perhaps there is a way to preserve the family’s reputation and fortune by pinning everything on Joe and protecting Maya in exchange for her silence.

Neil, however, produces a gun. Judith and Caroline give him tacit approval, and he shoots Maya three times. Maya falls to the floor, the voices drifting around her. Searching her dying body, the Burketts learn that she is unarmed. Maya smiles; above the fireplace is the nanny cam. Maya waits for the screams to deafen her, but only silence and peace come.

Told from Shane’s first-person narration, he and Eileen bump into each other at the hospital where Lily is recovering from giving birth to her first child. Still both single, Shane and Eileen had a “moment way back when” but now fall into amiable teasing (383). The video streamed from the nanny cam the night of Maya’s death at Farnwood went viral, thanks to Corey and Lulu. The truth was exposed in real time, and a murder unfolded before viewers’ eyes. Shane isn’t sure if Maya knew that she would be killed that night, but she wrote letters to Shane and Eddie beforehand and left her gun in Hector’s truck so that Neil could not claim self-defense after shooting her.

Daniel Walker, now 39, and Alexa, now 37, both thriving, are huddled in Lily’s room with Eddie and his wife, Selina, married 10 years after Claire’s death. Shane stayed in Lily’s life because she reminds him of Maya, a friend he dearly misses. She was a good person despite her crimes; Shane figures that her PTSD stemmed from guilt. Even though death did seem to follow her, Maya’s final act was to ensure that it didn’t follow Lily. Lily’s military husband, Dean Vanech, greets Shane and introduces him to his new daughter, Maya. Shane knows that her namesake is here with them.