Toxic

Toxic is a romance novel by the American writer Nicole Blanchard, published in 2017 by Evening Star Press, ISBN 9798990430303.

The narrator describes her life as a sequence of bad decisions, and puts her marriage to a man who hurts her at the beginning of the list. Her work as a nurse brings her into contact with prisoners, and one of them is violent and unpredictable and also the only person who has noticed the bruises she is carrying. What begins as a dangerous attachment becomes the thing she wants and the thing that frightens her, and she does not describe it in sensible terms. When she learns why he was sent to prison, she tries to leave, and the attempt fails, which leaves her with even less control over what happens to her.

The narrator's own account of her choices is not one that excuses them, and she does not pretend otherwise at any point in the book. She describes what she did without softening any of it.