And when she discovers, in the apartment into which she’d moved so as to extinguish the memory of her earlier life, a rat with its litter of offspring, she tries to locate another apartment, but, failing that, borrows a neighbor’s cat, and shuts it in the closet where the nest is, and lets it do what is natural, for while she cannot bring herself to kill the rodents directly, and is remorseful for what she has done (even referring to the litter as “babies”), she doesn’t want them to be near her, where she lives.