Excerpt from The Hours Count by Jillian Cantor, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

My heart pounded so loud and hard, louder and harder than the rain, and I turned frantically in circles looking for him—in the street, across the street, then back by the entrance to our building. "David!" I screamed his name again and people in line looked at me, but no one left their place to ask who I was looking for, why I was screaming. "My son!" I shouted at them. "Have any of you seen my son? A little boy?"

David was so small and he couldn't talk. How would he ever find me again? What had I done, taking him to get inoculated in the street and not watching him carefully enough?

"Millie." I heard a familiar woman's voice saying my name and I looked up. It was Ethel. John clung to her hip, and she was holding on to David, his small legs wrapped around her rotund belly.

"David!" I grabbed him from her and held him tightly to my chest. His tiny arms clasped my neck in such a way that I knew what he wanted to say even if he couldn't: He loved me, and he was sorry.

"I saw him wandering in the street"—I realized Ethel was talking—"and I grabbed him."

She walked in through the front entrance of our building as she talked, pulling herself and John out of the rain, and I followed her, David still clutching tightly to my neck, me clutching back. "Don't you ever do that again," I said to him, not sure if he understood or not, but the way he curled his head into the crook of my neck I hoped he did.

The elevator doors opened and Ethel and John stepped in. I ran to catch up with them. "Thank you," I said to Ethel. She nodded, holding John tightly to her hip but staring straight ahead as if she didn't want to talk to me now. What she must think of me!

The elevator doors shut, and we began moving slowly up to the eleventh floor. "Really," I said to her, "we were waiting in line for the smallpox inoculations and he got startled and . . ." My voice broke and I couldn't hold back the tears. To think what had happened, what might have happened.

"Of course," Ethel said. "I did what anyone would have done."

I thought of all the strangers waiting in line, staring anxiously at me as I screamed for David. "No, really," I said. "I owe you . . ."

The elevator doors opened again and Ethel and John stepped off onto the eleventh floor. They walked to apartment G.E. 11 at the end of the hallway, down a few doors from ours. Ethel pulled her key from her pocket and fumbled to get it in the lock. I was soaked to the bone and my teeth were chattering. David's tiny body heaved with shivers, but I got off the elevator and ran after her.

I reached up and touched Ethel's shoulder, and she turned to look at me again. "I can imagine what you must think of me," I said, and she shook her head as if to say she didn't think anything of me. John tugged at the bottom of her red dress, impatient, and she put her key back in the lock. "Would you at least come over for a cup of coffee after we all change into dry clothes? Let me thank you," I said. "The boys could even play . . . maybe."

She hesitated momentarily. "I don't think so."

"Another time, then?" Though I understood there would not be another time, that whatever I thought about Ethel and me becoming friends would not happen now after she had seen firsthand what kind of mother I was. After this, Ethel and I would be nothing more than strangers who would pass each other by in the hall, getting on and off the elevator.

"You never let me have friends," I heard John say as we walked down the hallway toward our apartment. His voice sounded so crisp and perfect and clear that it surprised me. Granted, he was obviously older than David, but it was as if I'd forgotten the way normal little boys sounded. That they had voices, demands.

"Millie," Ethel called down the hallway after me. I turned back to look at her, and from farther away, I noticed her stomach was so big that there barely seemed to be anything else to her tiny frame. "Why don't you come here for a cup of coffee after you dry off. John has so many toys. David might enjoy playing with some of them."

Excerpted from The Hours Count by Jillian Cantor. Copyright © 2015 by Jillian Cantor. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.