The Plaza

If you’ve been following along, you know a few things. You know I opened a bookshop in a Spanish seaside village. You know they’re demolishing the building. You know I searched for a new space — four of them, actually, each one more absurd than the last, and that I eventually found one in a plaza that already held every memory that mattered.

What you don’t know yet is what happened next.

I’ve been quiet for a few months. The explanation for that is simple: I was building.

The new space arrived with gorgeous honey wood floors and walls in a beautiful stone-textured paint. The bones of the main room were wonderful — but still needed bookshelves built, furniture, layers and layers of my personal touch. We painted the sitting room ourselves, we built a tree, and the children’s room was painted by my husband, my daughter, and my mentor, who happened to be spending two and a half months in Spain writing his own book. He showed up with a paintbrush and worked alongside my family while our two dogs chased each other around the plaza like it was their personal playground. Generosity like that doesn’t ask for credit. But it deserves mention.

There were no fairy lights yet. No pothos trailing down bookshelves. No green carpet in the children’s corner. No hand-painted mushrooms. None of the things that made Luna & Leaf feel like Luna & Leaf.

Just a beautiful room. With potential. And a deadline.

There’s something about starting over that no one tells you. The first time you build something, it’s fueled by adrenaline and naivety — you don’t know what you don’t know, so you just go. The second time, you know exactly how hard it’s going to be. You know how long it takes to hang a shelf so it’s level. You know what it costs to ship books from three different distributors. You know that the fairy lights need to be layered just so or the whole thing looks like a college dorm room instead of an enchanted clearing.

The second time is harder. And also better. Because this time, I wasn’t guessing. I was choosing.

And I wasn’t doing it alone.

The day we moved, friends showed up. Not just stopped-by-to-help showed up — schlep-books-all-day, pack-every-box, wheeled-things-through-town showed up. What I thought would take days took hours. It was one of those moments where you look around at the people carrying your books through the old town and think: *this is what community actually looks like.* Not a word. A verb. Every decoration, every book — carried by hand, through cobblestone streets, to the plaza.

Our plaza. The one where we’ve thrown Halloween parties for my daughter’s class for years. Where my husband threw our ten-year anniversary party. Where we spend summer nights at Tom’s Irish bar with live music drifting through the orange trees. The plaza where Longman’s English bookshop used to be, long before I ever arrived in this town.

On March 24th, I opened the doors.

I don’t remember what I expected. Probably something like the first opening — a slow build, a trickle of familiar faces, a few curious tourists peeking in. What I wasn’t prepared for was the reaction.

People walked in and stopped.

Not browsed. Not glanced. Stopped. In the doorway. Looking around the way you look around when you walk into a space where every single thing has been placed with love and you can feel it before anyone tells you.

“This is the prettiest bookshop I’ve ever seen.”

I heard it once and thought they were being kind. I heard it five times and started to believe them. I have now heard it from over fifty people — tourists, locals, expats, children, a man who told me he doesn’t even read but wanted to sit on the couch for a while. Fifty people, each one saying some version of the same thing, and each time I feel my shoulders drop a little further.

The new space has something the old one didn’t: the plaza. At Calle Viento, Luna & Leaf was tucked into a side street — beautiful, but hidden. A secret you had to know about. Here, the bookshop opens onto a plaza where life is already happening. Kids run past the window. Music drifts from Tom’s. The afternoon light hits the stone in a way that makes everything look like a film still. It also has rooms and spaces that feel cozy and welcoming, inviting you to drop your shoulders when you walk in.

People aren’t just finding Luna & Leaf. They’re finding it and then telling other people to find it. A woman came in last week and told me her daughter in the UK had sent her. “When you go to the Costa del Sol,” her daughter said, “you have to find this bookshop.” Her daughter had never been here. She’d seen it online and added it to her mother’s trip like it was a landmark. Like it was a destination.

Someone asked me if I sell swag.

Swag. For my bookshop. The one I built, twice, in a town where I showed up knowing no one. People want to take a piece of it home with them. I don’t take that for granted.

I don’t have swag yet. But I’m working on it.

Here’s what I keep thinking about: I almost didn’t end up here. If the first space hadn’t fallen through, I’d be somewhere on a different street, in a different building, without the plaza. If the second landlord hadn’t wanted twenty-four thousand euros in repairs, I might have forced it to work. If the stairs in the third space had been six inches wider…and sturdier…well, possibly legal, I might have settled.

Every closed door was pushing me here. To the plaza I already knew. To the plaza where my daughter has trick-or-treated for years. To the spot where an English bookshop already existed once, like the universe had been saving it.

I believe in signs. I believe in alignment. And everything I’ve been paying attention to in this town, for years, long before I ever opened a bookshop, pointed here.

The owners of the space are two kind, wonderful women. The kind of landlords you dream about but assume don’t exist. They were thrilled to have a sit-down, take-your-time, stay-as-long-as-you-want bookshop in their space. The first time I met them, something in my chest unclenched. The way the best things in life feel. Not dramatic. Just: *yes.*

The tea shoppe — our magical little hobbit house of a space — sits in the same plaza. My husband works out of it now, but starting this July, it’s becoming an extension of Luna & Leaf. A space you can rent for book clubs, meetings, private work sessions — or drop into during open hours for a quiet co-working morning surrounded by books and cobblestone. The two spaces sit just steps apart now, like they were always supposed to be neighbors.

On Saturday mornings, my daughter sits at the window bar, reading, while Edison lights glow overhead and the plaza wakes up around her. When kids come in for our Saturday story time, she reads the Spanish books to them — because, as she has informed me more than once, my Spanish still needs some work.

She’s not wrong.

I didn’t plan any of this. I keep saying that because I keep being surprised by it. I’m a screenwriter. I plot things out. I outline. I know where the second act break goes and what the midpoint reveal should be. But the best stories, the ones that actually matter, are the ones you can’t outline. The ones that surprise you.

The old building on Calle Viento still stands, for now. Empty. Waiting for whatever comes next. And I am in a plaza that feels more like home than anywhere I’ve ever been, watching a little girl read Spanish picture books to a room full of kids while music plays across the plaza.

This Friday, we hosted our first Books N Brews. People drifted between my shop and Tom’s Irish bar across the plaza, glasses of wine in hand, kids running back and forth between bookshelves and bar stools. And about a dozen tweens and teens chose to spend their Friday night hanging out in my bookshop. Not because someone made them. Not because there was nowhere else to go. Because they wanted to be here. If you’re in the business of books and young people, you know how rare and extraordinary that is.

And this Saturday is the city’s annual Noche Blanca — and they’ve put the stage directly in front of my shop.

I couldn’t pay for that kind of marketing.

When the audience sits down to watch the performances, they’ll be looking right at Luna & Leaf. At the Edison lights over the rustic window bar. At the neon @lunaleafbookshop sign glowing against the greenery. At a bookshop that, four months ago, didn’t exist in this plaza yet.

Then on June 12th, we’re throwing our Grand Reopening party. The mayor is invited.

But that’s all a story for next time.

For now, I’m sitting in the shop after just opening the doors, the plaza still quiet outside, the books all in their places. New books, actually — carefully curated, every single one chosen with intention. New decor, too. Upgraded. Evolved. The soul of Luna & Leaf made the journey from Calle Viento, but this version is something more. A bookshop I dreamed up for a fantasy novel, now alive in a Spanish plaza, looking exactly the way it was supposed to. Funny how that works.

I keep coming back to something I wrote in my last post: the stories we commit to paper have a way of becoming real. I wrote a fictional bookshop into a novel. Then I opened a real one. Then they told me they’re tearing it down. Then I found the plaza. And it’s better than I could have expected.

You can’t outline this stuff. Trust me, I’ve tried.

This, too, is Mañana.

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*Luna & Leaf Bookshop is now open in Plaza Manilva, Centro Estepona. Come find us — or shop from the US and Canada through our Bookshop.org online store.

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