Claire and Marcia’s experiences in Forget Me Not both illustrate the danger of trusting strangers. While Claire and Marcia are eager to find and show solidarity in their dealings with other people—especially women—the novel demonstrates that being too ready to trust the wrong people can place a person in danger.

Claire loved her own sister so much that she develops a deep need to help other women in their time of need. When she meets “Marcia” (actually Lily masquerading under a false identity), she immediately suspects that Marcia may be a victim of abuse and seeks to help her. Ryan warns her of this tendency when he sees her conflating the teenage Marcia she reads about in the diary with adult “Marcia” (who turns out to be Lily). Claire would like to take care of the teenage Marcia, who reminds her of Natalie. Her assumption that Marcia is a safe person to ally herself with while perceiving only Mitchell as dangerous leads Claire to make risky mistakes, such as raising Marcia’s suspicions of Claire’s intended flight from the farm. At the novel’s climax, Claire realizes that Marcia is really Lily, and that Lily, far from being a passive victim, is a murderer who is in control of the situation. Thus, Claire’s eagerness to trust her impressions of Marcia/Lily leave her vulnerable to Marcia/Lily’s manipulations.   

The teenage Marcia has a similar problem, as recounted in her diary. When she meets Mitchell, she is drawn to what she regards as his charming exterior and his seeming care for her well-being. In her desperation to find belonging and connection, Marcia fails to evaluate what Mitchell says with a more skeptical and detached eye, not realizing that he is seeking to isolate and manipulate her until it is too late. She makes a similar mistake with Lily: Although she recognizes that Lily is erratic and obsessed with Mitchell, Marcia fails to doubt that Lily will help her. She expects Lily to feel the same maternal instinct to protect the baby as she does and help her leave Mitchell. Since Marcia does not give herself the time to observe and evaluate people objectively before confiding in them and trusting them, she ends up in the hands of dangerous individuals.

While Marcia does not escape from the danger in time, Claire saves herself before it’s too late. Claire’s instincts of mistrust and unease lead to her investigations, which in turn expose who Mitchell and Lily really are and the crimes they have committed. Claire and Marcia’s experiences thus reinforce the idea that it is important to get to know someone before trusting them.