Dwyane Wade didn’t know how to tell Gabrielle Union he fathered a child with another woman while they were on a break — so he almost didn’t.
The retired NBA player looked back on the 2013 scandal in an interview with Shannon Sharpe, admitting he tried to break up with his now-wife instead of coming clean.
“I tried to pussyfoot around it,” He explained.
At the time, he told the actress, “Hey, things have been bad lately. … We’ve been having a little distance in our relationship anyway.”
Union, however, kept showing up for the Miami Heat player, and he ultimately told her about conceiving son Xavier, now 9, with Basketball Wives star Aja Metoyer.
“You gotta sit with you and you gotta sit with this person if this is who you’re going to be with,” he recalled during the “Club Shay Shay” episode. “I had to sit with my wife and have this conversation.”
Telling the truth was “scary” for Wade because he knew he was going to “hurt” his partner.
“I couldn’t have gotten through that moment without her sticking with me,” the Olympian said. “That was a rough time for me. You got a lot on your mind. You’re keeping something from people you love. It’s heavy.”
Xavier was born in November 2013, joining Wade’s eldest two children — Zaire, 21, and Zaya, 16 — with his ex-wife, Siohvaughn Funches.
Now, he and Union are also the parents of a 4-year-old daughter named Kaavia, whom they welcomed via surrogate after suffering several miscarriages.
Two years after the little one’s November 2018 arrival, Wade admitted in a “D. Wade: Life Unexpected” documentary that telling Union about his and Metoyer’s baby boy was “the hardest thing” he’s ever done. “I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t eating,” the former point guard said in February 2020. “When … 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.”
As for Union, the “Bring It On” star wrote in her “You Got Anything Stronger” memoir that she was “devastated” and needed “untold amounts of therapy” when Wade told her the truth in 2013.
The former athlete proposed to her that December.
The duo walked down the aisle in August 2014 in Miami.