Watch Kate reveal that she had an abortion in exclusive This Is Us clip

This Is Us returns to NBC on Tuesday after a seven-week hiatus, and the era-hopping family drama aims to rescue you from that cliff of questions you’ve been hanging from. What kind of answers may await you?

Some light will be shed on the mystery about Randall's not-so-dead birth mother, Laurel (Jennifer C. Holmes). But perhaps the biggest news involves the reason that you clicked on this story. The episode will resume the painful conversation that Kate (Chrissy Metz) was having with her husband, Toby (Chris Sullivan), when she alluded to a secret pregnancy from her teenage years dating the highly toxic Marc (Austin Abrams). In this exclusive clip from the episode, which is the very first scene of "The Long Road Home," Kate reveals that she did indeed have an abortion. This news was hinted at via her strong reaction when Ellie (Annie Funke) — who is having Kate and Toby adopt her unborn daughter — asked Kate if she was “judging” her for considering to have an abortion.

Here, Kate explains to Toby that she decided to have the procedure because she was not ready to be a mother or to be tied to Marc for the rest of her life. “It was, I mean, the toughest decision I’ve ever made in my life,” she says. “But I don’t regret it. But I made it alone and you know I’ve lived with it alone. Wait, what are your eyes doing? Are you judging me?”

A shaken Toby wonders why it took Kate so long to share this information with him. “It took us two years to have Jack,” he says, referring to their first son. “That’s two years of talking about pregnancy all the time.”

“I was 18 years old,” she responds tearfully. “That decision was wrapped in the darkest, lowest, most painful time of my life. It was like the most painful relationship of my life, and all I wanted to do — I wanted to just lock it up, and I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to think about him. He was so cruel to me.”

When Toby seeks to comfort her by saying that he’d like to learn his name, find him, and then kill him, Kate notes, “It’s all in the past.” Counters her husband: “Is it though? If it was truly in the past, then why would it take you four years to tell me about it?”

That question — and others — will be explored in this week's installment, which will reveal “a little bit more about the whole psychology of this woman,” executive producer Elizabeth Berger tells EW. “We've seen so much about her father's death and we've seen some stuff about Marc, and we've hinted that that relationship had even more darkness and complicatedness to it than we've shown thus far. And this is just a really important puzzle piece. When you step back and you look at Kate Pearson as a whole, this episode sheds some light, some clarity on everything that she's been through.”

This Is Us airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on NBC.

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