The shout of “Get up, you lazy bum!” echoed through the room before Lucía García could even open her eyes. A torrent of icy water lashed over her like a whip. She sat bolt upright, gasping, her pajamas clinging to her skin and her hair dripping wet. The cold chilled her to the bone.

At the foot of the bed, still clutching the metal bucket, stood Carmen Ruiz, her mother-in-law.

“Nobody stays in bed until noon here,” the older woman declared in a steely voice. “You’ve entered a family that gets up early and works hard. If you want respect, earn it.”

Lucía trembled, not just from the water. It was 9:15 in the morning, not noon. She had arrived home at 3:00 a.m. after a double shift at the beach bar in Málaga, her feet aching and her throat raw from taking so many orders. She wanted to defend herself, but the humiliation silenced her.

Diego, her husband, rushed in.

“Mom!” “What are you doing?”

“Teaching your wife some discipline,” Carmen replied without blinking. “She’s been spoiled rotten for two years. It’s about time.

Two years of daily barbs. The rice always ‘bland,’ the clothes ‘poorly ironed,’ her way of speaking ‘unrefined.’ Diego always said the same thing: ‘It’s her personality, but she loves you.’” Lucía swallowed her pride and kept quiet.
But not this time.
She stood up, soaking wet, barefoot on the terrazzo floor, and looked Carmen in the eye.

“She’s right,” she said in an icy voice. “No one should be in bed until noon… or live in a house where they’re humiliated every day.”
The silence that followed was so thick that even the bucket seemed heavier in Carmen’s hand.

Lucía took a step forward, water dripping from her eyelashes.

“I’m leaving this house today,” she announced. “And I’m taking Diego with me… or I’m leaving alone.”
Carmen paled.

Diego opened his mouth, but no words came out.
Lucía turned to her husband, trembling with rage and cold.

“Choose right now, Diego. Either your mother or me. Because if I stay one more minute, I swear next time you’ll have that bucket on your head.

” Would Diego dare to stand up to the woman who had raised him for the first time? Or would Lucía make good on her threat and leave that very morning, forever?

Diego froze in the doorway. His mother stared at him as if he had just betrayed her simply by existing. Lucía, soaked to the bone and with purple lips, waited for an answer she had been silently pleading for for two years.

“Mom… this has gone too far,” Diego finally said in a hoarse voice.

Carmen let out a dry laugh.

—Too far? What’s gone too far is your lack of respect! I’m the boss in my house!

“It’s not just your house,” Diego replied. “It’s mine too. And Lucia’s.”

Lucía didn’t wait any longer. She went into the bathroom, took off her freezing pajamas, and stepped into the hot shower. As the water revived her body, she heard shouting on the other side of the door. Carmen was swearing, Diego was trying to reason with her. The noise was unbearable.

When she came out, wrapped in a towel, her small suitcase was already open on the bed. Inside were underwear, jeans, and her bar uniform. She wasn’t planning on taking anything Carmen had given her.

Diego appeared at the door, pale.

—Lucía, please… let’s talk.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” she said without looking at him. “I’ve been talking to myself for two years.”

—My mother is getting old, she has her issues…

—Your mother is sixty-two years old, not eighty-five. And she’s perfectly lucid enough to humiliate me every day.

Diego ran his hand through his hair.

—What do you want me to do? Throw her out on the street?

—No. I want you to choose once and for all. Either you come with me right now and we’ll look for an apartment, or I’m going alone, period.

At that moment Carmen burst into the room.

—Get out of my house! Both of you, if necessary! Let’s see how you manage without my pension and my apartment!

Lucia zipped up the suitcase.

—Perfect. We’ll both go.

Diego looked at her in horror.

—Both of us? Lucia, we have no savings…

“We have my salary and yours from the construction work. We’ll rent something small in Torremolinos. Or I’ll sleep at my sister’s until we find something. But I’m not staying here another day.”

Carmen took a step towards her son.

—Diego, if you go with her, never come back. I’m warning you.

The man swallowed hard. Twenty years living under the same roof as his mother. Twenty years of hearing “this is how it’s done in this house.” Twenty years of not daring to contradict her.

He looked at Lucia: she was trembling, but not from cold. She was trembling with determination.

And for the first time in his life, Diego made a decision of his own.

“I’m gathering my things,” she said in a low but firm voice.

Carmen was stunned. She tried to scream, threaten, cry. Nothing worked. In less than half an hour, Diego and Lucía were coming down the stairs of the building on Honduras Street with two suitcases and a garbage bag full of clothes.

At the door, Carmen shouted from the balcony:

—You’ll see what real life is like without me!

Lucía looked up, smiled for the first time all day, and replied:

—We already know her, Carmen. And she’s much better than the one we had with you.

They got into Diego’s old Seat Ibiza and drove off towards nowhere in particular… but together.

A year later, the small two-bedroom apartment in Pedregalejo smelled of freshly brewed coffee and pancakes on Sunday mornings. Lucía and Diego had rented the apartment for 650 euros; it had windows overlooking the sea and a balcony so narrow it could barely fit a table and two chairs. But it was theirs.

Lucía had been promoted to head waitress at the restaurant where she worked. Diego finished his electrician’s course and now earned twice as much as he did in construction. Between them, they paid the rent, the electricity bill, and had even started saving for their civil wedding, which they would celebrate in the spring… with only friends and family who truly loved them.

Carmen wouldn’t speak to them. At first, she sent Diego messages full of reproaches: that they were ungrateful, that they would regret it, that she was alone and sick. Diego responded politely, but he never gave in. One afternoon, Carmen showed up unannounced at the building entrance. Lucía saw her through the peephole and, instead of opening the door, called Diego at work.
—Your mother is downstairs.

Diego took a deep breath, went downstairs, and talked to her on the street for almost an hour. No one knows exactly what they said to each other, but when Diego went back upstairs, his eyes were red.

—I told her I love her, but I won’t live by her rules anymore. If she wants to see us, she’ll have to apologize to you first.

Carmen left without saying anything.

Months passed. One November morning, the intercom rang. It was Carmen, her voice trembling.

—Lucía… can I come up?

Lucia opened it without hesitation.

Carmen carried a homemade apple pie and her eyes were filled with tears. She didn’t say much. Only: “I’ve been stupid. Please forgive me.”

Lucía hugged her. Diego did too. The three of them cried in the small living room, with the sound of the sea in the background.

Since then, Carmen has come for lunch every Sunday. She brings cake, criticizes the salt a little (out of habit), but keeps quiet when Diego raises an eyebrow. She helps hang up the laundry “because she does it faster” and stays to look at the photos of the vacation the three of them are already planning together in Menorca.

One afternoon, while they were washing the dishes, Carmen looked at Lucia and said softly:

—Never again a bucket of cold water, okay?

Lucia burst out laughing.

—Deal. But if you wake me up like that again, I’ll throw you out onto the balcony, bucket and all.
Carmen laughed too. And for the first time in a long time, her laughter sounded real.

In Pedregalejo, with the sun streaming through the window and the aroma of coffee in the air, the Ruiz-García family started anew. Smaller, poorer in square meters… but infinitely richer in peace.