Nel rehearses what she will say to the critically ill Sula, whom she hasn't seen for three years. Motivated by a friendship that once bound them as one, she will visit Sula. Today, she will look down at the stemmed rose on the forehead of her old friend, at the same face that Jude kissed.
The reunion is not extraordinary; minutes later, Nel is off to the pharmacy to fill Sula's prescription, and after Nel returns, the two women settle into a conversation seasoned with innuendoes of what constitutes good and bad, right and wrong. Finally, Nel asks the question that has been tearing at her ever since Jude left: She wants to know why Sula slept with him, an act that severed and destroyed their friendship. Neither repentant nor apologetic, Sula tells her that Jude simply "filled up the space." Nel is crushed that Sula didn't even love Jude. She protests that she has always been "good" to Sula, but Sula points out to Nel the difficulty in separating good from evil. She whispers a final haunting and ambiguous question to Nel, asking her to consider which of them is good and which one is bad. Sula suggests that perhaps she was the good girl, and that Nel was bad: "I mean maybe it wasn't you. Maybe it was me." Shaken, Nel leaves.
Riddled with pain and drifting into a narcotic limbo of past and present, Sula curls up in her grandmother Eva's bed. Images of Tar Baby and of her mother, Hannah, dance gently within her semi-consciousness, but fatigue grips her. Fetus-like, she draws her legs up to her chest, puts a thumb in her mouth, and remembers that someone once said "Always" to her, but she can't recall who.
Sula stops breathing, and, in this quiet lifelessness, she realizes that she is dead. She thinks of Nel and smiles: Death doesn't hurt.
