Summary

“Happily Ever After” (1) begins with a third-person narrator describing how Lyssa’s mother took her to see “the movie where the mermaid wants legs” (1) when she was seven. Lyssa did not understand why the mermaid would have traded her life in the ocean to be with a prince. At 30, Lyssa was working at a gift shop in the Titanic. The narrator clarifies that this was not a metaphor: Lyssa worked in a replica of the Titanic that housed a small museum and hosted events such as weddings and birthday parties. The replica had been built by “an enterprising education capitalist” (1) who told his investors that he planned to take advantage of a resurgent interest in the disaster.

At the end of the summer, a minor pop star rented the building to shoot a music video. When the director saw Lyssa, he asked...