I get it, that the Make It Happyn folks have to be more circumspect, but I’m not all that far in when I see the mood in the room shifting, when I notice a few cocked heads, a few furrowed brows. At first, I check my visuals—is the projector working right, are the sketches turned the right way, did anything get damaged?

But everything looks exactly the way I intended it to.

So something is definitely off.

“What excites me about these sketches,” I say, moving into the final part of my presentation, “is that they tell more than a color story, or a seasonal story, or the occasional holiday story. They’re cohesive, gender neutral, and—”

“Miss Mackworth,” a man in one of the corner seats interrupts, and I swallow, feeling a fresh wave of nerves. I clutch at my tiny projector remote like it’s a lifeline.

“Yes?”

“These are beautiful pieces, and your talent is clear. But I think I speak for everyone when I say that what you’ve presented us with here is surprising, given the work we’re used to seeing on your website and social media.”

“Bill,” says Ivonne, her tone warning. But when she looks back at me and smiles, there’s a gentle encouragement there that seems condescending. “Go ahead and finish, Meg,” she says, as though the rest is a formality, or a generosity. She came all this way, her tone seems to say.

I look back and forth between them, and for a second my old instinct comes roaring back—to smooth this over, to placate. To continue on as though I haven’t noticed anything at all is uncomfortable here.

But I’m going to fight for this work.

I turn my head to the projector screen, feign a few seconds of contemplation, as if Bill has revealed a great mystery about my own work to me.

“Actually, that’s a great point, Bill. This is very different from what I’ve been doing with my custom planners. I’m known for . . . something more traditionally whimsical, you might mean?”

He tips his head in acknowledgment, and a few of his colleagues nod in agreement, too.