Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

The climax of the novel arrives when Sam and Sadie are away on a promotional tour for Master of the Revels during the 2005 Christmas season. Back at the Unfair Games headquarters, a man radicalized by anger over Sam's decision to legalize gay marriage inside their MMORPG Mapleworld shows up looking for Sam. Unable to find him, the attacker shoots and kills Marx, who has become the emotional center of the company and Sadie's partner, before turning the gun on himself. Marx's death devastates both Sam and Sadie, and it comes just as Sadie has discovered she is pregnant with his child.

Sadie withdraws from the world, becoming a recluse and ceding day-to-day control of Unfair to Sam. She continues to work from home, quietly building an expansion for Master of the Revels that includes a digital likeness of Marx reciting Macbeth soliloquies. After giving birth to their daughter, Sadie sinks into postpartum depression, finding an unexpected refuge in an Oregon Trail-style multiplayer game where she plays as a struggling pioneer and single pregnant mother, forming friendships with other anonymous players, including an in-game "wife." Piecing together clues, she eventually realizes that several of these online friends, including her in-game spouse, are all secretly Sam, who has been playing under multiple aliases. When she confronts him, Sam admits he built the entire elaborate game as a way to reach her and help them grieve and heal together, without revealing himself. Rather than being touched, Sadie feels manipulated and furious at the deception, and when Sam asks her to collaborate with him on a sixth game, she cuts off contact with him entirely.

Time passes, and in 2008 Sadie has dinner with Dov, her former mentor and lover, who tells her that what Sam did was, in its way, an act of profound love, something only someone who truly loved her would attempt. The conversation shifts something in Sadie, and she finally forgives Sam. The two reconcile, choosing to sell off the rights to produce an Ichigo 3 to an outside developer so they no longer have to keep revisiting their earliest success or the painful history tangled up in it.

The novel closes with Sam and Sadie, having weathered betrayal, grief, and years of estrangement, recognizing that making games together is one of the truest sources of happiness either of them has ever known. Reunited as creative partners, they begin planning their next collaboration, ending the story on a note of renewed partnership and hope rather than a tidy romantic resolution.