Prisoners of the Island

An invitation to a private island should have been a fresh start. For Mégane, it becomes a struggle to get home.After the troubling events at the Alders, the French cleaning professional has learned to ask questions. When Diane Mercer offers her a well-paid assignment in the U.S. Virgin Islands, she checks the contract, keeps copies of the correspondence, and leaves her itinerary with Charly, her husband. The job is straightforward: observe how a luxury residence operates and recommend improvements. She has no reason to expect that the terms she negotiated will disappear once she arrives.At Pelican House, billionaire Adrian Voss welcomes his guests into a world of sea views, immaculate rooms, and private parties. Behind that polished hospitality, the staff live by different rules. Mégane’s passport is withheld. Calls fail to connect. Her departure is postponed, and the independent assignment becomes compulsory service. Refusing a demand brings another threat, another explanation, another door she cannot pass through.Among the women working in the house, she meets Ana, Salomé, Leïla, Iris, and Tessa. Each arrived with plans of her own. Each has learned something different about the cost of saying no. Between early shifts, exhausting evenings, and brief moments away from watchful eyes, they begin to share what has happened to them. Trust comes slowly. Some want to leave immediately; others fear what might await them beyond the island.Mégane finds particular comfort in Salomé. Their growing tenderness offers a closeness neither has been ordered to provide. Yet the feelings born in their shared room raise questions that reaching safety will not answer for them. Across the ocean, Charly is trying to understand messages that no longer sound like his wife.Élise and Gabriel Valette, a young couple accustomed to Voss’s hospitality, may offer a way to reach the outside world. But helping means confronting what they overlooked during earlier visits, as well as their own connections to their host. Mégane must decide what to entrust to them while keeping the other women’s wishes in view.Then a new arrival appears with a recruitment program bearing Mégane’s photograph. Her presence has been turned into a promise she never made. As another woman’s transfer threatens to separate the group, the possibility of escape becomes urgent. A lavish reception approaches, bringing more guests, more demands, and a narrowing chance to act. Together they must find a way to make their voices heard beyond a house where every request is controlled by someone else.Told through Mégane’s retrospective diary, Prisoners of the Island follows the women behind the luxury: their work, their disagreements, their courage, and the small acts that keep them connected. This fourth book in The Private Diary of a Cleaning Woman series is a story of captivity and solidarity, of love complicated by fear, and of the difficult passage from asking to leave to choosing what comes next.