Hearing a door open in the darkened hallway, Macy panics and runs to the front door. However, the other Visitors still stand guard outside. Trapped, she goes upstairs.

The phone rings. An old man relays rules in a monotone voice: Macy must not look at the Visitor for more than three seconds, or else she will forget to breathe. She can’t leave the house. However, she is now permitted to defend herself. The Visitor moves slowly and can hear her thoughts, so she should think of quiet, gentle memories.

Macy hears slow footsteps approach the staircase. After accidentally alerting the Visitor by stepping on glass, Macy turns on the shower as a distraction and hides in a closet. Through the slats, she sees the Visitor’s shadowy head appear. She closes her eyes as it approaches. It turns off the shower and moves down the hall; a cold exhale seeps through the slats, carrying the smell of blood and chlorine. She glimpses the creature’s impossibly long limbs and wet, pale skin as it enters the main bedroom.

Realizing that it’s checking each door, Macy slips downstairs and grabs the switchblade. When Brownie jumps from a cabinet and alerts the Visitor, Macy flees to the back hallway, where every door is locked except the basement door, which stands ajar with a light on inside. She descends.

The light shuts off. The TV turns on to a blue screen, and Macy sees a silhouette rising in front of it. It’s the Visitor, whose head is covered in a black plastic bag that inflates and deflates with each wheezing breath. Frozen in terror, Macy can’t move, blink, or breathe. The basement door slams shut above her, and the TV turns off.

In complete darkness, Macy gropes her way to a spare bedroom and locks herself inside. The doorknob begins rattling. Hiding under the twin bed, she tries to think of a gentle memory, but it warps into a vivid vision of her father’s truck crashing into the Willamette River.

The door splinters open. From beneath the bed, she sees the Visitor’s maggot-infested legs. As the Visitor lowers itself toward her, Macy stabs its ankle with the switchblade, severely wounding it. Macy barricades the door and runs upstairs, but someone holds the basement door shut from the other side.

The injured Visitor grabs her ankle and drags her down. She hits her chin on the concrete and loses the switchblade. The Visitor’s grip triggers a hallucinatory sensation of being crushed and peeled apart. Macy’s fingers find the knife, breaking the hallucination. She stabs and slashes in the darkness until the figure goes limp.

Exhausted and covered in blood, Macy lies on the concrete floor as morning sunlight streams through a small basement window. The sun is golden-white, not red. She has survived.

The next morning, Macy feels numb and shell-shocked. She doesn’t remember leaving the basement, only showering to wash off the blood. After multiple failed attempts to reach Grace, she accepts that she’s likely permanently trapped at the house. She gets a call from Jemma, who tells her that she’s going to an interview at Target.

Macy begins cleaning. While rehanging picture frames, she pieces together the Carnswels’ history: David inherited a lumber empire and later married Grace, though photos suggest that Grace had been happier with a previous partner, with whom she’d had three children. Macy shuts the basement door, preferring to deal with the Visitor’s corpse later, and scrubs the floors and carpets to remove the blood, though faint stains remain.

She tries to think of her captivity as a necessary sacrifice to protect Jemma and humanity. At around 5:30 pm, the rotary phone rings. A kind old woman with a Southern accent is on the line, repeatedly interrupted by grandchildren and a dog. She instructs Macy to fix the lawn mower and mow the lawn by tomorrow. Macy looks out at the overgrown yard and sighs.

Macy repairs the lawn mower using spare parts from the garage. The smell of oil and grass clippings triggers memories of her father, which she allows herself to sit with. She fills the mower and cuts the overgrown lawn in multiple passes, finishing just before sunset.

While lying on the couch afterward, she scrolls through old photos of her family. Looking at the bloodstained rug, she sees mental images of her father’s happier moments, and for the first time since his death, she lets herself cry from sadness rather than rage. The tears feel painful but cathartic.

When darkness falls, she opens her eyes to find a white rabbit with pale blue eyes sitting on the living-room rug. Instead of fleeing, it hops toward her and nuzzles her feet. She picks it up and carries it toward the fireplace.

Macy builds a fire while a timer counts down on her phone. When her wand lighter fails, she retrieves the Uber driver’s lighter from her father’s jacket and gets the fire going with just over a minute to spare.

She removes the trembling rabbit from its cage, but as she brings it to the flames, her phone buzzes with a call from Jemma. The rabbit escapes down the basement stairs. Macy pursues but freezes at the entrance, remembering what happened the previous night. The timer expires; Macy has failed the Rite again.

Macy answers Jemma’s next call. Jemma excitedly announces that she got a job at Target, but Macy can barely hold the conversation with her. When Jemma grows frightened and offers to drive up, Macy tries to reassure her.

Macy hears three hollow knocks at the front door, followed by the muffled voice of a man who says his truck broke down. Jemma, hearing this over the phone, urges Macy to hide. Despite her own better judgment and Jemma’s pleas, Macy hangs up and walks in a trance toward the foyer.

She stops just short of the corner. In the reflection of a glass picture frame, she sees that the Visitor is a perfect replica of her father, wearing the same Fleetwood Mac shirt and work boots he wore the night he died. His gentle, kind expression fills Macy with terror. The Visitor knocks again and looks directly at her.