I’m tearing up a napkin and shoving strips into the mouth of my to-go coffee cup and he’s soaking up tomato bisque with chunks of white bread. Let’s find the crux of the issue. He loves that word. Crux. It sounds like a broken glass, scraped out of his mouth. The x hangs off the end, a tipping cross like the one that hung on the back wall of his spiritualist church where he asks the dead for enlightenment, puts price tags on healing and fabricated messages from beyond, his obsession the crux of his second failed marriage. I tell him he holds conversations like he’s demanding confession, spending too much time searching for sin and not enough time searching his soul for a reason why he can accept dead men talking and not pronoun changes. You just want to change my beliefs, he says, because Acceptance For All doesn’t apply here. It’s not a belief. He doesn’t listen. I pull soggy napkin shreds from the bottom of the cup, arranging them into an x.