Sully attacks Maren, who escapes the cabin

Sullivan attacks Maren, who escapes the cabin, in a violent confrontation that exposes Sullivan as her grandfather and turns his long, seemingly instructive attention toward her into a direct threat to her life.

The Intruder and the Family Revelation

Maren wakes beneath a pile of coats in Jamie Gash’s spare room after dreaming that her mother has come to find her. The brief hope vanishes as she recognizes that someone is in the room and realizes that locking the door has not kept her safe. Sullivan is sitting in a chair in the dark. He has noticed the ID card Maren found and tells her that her father left it there; when she asks how he knows, he reveals that her father is his son. The disclosure makes Sullivan Maren’s grandfather, a connection that leaves her feeling as though she has been cast adrift outside herself. It also changes the meaning of his presence: the man waiting in the room is not a stranger who has merely tracked her to the cabin, but a member of the family whose history she is only beginning to understand.

The Waiting and the Attack

Sully explains that he had once tried to reach Maren’s father but could not do so without drawing attention; by the time he realized Frank was hiding, he believed he could no longer get to him. Instead, Sully says, he had known Maren was nearby and waited for her to return. His admission makes the danger feel less like a chance encounter than the end point of a long pursuit: the questions and lessons that had seemed to connect them now acquire a predatory underside. Maren wonders whether he had kept her there for entertainment or to fatten her up.

The threat becomes unmistakable when Maren understands that Sully has the knife he used to peel an apple and intends to kill her with it. He pins her on the bed, holds her arms, and presses the blade against her left forearm. His defense of his rule—that he eats people only once they are dead—collapses into a chilling qualification: he does not always let them die on their own time. The distinction that had made his conduct seem bounded offers Maren no protection; Sully can cause the death that makes his victim eligible for him.

Maren fights for the narrow opening his grip leaves her. She kicks at his legs until he loosens his hold, frees her left hand, and bats the knife away by its handle. Reaching blindly toward the nightstand, she finds Mr. Harmon's Sphinx trophy, grips it by a wing, and strikes the back of Sully’s skull. When he rears up and lifts a hand to his head, she hits him again. He falls on top of her; she feels blood on her fingers, drops the trophy, pushes him aside, and rolls out of bed. The exchange reverses the scene’s immediate balance of power, but Maren has no time to learn how long Sully will remain down.

Flight into the Forest

Maren does not stop to gather her belongings. In retrospect, she recognizes that she might have packed her rucksack, but in the moment she cannot know how quickly Sullivan will recover, and the possibility of another attack leaves no room for deliberation. She tears down the creaking wooden stairs and into the forest with only her journal in her hand and her birth certificate in the back pocket of her jeans. The two documents she carries are intimate records of her life; everything else is abandoned to the cabin and the man who has just tried to kill her.

Escape offers no clear route to safety. The main road is two or three miles away through the woods, and even reaching it would not guarantee a ride in the middle of the night. Maren expects Sullivan to come after her in his truck and imagines that he might run her down, a possibility that recalls the death she had once wanted on the Iowa highway. The threat of being killed is therefore bound both to the immediate attack and to her earlier despair, but now she is running to stay alive.

The forest makes flight physically precarious: the track is muddy, Maren slips more than once, and she keeps going with muddy knees and bloody hands. She takes great lungfuls of air to push panic aside. Even if someone passes on the road, she doubts anyone in their right mind would stop for her. Her escape is not a secure deliverance but a desperate passage out of the cabin, undertaken with almost nothing and without assurance that the road—or anyone on it—will offer help.

The Dream’s Interrupted Warning

Before the attack, the scene passes through a dream in which Mrs. Harmon lays down a teapot, places her hand on Maren’s, and reassures her. The kitchen and Mrs. Harmon then disappear, their touch vanishing as Maren returns to the room beneath the coats. That abrupt shift turns an image of comfort into evidence of how little protection it can offer: even the hand that seemed to steady her belongs to a dream, while the danger in the room is real.

A different maternal voice enters the crisis as Maren is pinned down. The warning to get out does not come from her absent mother in the room; it is an inner voice that focuses her on escape. The contrast gives the scene two incompatible forms of maternal presence: the hoped-for rescue that dissolves on waking and the urgent command that helps her act. Neither removes the threat, but the warning becomes part of the split-second response that carries her from paralysis into resistance.