Lee kills Sully

Lee’s killing of Sully ends the month-long pursuit of Maren, but the decisive act takes place outside her sight. The scene turns on a reversal: Sully has cornered Maren and believes himself in control, yet Lee’s arrival transforms the room into a trap for the hunter.

The confrontation

A door slams at the end of the corridor, followed by heavy, steady footsteps. Maren recognizes Lee before he reaches the locked room. She tells Sully that Lee can handle him and predicts that if Sully eats her, Lee will eat Sully in turn. She describes Lee as someone who eats people the world is better off without. Sully answers by insisting that everyone does it, then glares at her and runs a hand over what remains of his hair.

Lee calls through the door, while Maren asks Sully whether she should tell him where he is. Her calm is strange to her because Sully may still lunge at her with his knife. As Lee works the lock, the rubber treads of his boots squeak and metal clicks against metal. Maren warns Sully that Lee knows how to pick locks. Sully attacks; Maren grips his right arm and watches him adjust his hold on the knife, trying to stab her in the hand.

At the last moment, Maren releases Sully’s hand. He falls forward onto the bed, driving the knife into a pillow. She climbs onto his back and seizes his knife hand from behind as the dead bolt gives way and the door swings open. Sully turns toward Lee with a startled, almost frightened expression; despite having hunted Maren for a month, he now seems impossibly frail. Lee barely glances at Maren before taking Sully by the arm. Maren lets go, and Lee tells her to wait in the bathroom.

The closed door and its aftermath

Maren bolts herself into the bathroom while Lee remains alone with Sully. From the bathtub, she presses her palms against her eyes until she sees comets, measuring the wait at seven minutes, give or take. She believes she is safe now—nearly safe—but the interval leaves the decisive violence outside her view. The door closes on Sully’s attempt to address Lee as his son; Lee rejects the name, a brief exchange that makes their history audible without explaining it.

When Lee finally knocks, he asks whether he can come in. Maren does not answer, but he enters, kneels beside the tub, and pulls back the shower curtain. He puts an arm around her and breathes on her; rather than comfort, his closeness makes her want to throw up. Lee apologizes and says he will brush his teeth. Maren thanks him, and he gently takes her hand to help her out of the bathtub. Their reunion is therefore marked both by care and by the physical recoil she cannot suppress.

Lee washes his face and hands and uses Kerri-Ann Watt’s toothbrush while Maren returns to the bedroom. The room had never felt especially homey; now its bare mattress, stripped sheets, and the clean Laura Ashley duvet Lee has laid over it make the aftermath newly stark. At the foot of the bed, Maren curls herself tightly together. Beside the door, she notices a yellow plastic grocery bag, its handles knotted twice around a bulging mass of human scraps. The bag supplies the grisly evidence of what happened after Lee took Sully from her, though the killing itself remains offstage.

Lee sits in the desk chair and rubs his eyes. He says he cannot believe how close he came to losing Maren. His words place the scene’s outcome beside its cost: Sully’s pursuit has ended, but Lee’s return has brought Maren face-to-face with the violence that made her safe. The narrative withholds the act behind the closed door and lets the aftermath—the bag, Lee’s exhausted posture, and Maren’s tight curl at the end of the bed—carry its weight.

The rejected name

The brief exchange after Lee takes Sully by the arm gives the violence a family register without explaining its history. Sully begins to address Lee as his son, appealing to a bond the word claims; Lee answers, “Don’t call me son.” The refusal is immediate and categorical. It neither opens a negotiation nor offers Maren an account of what passed between them. Instead, the scene lets the kinship claim and its rejection stand side by side, with the locked room separating their exchange from her view.

That separation matters to the scene’s moral shape. Maren has just warned Sully that Lee eats people he believes the world is better off without, casting his violence as selective rather than indiscriminate. Yet Lee’s refusal of the word son offers no explanation of how he judges Sully, and the aftermath does not settle the question through a witnessed act. The double-knotted bag of scraps confirms what the closed door conceals: Sully does not emerge. Lee’s later apology and concern for Maren coexist with that evidence, leaving care and lethal violence in the same frame without making one erase the other.

The question after the rescue

Maren brings Sully’s earlier claim into the first conversation after the attack: “He said he’d taken care of you.” The line carries the confrontation’s family tension into the reunion, but the exchange does not explain what Sully meant or how Lee understood it. Instead, after thanking Lee and letting him help her out of the bathtub, Maren asks why he came back early. The scene closes on that question, turning from the immediate danger to the reason for Lee’s return without supplying an answer here.