Robisi was a broken man in every way. His speech was slow and he often faltered mid-sentence, as if he’d been caught on Sunday morning with only half a homily.

His back, though not broken, was hunched, and he looked at the ground as he walked. He lived each day with a secret that though he shared it, no one seemed to understand.

He wandered through the central park of Bogota dropping seed and breadcrumbs for the pigeons. Perhaps it was penance, perhaps it was stupidity, perhaps he was as crazy as the rumors in his neighborhood said. Most everyone still called him “padre,” though he wished they wouldn’t.

He still wore black most days, but not that black. And not for the same reason. The sins of Father Robisi were well known. As he dropped his seed in the sunlight of a warming Columbian morning, his flock of feathered parishioners trailed behind him like so many schoolchildren.

Robisi found comfort in his congregation of pigeons. If he should care for the least, what is less than a pigeon? He took solace in the ants that picked up the crumbs left behind.

Many people watched Robisi, and he’d grown accustomed to it. Some in curiosity. Others in disdain. Some in suspicion. When Robisi caught them watching, which was only by mistake, he smiled—the kind, gentle, confident smile of a man fully exposed and therefore with nothing left to hide. He would hold their gaze long enough that if they could hear his thoughts, their day might improve, but then Robisi would turn his eyes back to the ground—to his flock.

Though he didn’t know why, on this morning Robisi raised his head and examined an indistinct apartment building in the distance.

In that apartment building beyond the park and across the market square, Ethan snapped from his reverie and stopped watching the old man in black who led the parade of pigeons. Ethan looked to the motto he’d written with a whiteout marker along the top of his screen. Veritas vos liberabit.

A ribbon of light from the morning sun cut through the window and across Ethan’s shoulder, but otherwise the room was dark.

His eyes returned to the list on his computer screen.

The list.

The one everyone had been talking about for years. The one that people had died over. The one that everyone promised to release but then never did.

The list.

The list that would expose the worst, the most corrupt, the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes.

Government officials had promised to release it, yet they never did.

Judges had promised to release it, yet it remained sealed.

Even presidents claimed it would soon by made public, but still no one had ever seen it.

Ethan D’Angelo would be the one. He would release it.

Six months of work. Six months of staring at that computer screen day after day, night after night. Eating beans straight from the can, pounding endless cups of coffee. He’d work until the Bogota sunrise, when he could hear the street vendors clattering along far below the window of his flat. Then he’d fall asleep until he was sticky with sweat from the heat of the day, and wake up to return to his desk.

If he could have grown a beard, he would have. He’d end this ordeal like a man stranded on an island, the beard evidence of his resolve. But his beard only grew in patchy splotches at the corner of his mouth. Even though his whiskers were as black as his hair, after weeks his sideburns looked like scrub grass, tufting irregularly across the desert of his face. For two months he tried to shave every day—his cousin had once told him that would make their beards full and coarse, but it didn’t work, so Ethan had given up. Every few days he’d take an hour to shower, shave, and walk to the bodega on the corner for more coffee.

He’d tried to work at the café or the library, but he was too distracted. The way his eyes lingered over the women of Bogota—he had a year’s savings—but not if he was buying gifts and dinner and drinks. Ethan was a young man, but he already knew what would happen when he finished his job. Exile, at best. He felt a pain, like someone tightening a belt around his spleen, when he watched the women picnic on blankets in the park, their brown thighs and shoulders exposed, warming in the sun…

But that’s what heroes do sometimes. They do the hard thing for people who cannot do it for themselves. They sit alone in the dark in an apartment in Columbia with a rice cooker and a pantry full of canned beans and only sometimes the news on the old box TV in the background just in case someone else did the hero’s duty first.

Governments wouldn’t release it. Judges wouldn’t release it. Six months alone, desperate, obsessed would release it.

First he had to find it. So many emails stolen, computer networks defiled, fraudulent phone calls made. “Senator Leery lost his password again, could you send him the reset?”

Now here it was at his fingertips.

Ethan wanted to scream, shriek even, like a school girl. Except he was alone in the apartment, in the dark. There’s something performative about a squeal, like the way you only laugh out loud at a movie when you watch it with other people.

He hadn’t looked yet. Wanted to make sure he was ready. He knew he held the power to tear the world apart. To topple governments and power structures, to bring the world to its knees. He was certain that all the heroes would fall.

“The truth will set us free,” he muttered to himself, translating the Latin across the top of his screen. At once he felt embarrassed, performative, talking to himself out loud like a character in a movie. He shivered and shook his head, scrolled his mouse wheel to expose the document.

He began to read the names on the list. One by one.

Senators, presidents, movie stars—it was exactly what he expected. These were the worst humans on the planet. The ones that were truly corrupt to the core. They deserved everything that was coming to them. He read slowly at first, then faster. He could have written this list. His eyes began to scan looking for a surprise.

Hundreds of names. He knew every single name. Men and women. Some from world governments and international sports stars, but most from his own country. He was only bemused to find the names of a few people who were close to him, only confused for a moment that they should be included on a list mostly comprised of people of great renown. His stepfather, his uncle who took him camping as a boy, the teacher who told his mother he cheated when he hadn’t…

It wasn’t until he came to the very last name on the list that he was surprised. This time he did shriek, a deep guttural cry like a man who wakes to find an intruder standing over his bed. There was nothing performative about this cry as he read the last name on the list…

Ethan D’Angelo

He stopped. He laughed out loud, a snorting kind of smirk of a laugh, and shook his head.

It was a joke. It had to be. Someone had known he would find the list; they must have added his name.

But who? But how?

He was nobody. Just a man, a boy practically, with a passion for the truth. Was that a crime?

He couldn’t break his eyes from the letters of his own name.

The letters felt as if they counted through his sins. Not just his sins. The full measure of his thoughts. Experiences he’d never had exploded in his mind. Every brown curvaceous body he’d lingered his eyes upon in the park came alive in his memory in full erotic display, no depravity left unexplored.

Every fight he hadn’t had growing up in Atlanta, every boy he cursed under his breath as he walked away, exploded in violence in his mind, beating bloody faces into the asphalt, breaking teeth from their mouths.

The memories were alive in his mind. He could only distinguish them from his true life in that the new memories were more vibrant than the old ones, more real, more alive.

His fingers, his eyes, his whole body burned with guilt, like being dipped in battery acid while drinking hot tar.

He had done those things. He had done them all.

And his name was on the list. He couldn’t release it now. Not with his name. This is not the cost that heroes bear.

The options passed before his mind’s eye. One as clear as his memories—his body, suspended from the stair rail outside of his apartment, his neck wrapped in a coiled bed sheet. His feet kicking, his fingers grasping at the noose, and then stopping, the life dropping from his eyes. It felt as real as the cheap office chair he sat upon.

He had to escape. His finger hovered briefly over the delete button. He paused. He couldn’t be the hero, not at this cost, but he couldn’t be the coward either.

So instead he printed one copy of the list. He scribbled a note at the top and stuffed the pages into an envelope. Then he deleted the file, formatted his hard drive, and threw his computer in the trash as he left, leaving the apartment door wide open behind him.

Later that day, Robisi found an envelope shoved under his door. He knew he’d been followed home from the park. He was once followed frequently, and he was accustomed to the signs, though he paid them no mind.

Robisi lived in a humble stucco home of only two rooms. Two of everything was enough for Robisi. Two pairs of pants, two pairs of shoes (one of sandals and the other slippers), two cups, two bowls. If one old friend should ever have the courage to visit, Robisi was ready.

Robisi picked up the envelope from the mat he’d made from plastic shopping bags and sat down in his chair—an old wooden dining chair, one of only two chairs in the house, which sat across from its twin in the otherwise barren dining room.

Only one picture hung in the home. A picture of Jesus, hung by most for superstition, but by Robisi because he saw his life in the stigmata of Jesus’s hands. Empty, injured, restored unwholly by the grace of God.

Robisi lifted his eyes to the painting, then lowered them back to the ground before he carefully extracted the pages from the envelope. And so he read:

This is the list. Everyone wants it. I found took it. These are the worst of us.

I don’t know what to do with it. Perhaps you will know better than I.

I don’t know why you. Maybe you do. I’m sorry.

-One of the worst of us

Robisi turned the page. Though there were more than ten pages, they were all blank. He let them flutter to the ground one by one as he looked, each page empty.

Just as he expected, he found only one name on the list:

Father Andre Robisi

Robisi nodded his head. Without lifting his eyes from the ground, he found a thumbtack in a drawer by the sink, took the page to the wall, and tacked it below his only picture.

Brad Pauquette

Brad Pauquette is the director of The Company and the bestselling author of The Novel Matrix. With more than 15 years of experience in the publishing industry, Brad is passionate about helping authors write and publish their best work.