Delilah in ‘Every Summer After’ vs ‘Every Year After’: How One Minor Character Became a Scene-Stealer

When Carley Fortune published ‘Every Summer After’ in 2022, most readers were utterly absorbed in Percy and Sam’s aching, second-chance love story. Delilah was there in the margins, a figure from Percy’s past who added texture and friction to her teenage summers in Barry’s Bay, but she was never the point. She existed as a supporting player in someone else’s love story, a childhood friend and occasional frenemy who flickered in and out of the narrative without demanding much attention.

That version of Delilah is almost unrecognizable compared to who she becomes in Prime Video’s ‘Every Year After’, the eight-episode adaptation that premiered on June 10. The show arrived with a clear creative mandate to expand the world beyond Percy and Sam, and no character received a more dramatic transformation in the process.

In the source novel, Delilah serves as Percy’s summer friend during her teenage years in Barry’s Bay, a firecracker presence who complicates Percy’s friendship with the Florek brothers before largely disappearing from the adult timeline. In the present-day timeline of the book, Delilah does not live in Barry’s Bay, and Percy has not spoken to her in years. Her estrangement from Percy happens quietly, without the kind of dramatic reckoning the show stages around it.

The adaptation changes almost everything about Delilah’s role in the story. In the show, Delilah has become a permanent fixture of Barry’s Bay after she first visits the small lakeside town because of Percy, ending up married to a man named Whit and owning a stunning summer house in the area. She is no longer someone Percy has simply lost touch with. She is embedded in the town itself, in the Florek boys’ lives, and in a web of relationships that Percy has to navigate.

The show gives Delilah a secret affair with Charlie Florek, a storyline with no counterpart in the original novel, along with a past pregnancy and abortion that surfaces as a reason the friendship between her and Percy fractured in the first place. Delilah’s past pregnancy and subsequent abortion is one example of how her storyline expands in the show, introduced in the episode titled “Plan B,” in which Percy reflects back on her friendship with Delilah and this pivotal moment in their shared history.

The finale then takes her arc in an entirely new direction. The season ends with Delilah newly single and independent, and a closing scene that signals she is beginning to explore her own identity in ways the show had quietly been building toward. A potential second season would need to address Delilah exploring her sexuality, now that she has realized she is attracted to both women and men.

Playing Delilah is Abigail Cowen, known to many viewers from ‘Fate: The Winx Saga’, ‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’, and ‘Stranger Things’. The casting carries a small piece of serendipity, as Cowen and lead actress Sadie Soverall previously played sisters in ‘Fate: The Winx Saga’, and their established chemistry translates directly into the complicated, loving tension between Percy and Delilah on screen.

Cowen has spoken warmly about what drew her to the role and what she found most exciting about the character’s design. Speaking about the dynamic, Cowen described Delilah as a firecracker, free-spirit type when young who pushes Percy outside her comfort zone, while in adulthood the dynamic reverses and Percy becomes the one pushing Delilah to confront her own demons. That inversion gives the friendship genuine dramatic arc rather than static decoration.

Critics have noticed. One review noted that Cowen’s Delilah beautifully evolves from a seeming mean-girl type into a layered friend with real pain and growth, a role that could have easily been one-dimensional but instead becomes one of the ensemble’s genuine highlights.

Showrunner Amy B. Harris was specific about the kind of female dynamic she wanted Delilah and Percy to represent on screen. Harris explained that she does not want to write shows where women are mean to each other, and that while the drama in Percy and Delilah’s estrangement gives the show compelling tension, her ultimate goal was to see these women support each other. The result is a character whose arc moves from antagonism to genuine, hard-won connection.

Whether or not ‘Every Year After’ gets a second season, Delilah’s transformation from peripheral presence in ‘Every Summer After’ to one of the show’s most emotionally complex figures stands as one of the adaptation’s strongest creative choices.

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