CHARLOTTE, N.C. _ Carolina Panthers punter Andy Lee sat in a chair in a busy Starbucks on a drizzly March Tuesday in Myers Park.
He was crying.
His wife, Rachel, patted his knee softly, her own large brown eyes brimming as Lee pressed his index finger to the side of his throat to help force his words out.
They were strikingly and palpably close in that moment, a private cocoon of sorrow and support in the midst of a city's mechanical coffee shop routine.
There were strangers all around _ one, to Andy's right, trying very hard to hide behind his book, one just behind him and the reporter he had only spoken to twice before in front of him, watching him break down.
Rachel and Andy lost their daughter, Madelyn Elizabeth, in 2015 just eight days after she was born in Charlotte.
Andy's was the sudden, swelling sorrow that bursts out of a parent who has suffered such a tragedy, sometimes triggered by small things, in front of strangers. He was considering aloud the tradition of a father-daughter dance in the South, and the thought had occurred to him that he would never be able to give Madelyn away at her wedding.
