Our ten-year-old son’s final wish was simple. One real football game with Mom and Dad. We thought the whole trip was for Ethan, start to finish. Then our faces appeared on the stadium’s giant screen, the announcer told us to turn around, and I watched our son hide a smile while my husband went completely, utterly still beside me.

“Mom! Look!”

Ethan nearly spilled his drink trying to point up at the enormous screen suspended above the field.

I looked up, and there we were. All three of us, forty feet tall, filling the giant screen that hung over the center of the field. Chris on one side of Ethan, me on the other, and our boy in the middle in his blue team jersey, the one we’d ordered a size too big back when we still assumed he’d grow into it. He was grinning so hard that for one glorious second he looked like every other ten-year-old in that stadium. Not a patient. Not a chart at the foot of a bed. Not a countdown. Just a kid at a football game with his mom and dad, mugging for the camera.

I waved up at the screen. Chris threw both hands over his head like he’d personally scored. Ethan shouted, “We’re famous!” at a volume that turned heads three rows over, and the people around us laughed and waved toward the camera too, that easy stadium generosity, folding a stranger’s kid into their good time without a second thought. Somebody behind us ruffled his hair. Ethan loved it. He was lit up like the screen itself.

I’d already taken more pictures that afternoon than I could count, my phone hot in my hand from hours of overuse, the battery already down past half. But I reached for it again out of pure reflex, the way I reached for it a hundred times a day now, and lifted it toward the screen to photograph the photograph of us, as if I needed proof of the proof.

Then the stadium announcer’s voice rolled out over the whole crowd, unhurried, amplified, impossible to ignore.

“Ethan, we’re very happy you’re here with us today.”

My son stopped bouncing. His face swelled even larger on the screen, that gap-toothed grin frozen in forty-foot glory.

“But there’s something you don’t know about this trip,” the announcer went on.

I looked at Chris. He looked back at me, and I could see he was just as lost as I was. This wasn’t on the itinerary the wish organization had walked us through. There had been a schedule, accessible seating, a coordinator’s phone number, a plan for everything down to the parking. Nothing about the announcer knowing our son’s name.

“All three of you,” the voice continued, warm and unhurried, “please turn around and look behind you.”