Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow ending explained

Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children at a hospital in California, quickly bonding over Super Mario Bros. and their love of discovering the right solution for any puzzle. After a falling out that would be dramatic by any 10-year-old’s standards, they bump into each other in Cambridge, Mass. — Sadie attends MIT, and Sam goes to Harvard — and decide to combine their talents and create video games. What develops is a partnership that strengthens and strains over the years, evolving with the technology of the ’90s and 2000s.

As we all know by now, this is not a story about gaming. Sure, there are technical components: the whiteboard visions, the coding until their fingers bleed, the allure of easy money over artistic value. It’s interesting to see what inspires Sadie — such as a student production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” that propels the pair’s breakthrough “Ichigo” series — and how Sam’s own twist of creativity shapes and tests her ideas.

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But despite these fantastical virtual worlds woven in lush detail, Zevin wants us to take a hard look beyond the screen. At its heart, “Tomorrow” is a coming-of-age tale stretched, in so many ways, by grief and hurt.

Young Sam witnesses a woman kill herself by jumping off a building. Then he survives a horrific car crash that leaves his mom dead and his leg irreparably crushed. The resulting amputation in adulthood leads to agonizing phantom limb pains. As for Sadie, she’s caught in an unhealthy relationship with her sleazy former college professor, Dov, who also believes in her brilliance and helps boost the development of “Ichigo.”

Mix in Sam’s experience as an Asian American (along with his mom’s struggles as a Korean American actress), Sadie’s fight for recognition as a woman in the industry, conversations of cultural appropriation in art and so, so much more.

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But the novel’s pivotal tragedy centers on Marx, Sam’s best friend from college and later Sadie’s boyfriend. The trio’s final member, also their producer and CEO, is shot while protecting an employee from two men who break into their office building. The intruders’ target is Sam, who introduced same-sex marriage in his online multiplayer game Mapleworld. Instead, they find the suave and sensible Marx, who once dreamed of playing a hero onstage and would now die as one — virtual reality bleeds into the real world, and this time, there’s no restart button.

His chapter, written as he realizes his fate while comatose, is undeniably the most heart-wrenching section of the book. I turned every page ever so slowly, with bated breath, because, surely he wouldn’t actually die, right? How would Unfair Games fare without its mediator, the eye for talent, the duct tape holding everything together when Sadie and Sam are in another creative tiff? He and Sadie have a house and are expecting a child. Isn’t this simply too cruel?

Maybe I have no right to be shocked. Maybe it was naive to believe that Marx, a critical support to Sam and Sadie, who had both been through so much, was safe from the plot’s warpath. Yet I couldn’t help but think that anger, devastation and doubt seem to swell and solidify every chapter, only to explode and simmer until the next eruption. It’s a relentless machine programmed to churn out more and more suffering. What’s the point here, and does it ever end?

This is Zevin’s tough love: There is no shortage of misfortune in life. Take a deep breath. Click continue.

So, I exhaled and kept reading. Because Marx’s death, as inconceivable as it was, does turn into the unfortunate catalyst needed for the novel’s finale and what becomes of our beloved duo.

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Sam and Sadie, Sadie and Sam. Always together but never together. Let’s not forget their elusive, ever-changing dynamic in this moment of grief. After their reunion in college, they agree to always stay friends, “no matter what happens, no matter what dumb thing we supposedly perpetrate on each other,” which is about as romantic as platonic vows can be. She also says she loves him several times, drawing a hilariously lackluster response from him — though he later admits that he “more than loved” her. They tease this all-too-familiar thread of will-they-won’t-they up to the end, and it almost comes across as trite at times and cheapens their friendship.

Reviews had warned that this would not be Sam and Sadie’s love story, and it’s true. Their fights can be vicious and resentful, and sometimes it’s hard to remember why they’re friends in the first place. Then there are those tender moments, like when she withdraws into her home and deals with new motherhood alone after Marx’s death. Even though they’re barely speaking, Sam builds an open-world game inspired by Oregon Trail, one of her favorites, knowing that she’ll download it and that he can speak to her as a fellow player (although she quits and stops talking to him again after discovering his deception, another instance where the story can feel a bit tiresome and almost loses its way).

What they have at its best — a lifelong connection — is “better than romance,” and much to my relief, they ultimately prefer it that way.

“There were so many people who could be your lover,” Sadie explains, “but … there were relatively few people who could move you creatively.”

Because let’s not sugarcoat it: Sam and Sadie’s final reunion is inevitable, with or without another 50 pages of misunderstanding.

“Tomorrow” is not the type of book to accept a game over. It clutches onto that innocent hope ingrained in all video games: “The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent ever,” as Marx says.

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Sometimes it takes multiple playthroughs or a specific combination of moves. Every time Sam and Sadie lose each other, something brings them back together, whether it’s a brief call after a family death or the surprise appearance of a Donkey Kong arcade machine.

As the book wraps up, the two are reunited and, even in their mid-30s, every conversation leads back to what they know best: video games and each other. This closure is the only conclusion that makes sense for “Tomorrow,” which has to pick itself back up after unleashing a lifetime of despair in 401 pages. Warm and nostalgic, the final pages are a picture-perfect finish that elicit a sigh of relief. Sadie hands Sam a new game that she’s working on, inviting him to play with her once more. We endured all the fighting, death, inequality, miscommunication and uncomfortable interactions with Dov to achieve this: the possibility of a “Ludo Sextus,” the promise of another tomorrow — of “infinite rebirth, infinite redemption.” And in the real world, with our abundance of virtual ones, maybe that is the best ending we can hope for.