Lost Summer (Verano perdido)

Tito waits in a hospital room for a trial that will determine his future. It all began with a vacation alongside his girlfriend Valeria, who had grown increasingly distant, and ended in a spiral of jealousy, alcohol, and conflicts that nearly turned tragic. As he reconstructs what happened, Tito must confront the truth about the trip and, above all, about a relationship that may have been broken long before the vacation began.

Tito, a thirty-five-year-old architect, wakes up in the hospital of a volcanic island with both hands bandaged and awaiting trial. From his bed, he follows the proceedings via videoconference while his lawyer, Eleuterio Lopo, a chain-smoking former boss, cynical loudmouth, and specialist in turning every disaster into an improbable legal theory, attempts to save him from what seems certain to be a conviction.

As witness testimonies unfold, Tito relives the vacation that led him there. It all began a few days earlier, when he traveled to the island with Valeria, his partner of nearly twelve years; Pelayo, his best friend since childhood; Pilar and her son Lucas; and Anna Paola, one of Valeria’s Italian friends, who is going through yet another of her habitual romantic crises. What was supposed to be a relaxing holiday quickly turns into a coexistence as entertaining as it is uncomfortable.

From the very first day, Tito senses that something has changed. Valeria is distant, avoids being alone with him, and seems increasingly at ease in everyone else’s company. As he struggles to recover the intimacy slipping through his fingers, the vacation becomes filled with small everyday disasters: absurd excursions, tense dinners, ridiculous accidents, awkward silences, and arguments that begin as jokes but end up exposing very deep wounds.

Life within the group offers little comfort. Anna Paola turns every conversation into an unpredictable monologue about love, men, Italy, or Spain. Pelayo attempts to serve as a universal mediator while patiently enduring Tito’s constant mockery. Pilar watches the deterioration of the couple’s relationship with growing concern. Even Lucas, with his endless curiosity and innocent questions, ends up revealing truths that the adults would rather avoid.

Little by little, Tito begins to feel excluded from a group that seems capable of functioning perfectly well without him. The feeling intensifies with the arrival of Domenico, Valeria’s former business partner, an old friend of them both, and a longstanding source of insecurity for Tito. Charismatic, successful, and admired by everyone, Domenico embodies everything Tito feels he has lost over the years: professional prestige, self-confidence, and a privileged place in Valeria’s life.

From that moment on, the conflicts escalate. Tito argues with Anna Paola, ridicules Pelayo, interprets every gesture as a personal affront, and becomes obsessed with a single goal: talking to Valeria and repairing a relationship that has been crumbling for far too long. Yet the more desperately he tries to recover the past, the more obvious it becomes that the past no longer exists.

Everything culminates at a party hosted by Domenico. What is a celebration for everyone else turns into a nightmare for Tito. He drinks too much, confronts several friends, loses sight of Valeria, and ultimately follows the group to a nearby volcano, convinced that he can still save something from the wreckage.

The conversation he has been seeking for days never takes place.

During an argument and a brief struggle, Tito throws a lighter that strikes Anna Paola on the forehead. Dazed and bleeding, she stumbles dangerously close to the edge of the crater and is moments away from falling into the abyss. Valeria manages to grab her at the last second.

From his hospital bed, the trial gradually starts to resemble less a legal investigation and more a reckoning. Testimony after testimony, memory after memory, the proceedings dismantle Tito’s perception of himself and reveal a man who is brilliant, imaginative, and funny, but also incapable of accepting failure, the passage of time, and the decline of the most important relationship in his life.

However, when the trial reaches its climax, Tito wakes up. The court, the witnesses, the prosecutor, Lopo’s absurd defense strategy, and the entire judicial process never existed. The trial was a nightmare born from guilt, fear, and the blow he suffered to the head. The accident at the volcano happened. Anna Paola’s injury was real. What never existed was the possibility of defending himself against what truly mattered.

The real verdict arrives in the hospital room. Valeria enters to say goodbye and tells him that the relationship is over and that she will return home without him. For the first time, Tito understands that the conflict was never Domenico, Anna Paola, his friends, or even what happened at the volcano. The real problem was his inability to accept that the story he had spent years trying to save was already over.

RELEVANT INFORMATION: With a background in Audiovisual Communication, Fine Arts, and Advertising Graphics, Pablo Dávila has spent more than fifteen years working in creativity and communications for the film industry. He has collaborated on dozens of feature films and television series.

Lost Summer is his second novel, a work infused with dark humor that combines comic situations with a sharp and perceptive look at failure and relationships. Particularly noteworthy is its interplay between reality, imagination, and perception, as well as a distinctive narrative voice capable of creating unsettling situations without ever losing momentum.

The novel has significant audiovisual potential. Its visually striking settings, humor, dialogue, and mystery elements provide strong foundations for a dynamic film or television adaptation, with ample room to explore both the comedy and the more unusual, psychological aspects of the story.

AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Limited Series, Feature Film, TV Film. 

AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish.