Madison, Wisconsin, is a university-city stop in Maren and Lee’s journey, a place where the bustle of student arrival briefly offers the appearance of ordinary life before the dormitory becomes the setting for Maren’s renewed danger. The campus’s open, communal spaces contrast with the private rooms and shadowed stairwells in which her isolation and vulnerability come into view.

Arrival and Campus

Maren and Lee reach Madison just after four o’clock, traveling with Kerri-Ann Watt, an incoming senior at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. On the drive, Kerri-Ann directs personal questions to Lee and pays little attention to Maren. Maren sits in the back seat while Lee rides in front, giving her sympathetic looks over his shoulder; she suppresses a smirk as she recognizes his answers as lies. Their seating and conversation establish the imbalance that follows them into the city: Lee is Kerri-Ann’s focus, while Maren is present but largely overlooked.

When Kerri-Ann returns from checking into her dorm, she offers Lee and Maren a place to stay for the night in her single room, on the condition that they help her move in. The offer makes the university a temporary refuge for travelers who have no place of their own. Around them, students in T-shirts and ball caps marked with badgers laugh, call across the parking lot, hug, and high-five. This public welcome to a new academic year gives Madison a distinctly social surface, one Maren can observe without sharing in its easy belonging.

The Dorm and Temporary Shelter

The dorm room is spare and institutional: painted cinderblock walls, gray linoleum, and fiberboard furniture. As Kerri-Ann hangs posters, including images of Tom Cruise in Risky Business and Right Said Fred, Lee rolls his eyes. The small gestures make the room feel like Kerri-Ann’s own space, while Maren and Lee remain helpers whose stay depends on her invitation. After carrying the belongings upstairs, the three go to a campus pizzeria for dinner.

On the lakeside path, Kerri-Ann walks beside Lee and touches the inside of his arm whenever she points something out. Maren finds the display tiresome and thinks that the next morning’s plans will have nothing to do with Kerri-Ann. Back in the room, Kerri-Ann asks Lee to assemble her loft bed while she unpacks her toiletries and cosmetics; she invites Maren into the bathroom as she lays them out along the counter. The division of attention persists: Lee is given a practical task, while Maren is included in Kerri-Ann’s preparations but remains an observer of the intimacy forming around her.

That night, Maren settles on a couch in the dorm’s common room. Its cushions smell of beer and dirty socks, a markedly less private and comfortable place than Kerri-Ann’s room. She imagines Lee and Kerri-Ann together, then falls asleep and dreams of running through zigzagging corridors as Kerri-Ann, in pink stiletto heels, loses her lead. When a security guard wakes Maren with a flashlight, the common room’s temporary shelter is shown to have limits: it is closed, and Maren is not a resident. She identifies herself as Kerri-Ann’s friend and gives the guard her room number, 229, but even the word friend catches in her throat.

Campus as Exposure

Madison’s campus offers Maren shared public space, but not lasting security. In a later episode, after leaving books on a library table and disposing of a cat’s tail in a nearby trash can, she walks across a sunny quad where students play Frisbee or sun themselves. She does not look behind her as she returns to the dorm. The everyday scene—people enjoying the afternoon across the quad—continues around her, while her attention is fixed on the threat she expects to follow.

Inside the dorm, Maren climbs to the second-floor landing and sits on a stairwell step, listening for boots on the stairs beyond the double doors. She has bested Sully once, but the old fear remains. When he appears, carrying a pocketknife with blood crusted around his fingernails, the institutional building’s ordinary routes become part of the pursuit: stairs, doors, and rooms offer no dependable escape. The contrast between the sunny quad and the deserted hallway makes the campus’s safety conditional rather than secure.

The Dormitory Becomes a Site of Threat

Sully follows Maren into Kerri-Ann’s room and turns the dead bolt. He pushes her toward the bed and threatens her with the knife if she looks at the door again. By then, daylight is fading and shadows fill the room; Lee will not return for hours. The room that had provided a night’s lodging and the address Maren gave the guard is now a confined space controlled by her pursuer.

The sequence gives Madison’s university setting a double function. Its parking lots, lakeside path, pizzeria, quad, and dormitory first frame the familiar routines of student life and a brief offer of shelter. Yet for Maren, being among students does not make her part of their security or community. The same dorm that accommodates her as a guest can be entered and locked against her, while its common room and stairwell expose how precarious her presence is. Madison is therefore not simply a stopping point on the journey: it is where apparent refuge and immediate danger occupy the same campus.