Ethan’s fatal attack on Anna

Ethan’s fatal attack on Anna is the rooftop confrontation that turns her from a cornered target into the person who ends his assault. The scene joins a revelation about the secret Ethan and his father have kept from his mother to a struggle across Anna’s house and onto its exposed roof. There, Anna embraces Ethan, then uses her weight to push him onto the fragile skylight. Its collapse kills him, and Anna’s subsequent call to Detective Little marks the transition from the violence itself to its immediate aftermath.

Causes and Disclosure

As Ethan advances toward the bed, he tells Anna that his mother knows nothing about what has happened: she was away and returned the following morning. His father made him promise not to tell her, Ethan says, because he wants to protect her. Ethan admits feeling some sympathy for his father, who must keep a major secret from his wife. The disclosure makes the household’s silence part of the confrontation: Ethan’s mother is absent from the events but is being deliberately kept from knowing about them.

Ethan then says that his mother thinks Anna is insane. The remark brings the conflict directly to Anna’s credibility, which has been central to the danger surrounding her. He takes another step until he is beside the bed, holding the blade level with her throat. Rather than simply attacking at once, he sits on the mattress with his back against Anna’s knees and asks her to analyze and fix him. The request does not make the threat disappear: the blade remains in his hand, and Anna recoils, unwilling to take up the role he demands of her. His appeal for help is delivered from a position of physical control, making the scene’s apparent invitation to understand him inseparable from the danger he poses.

From the Bedroom to the Roof

Anna’s resistance becomes physical. When Ethan orders her to look at him, she kicks with all her strength. Later, in a moment of blindness and arrested time, she lunges through a doorway and drives her shoulder into his gut. She pushes him toward the staircase; he suddenly vanishes from her sight, and she hears him collapse down the stairs. The action briefly makes the house’s interior a route of escape, but it does not end the pursuit.

Anna climbs a ladder toward the roof through the storm. The rungs are cold and slick, the ladder squeals under her weight, and rain and wind batter her as she emerges. Ethan grabs her ankle; she shakes him loose and hauls herself out. The roof gives her space, but not safety. She sees a dark drop beyond the trapdoor, then Ethan emerging from it and rising onto the roof with the letter opener in his hand. On three sides is a four-story drop; to the east, the wall of St. Dymphna’s rises beside her. Anna backs against the skylight dome, which gives slightly under her foot. David had warned her that the glass was flimsy and that a falling branch could take out the whole window. The warning becomes newly consequential when the skylight is no longer merely part of the house but the vulnerable surface between the two opponents.

The Reversal on the Skylight

With Ethan still glaring at her and gripping the letter opener, Anna breathes deeply and tells him that both of his parents loved him. She hugs him. He initially stiffens, then slackens, and they stand together in the rain. As Anna sways, Ethan holds her; when she regains her footing, they have changed positions, with her hands on his chest and her feeling his heartbeat. The embrace changes the immediate arrangement of their bodies and creates a pause in the attack, but it does not establish that Ethan is safe or that the danger has passed.

Anna repeats that both parents loved him, then leans into him with all her weight and pushes him onto the skylight. The reversal is decisive: the blade and the advancing assailant had made Anna appear wholly subject to Ethan’s control, but the closeness he permits gives her the position from which to act. The letter opener skids aside as Ethan spreads his hands against the glass and tries to push himself upright. The skylight disintegrates beneath him. He drops out of sight, and the storm is so loud that Anna cannot hear whether he screams. Below, rain swirls through the opening and broken glass glitters on the landing. Anna cannot see farther into the darkness, so the fall first registers as a disappearance rather than a confirmed death.

Death and Immediate Aftermath

The confirmation comes after Anna returns through the house. At two in the morning, the clock in the library chimes the hour. From the landing she can see Ethan’s body disarranged on the floor. Blood forms a dark crown around his head; one hand lies folded over his heart, and his eyes are open. Anna looks back at him, steps past him, and enters the kitchen. The sequence gives the fall a second, quieter ending: first the broken skylight and the unseen drop, then the body encountered in the house below.

Anna plugs in the landline so that she can call Detective Little. The call makes the fatal outcome a matter to be reported to the police, following Anna’s personal confrontation with Ethan. The event’s central reversal is therefore also a crossing of thresholds: from bed to doorway, from staircase to roof, from the storm-beaten outside back into the house, and finally from private survival to police contact. Ethan’s death resolves the immediate physical attack, while his disclosure about the secret kept from his mother leaves the family’s concealed knowledge as part of the aftermath.