Would it even be A Million Little Things if Delilah’s long-awaited homecoming weren’t marked by worry and trauma?
Stephanie Szostak’s character returns to Boston in the Wednesday, April 5, episode of the ABC drama (10/9c), and we’ve got your exclusive first look at the hour.
We saw Delilah previously this season, via a video call on the day of little Javier’s birth. In next week’s installment, though, she’ll be with the other Friends of Jon in person when she flies back from France and immediately becomes involved in a stressful situation that has her spending time at the hospital.
The episode, titled “Father’s Day,” will take place around the June holiday and will find Gary dealing with the emotional implications of his first Father’s Day both as a dad and without his own pop. On a related note, Rome will spend significant time looking for the best possible place for his dementia-suffering dad, Walter, to live.
In the Season 4 premiere, Delilah — who’d come home from France to attend to Sophie in the wake of her assault — learned that her father (who was still abroad) had suffered a stroke. That terrible news cemented the plan that she’d floated in the Season 3 finale: She’d move back to Europe for good, with her and Eddie’s daughter Charlie, in order to have a fresh start after the death of her husband Jon. The move coincided with Szostak’s move from series regular to recurring guest star, which had a lot to do with travel and Canada’s then-stringent COVID-quarantine protocol. (Szostak lives in Connecticut; the show shoots in Vancouver, British Columbia.)
“She has, for the first two seasons, lived away from her boys and from her husband,” executive producer DJ Nash told TVLine at the time. Her ability to work a few days and then fly home for the rest of the week “went away with COVID, because the second she stepped out of Canada, there was a 14-day reset,” he adds. “So we wrote her out for [Season 3], thinking, ‘Oh, she’ll be back.’ And then she said, ‘I really need to be with my family more, I don’t want to do all the episodes.’”
He added that he was glad to work out a solution that kept Szostak part of the series. “And that’s why I called [the Season 4 premiere] ‘Family First,’” he said, “because I really get it,” he says. “And that’s exactly what our show’s about.”
Take a good look at the photos at the top and bottom of this post, then hit the comments with your predictions for Delilah’s Boston return.
