Lee’s killing of Sully turns Maren’s entrapment into a rescue, but the reprieve comes through another act of eating: Lee saves her by killing the grandfather who has pursued her. The scene brings Maren face to face with Sully’s threat and with the terrible certainty of what Lee is willing to do for her.

The Pursuit and the Locked Room

Sully’s approach is preceded by Maren’s wait on the second-floor landing of a dormitory stairwell. She has thrown away the cat’s tail he left behind and knows he cannot touch her in the open, but the library will not remain available as a refuge. She waits for his boots; when they come, their slow, steady sound carries the old fear back with them. Sully appears with a pocketknife, its blade glinting beside fingernails ringed with dried blood, and treats his attack as punishment he is entitled to deliver as her grandfather.

Inside the room, Sully bars Maren from the door and threatens to slit her open if she tries to leave. He taunts her that Lee has failed to come to her rescue a second time, then claims he has already taken care of him. Maren answers that Lee can handle Sully, invoking Lee’s willingness to eat people the world would be better off without. The claim is not merely reassurance: when Lee’s footsteps sound in the corridor and he calls for Maren, the locked door becomes the immediate divide between Sully’s control and the possibility of rescue.

The Door Gives Way

Maren keeps Sully talking while Lee works at the lock. She tells her grandfather that Lee knows how to pick locks and will get inside; the confidence is tactical, a way to hold Sully’s attention while the sound of metal clicking against metal draws nearer. When Sully lunges, Maren catches his right arm. At the last moment she releases it, sending him tumbling onto the bed with his knife driven into a pillow, then climbs onto his back and seizes the knife hand from behind. The maneuver leaves her physically entangled with the man who has hunted her, but it also keeps the blade from turning against her as the dead bolt yields.

Lee enters and takes Sully by the arm. He barely looks at Maren before ordering her to wait in the bathroom, and Sully tries to address him as his son. Lee rejects the name. The brief exchange makes their family connection unmistakable without softening the violence between them: Lee has come for Maren, but he does not accept Sully’s claim on him. Maren retreats behind the shower curtain and presses her palms to her eyes. She counts roughly seven minutes, measuring safety not by what she can see but by the time she must wait before Lee comes to the bathroom door.

When Lee asks whether he may come in, Maren does not answer, yet he enters and kneels beside the tub. His arm around her brings relief and revulsion together; she wants to vomit, and Lee apologizes, then says he will brush his teeth. The aftermath makes the rescue’s cost visible. Back in the room, Maren sees a yellow plastic grocery bag, its handles knotted over a bulging mass of human scraps. Lee has killed Sully and consumed him. Sully’s pursuit has ended, but the means of ending it is the same appetite that has shadowed Maren’s life and bound her to Lee.

The Uneasy Shelter Afterward

Lee’s return ends Sully’s immediate hold over Maren, but it does not restore an ordinary sense of safety. After she leaves the bathtub, Lee washes his face and hands and uses Kerri-Ann’s toothbrush; the room itself has been stripped of its previous bedding, with a clean Laura Ashley duvet laid over the bare mattress. Maren curls up at the foot of the bed. These practical gestures make a temporary refuge, yet the knotted grocery bag of human remains at the door keeps the violence in view. Care and horror occupy the same small room.

The rescue also sharpens the difference between Sully’s account of his appetite and Lee’s actions. Sully had described himself as eating only people who were already dead, a rule he framed as an unavoidable part of what he was. Here, Sully has pursued and threatened Maren, and Lee’s intervention ends in Sully’s death and consumption. Maren had already explained Lee’s violence as directed at people the world would be better without; the scene puts that claim under pressure by showing the human cost of the protection it offers. Lee has saved her, but his presence cannot be separated from what he has done.

In the hours afterward, Maren drinks from Lee’s flask. Its taste is harsh, but the alcohol briefly dulls her awareness of Sully’s knife, the bones Lee has swallowed, and the fact that she has no money that is rightfully hers. Her thoughts also turn to her father, who may continue hoping she will visit, and to the possibility that someone will come looking for Kerri-Ann and alert campus police. The relief is therefore not a resolution: it is a short-lived suspension of fear, guilt, and practical danger. Maren recognizes how easily people might seek that kind of oblivion, then declines Lee’s offer of more because she senses the fragile comfort fading.

Food has repeatedly carried both welcome and threat in Maren’s encounters: Mrs. Harmon’s breakfast briefly made her feel trusted and gave her a reprieve from having no home, while Sully’s casserole joined domestic hospitality to his cannibal life. After Lee kills Sully, eating becomes more starkly inseparable from rescue and its cost. Maren is protected, but the means of her protection leaves her confronting the appetite that has shaped her family and her own fear of what she may become.

Ethical Pressure and the Cost of Protection

The episode’s horror does not end with Sully’s death: Lee’s rescue makes the appetite that has haunted Maren materially visible as the price of her survival. That tension resonates with the novel’s stated purpose. In the acknowledgments, its author connects the story of ghouls to a call for an honest examination of flesh eating and its environmental and spiritual consequences. The scene does not collapse ordinary meat eating into Lee’s cannibalism; rather, it places an extreme, intimate act of consumption beside the routines of care that follow it, refusing to let protection make the violence disappear. Maren is safe from Sully, but the means of that safety leaves the moral question open.