Maren plans to confess to the police, then burns her confession

Maren plans to confess to the police, then burns her confession in an episode that turns an organized attempt at accountability into its deliberate undoing. She identifies herself in writing, connects her name to a decade-long list of missing young people and other victims, and prepares nine copies to send to local police. Yet after Lee challenges the plan and she is left alone at the cabin, she feeds the pages into the fire one by one. The episode’s central reversal is not that Maren lacks evidence or a plan, but that she cannot sustain the belief that telling the truth will make her free.

Preparing the Confession

While waiting for Lee, Maren searches online for the addresses of police stations in the towns where she committed what she calls the bad thing. She writes a confession in her notebook and makes nine photocopies. The number gives the plan practical shape: she is not merely considering whether to confess, but has begun preparing separate statements for the places connected to her actions. She is uncertain where she should wait for the police, but imagines resolving that problem later with a postscript. Even this unfinished detail shows her treating the confession as something that might be sent and acted upon, rather than as a private admission alone.

The text she drafts begins by identifying her as Maren Yearly, age sixteen, and anticipates that its claims may sound like a sick joke. It argues that names and dates matching missing-person reports should establish that she is not inventing the account for amusement. Her appeal therefore tries to make the records themselves witnesses: the statement asks to be tested against public reports, not accepted on her word alone. The planned confession is at once personal and documentary, an attempt to put her own account beside the disappearances and let the correspondence speak for it.

The list names Penny Wilson, in her twenties, near Edgartown in 1983; eight-year-old Luke Vanderwall at Camp Ameewagan in July 1990; and ten-year-old Jamie Gash in December 1992. It continues with Dmitri Levertov, Joe Sharkey, Kevin Wheeler, Noble Collins, Marcus Hoff, and C. J. Mitchell, giving ages, places, and dates for each. The final entry is Andy, whose last name Maren does not know, identified instead as an employee of the Walmart near Pittston, Iowa, in June 1998. The entries make the confession’s reach concrete: it spans years and towns, and includes children whose ages are recorded beside the locations where they disappeared.

Lee Challenges the Plan

Maren shows one of the copies to Lee as they are preparing to travel back into Wisconsin. He reacts with disbelief and objects that she is seriously considering sending it to anyone. When he says nobody will believe her, the obstacle he names is not whether the statement is true but whether it can be received as credible. Maren thinks that belief may not matter, but doubts Lee would understand that answer; instead, she tells him that perhaps the authorities will believe her. Her response keeps open the possibility that the documents and the matching reports might persuade someone, even as his skepticism presses against it.

The exchange gives the confession two different possible purposes. It could expose Maren to police scrutiny, but she also frames it through the promise that truth brings freedom. Her thought that the truth will set her free sits beside a more divided reaction: one part of her feels better for having prepared the material, while another remains, in her words, “still running in the dark.” The contrast does not resolve into confidence. Preparation offers a brief sense of relief, but it does not end the fear and uncertainty that the confession was meant to confront.

Lee urges her not to send the pages that night. He wants to reach Tarbridge as quickly as possible and find a safe place to sleep. They continue their journey, and Maren sees a deer leap across the road and run beside a barbed-wire fence. That encounter occurs after the argument but does not settle it: the confession remains with her as an unfinished decision while the journey carries her onward.

The Pages Go into the Fire

Later, at the cabin, Maren waits an hour and Sully does not return. She takes the photocopies from her rucksack, crumples them, and feeds them into the fire one by one. The act reverses the careful labor of copying and addressing them. What had been multiplied so that it could reach several police departments is destroyed sheet by sheet, leaving no copy ready to send. The sequence makes the choice physical: the prepared account is not simply postponed or misplaced; Maren deliberately dismantles it.

As the pages burn, the confession’s opening and its list of names are set out again. The repeated account brings the people and dates back into view at the moment Maren is destroying the means by which she had hoped to report them. She then concludes that the truth will not set her free and that she will only end up like her father. The fear attached to that comparison is not explained here in further detail, but it decisively overturns the earlier hope expressed through the confession’s appeal to truth. Instead of treating disclosure as a route out, she sees it as leading toward an outcome she dreads.

Significance

The episode stages confession as both a practical undertaking and an unstable promise. Maren has gathered addresses, written an account, copied it nine times, and linked its claims to missing-person reports. Those details distinguish the plan from a passing wish to tell someone: it has already acquired a procedure and potential recipients. At the same time, the plan depends on a belief that truth might change what comes next, and that belief weakens under Lee’s warning that nobody will believe her and Maren’s fear of becoming like her father.

The scene’s structure makes the change legible through paper. A statement meant to travel outward is first handed to Lee, then carried to the cabin, and finally consumed by the fire. Its movement from notebook to photocopies to ashes traces a shift from intended public disclosure to deliberate silence. Maren’s prepared list remains a record of what she says she did, but the act that follows prevents that record from reaching the police. The event therefore ends not with confession or release, but with the destruction of her attempted confession and the persistence of the fear that had accompanied it.