And then Charlie turned off his phone, dropped it back into his pocket, put his head down on the podium, and cried. For a good while. Charlie Men-Don’t-Cry Yates … cried. At a podium. In a tuxedo. In front of three hundred people. Hands clutching either side of the dais, shoulders shaking, breaths and chokes and cries finding their way straight into the microphone and filling the room with the amplified sounds—making it feel strangely like it was happening to all of us, too. Like we were all crying, in a way. But only one of us knew why.
