When a writer leaves his life behind and disappears into the Montana mountains, he doesn’t go looking for a story — he goes looking for quiet. He finds neither. In the small town of Stillwater, a land feud simmers just beneath the surface, old grief lingers in the soil, and a man with a peppermint tin and a battered wagon appears and disappears like a rumor the mountains refuse to explain. As the days stretch into weeks, the writer begins to understand that silence isn’t absence — it’s weight. And that weight, if carried wrong, can crush you. Haunted by the loss of his father and brother, strained by distance, and pulled between running and returning, he must decide whether healing is something you discover… or something you choose to stand inside of. Where the Mountains Keep Score is a quiet, lyrical novel about grief, forgiveness, and the small, stubborn ways life asks us to stay. A story about memory and earth, the lines we draw and the ones we inherit — and learning that sometimes the only way forward is to stop, take off your shoes, and let the ground hold you.