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Back at the motel, Caroline Sullivan was being chewed out by her boss.
Or at least, that was what it looked like, to the (unbeknownst to her) audience watching from a few yards back. She paced back and forth on the phone, talking both animatedly and very quietly to someone, laying out what seemed to be a defensive plea to keep her job after screwing up.
In reality, she was ranting to Rob Daley, A.K.A. her favorite confidante.
"...completely smoked us, left me for dead," she muttered to her boss, rubbing a hand down her face in exhaustion. It was dark outside and Caroline hadn't slept much the night before, plagued both by nightmares and thoughts of worry regarding her interview that morning. She sighed. "I mean, Rob, these guys are serious jerks. Those fireworks completely ruined the area."
Rob's crackling voice told her she just needed to ignore the tornado wranglers, hard as it sounded.
"I know," sighed Caroline, putting a hand on her hip and pausing her pacing. She chewed her bottom lip, thinking, then inhaled. "You think I could sue for endangerment?"
Over the line, Rob laughed, and Caroline smiled to herself. He bade her goodnight. She hung up and tucked her phone in her pocket, then turned—and finally found that she'd been entertaining an audience with her phone call. The tornado wranglers all raised a hand and waved it at her in friendliness.
"Crazy," she muttered to herself, widening her eyes for effect, as she took off back to her motel room.
"Oh, hey, princess," called one of Tyler's cowgirls—the one that manned the drone—as Caroline passed her. She hooted, lips curling into a smile. "How you gonna chase storms in that outfit, your majesty? Awfully prissy of ya—"
"Ah, come on now," came Boone's voice, even as the rest of his team laughed at the drone girl's remark. "She don't chase storms. She just follow them."
Caroline rolled her eyes. She had a horrible flashback to walking down a middle school cafeteria. Exhaling a huff of air, she picked up her pace and shoved her hands into her pockets, ignoring every hoot and jab coming from the tornado wranglers. Besides, she was in a perfectly fine outfit for following storms—jeans and a T-shirt—and she didn't care what Tyler's stupid lackeys thought about her clothes.
"Oh, Caroline, one moment—"
The British man was behind her—the one with a low tolerance for tornado entrance, who had lost his lunch in that storm earlier. Caroline turned slowly to find the rest of the Arkansas trash watching her interaction with Ben with curious grins on their faces.
"What's your surname?" Ben asked of her, holding the tip of his pen to a notepad, lifting his eyes from it to meet hers. He smiled. "In case I use anything about you in the article."
