The doctor asks if I wanted to see the ultrasound.

Yes. No. I don’t know.

Legs splayed, I turn my face against the scratchy pillow. My husband squeezes my hand.

Yes.

I always want to see. Even as a little girl I would watch when a nurse stuck me with a needle. It’s the surprise that really stings.

I take a deep, shaky breath and look at the monitor. I’ve seen ultrasounds of our babies before. When our son swam into focus six years before, a medley of vague white circles, Rob had joked, “We’re having an alien chicken?” Our daughter’s ultrasound three years after that was a whir of waving hands and feet.

So I braced for body parts. For saying hello and farewell to the shape of a child. But at only 6 weeks along, all I see are shades of grey.

There’s the pregnancy, the doctor says, pointing to a circle next to a bright spot. Do you want a picture?

I shake my head, tears trickling down my temples. The image was burned behind my retinas—a pinprick of light, the third child we would never have. Barely the size of a hangnail, its fingerprints already loom large in my nausea, swollen belly, tender breasts, bursting bladder, panicky breaths. My almost baby, heart not yet formed, nestled in the fibers of me.

How do you feel, asks the doctor after she sucks the bright spot from my womb. After we walk to the recovery room with purple walls emblazoned with unicorns.

Sad. Relieved. Crampy.

I drink the water, registering the nurse’s smile. I focus on my husband’s warm palm against mine, the image of our two little ones playing back at home.

I never thought I’d be 40 when I had my first abortion, already a mother and happily married. But life rarely pans out as pictured. Take, for instance, the aftermath of birthing child number one: a husband who plummeted into debilitating depression, teetering for a year on the razor-edge of suicide while I tried to figure out how to care for a helpless infant and an equally helpless partner.

Although that year scarred us, I wanted a redo. Rob took some convincing, but was blessedly unclouded by mental illness during our second child’s infancy. We scheduled his vasectomy after she was born, both of us satisfied with the foursome we’d created. The procedure was 99.8% effective, boasted the doctor.

Nine months later, I cried during a detergent commercial, woke up to gorge on bananas at midnight, could barely walk up the stairs without needing a nap. Rob went to the grocery store one night as I put the kids to bed, grabbing milk and diapers along with a pregnancy test.

The + popped up before I even pulled up my pants. Fuck, I hissed at the shower curtain, you’ve got to be kidding me.

Rob shook his greying head. Impossible! He drove back to the store for two more tests. Both positive.

We retreated to our bed, clinging to each other on a sea of wrinkled sheets, whispering into the night:

We just started sleeping again.

I just stopped breastfeeding.

We’d have to buy a new car, maybe a new house.

I don’t want to do it again.

We don’t have to, Bri, Rob said, stroking my hair. If you want to have this baby, I’ll support you. But we don’t have to.

And so here I sit—sad, relieved, crampy, but most of all grateful—on our big red couch, recovering from an abortion. The same couch where I birthed our baby girl one year before. Where I nursed our babies. Where I make love with my husband. Where I tickle tummies and read storybooks and write half-assed novels and gush with girlfriends and dream big dreams and eat curry and watch funny movies.

And where I cry, as I’m crying now. Because even though I don’t want a third child, I still honor its light against the dark. I cover my empty belly, look to the mountains, and say to the bright spot that could never be: We see you. We love you. We release you.