Michael Reaves/Getty ImagesDwyane Wade says the "hardest thing" he has ever had to do was tell his now-wife Gabrielle Union that he fathered a child with another woman.
The retired Miami Heat star and the actress began dating in 2009 and took a "break" from their relationship a few years later. In 2013, he welcomed a son, Xavier, with Basketball Wives star Aja Metoyerin. Wade, was at the time also a father to Zaire, 18, Zaya, 12, and nephew Dahveon, 18, proposed to Union late that year and married her in 2014.
"I had a child with someone else and I had to tell her," Wade says in the upcoming ESPN documentary, D. Wade: Life Unexpected, according to Entertainment Tonight. "Hardest thing I've ever had to do is man up and tell Gabrielle Union that I've had a child with somebody else. I couldn't sleep. I wasn't eating."
"When you hold something in that you know is going to come out and you have this information and you know it's gonna f--k somebody's life up, that you care about, that you love, if it don't hurt you, then you're not human," he added. "Me and Gab just went through something that you never want to go through and we still came out of it."
Wade and Union welcomed their first child together, daughter Kaavia James, in late 2018, via surrogate.
"That was my push away from the game," Wade says in the documentary, referring to his 2019 retirement. "It was time. There just came a point when I had to look in the mirror and say, 'What more do you want out of this?'"
D. Wade: Life Unexpected premieres on ESPN on Sunday, February 23 at 9 p.m. ET.