In Passing

SATU

Daniel Alexio first saw Athena Josephine through someone else's Instagram story. It wasn't even her account that caught his attention at first. It was one of his friends reposting a photograph, some casual post from a gathering Daniel hadn't attended. He was half-paying attention, scrolling through stories between emails, when her face appeared on the screen.

He stopped. Not dramatically. Just enough to look twice.

There was a girl in the photograph beside his friend Max who dressed nicely, smiling at the camera with the kind of expression that suggested she was perfectly comfortable being exactly where she was. Daniel didn't know her. He didn't even know her name yet.

Then he tapped the original post.

athenajosephine

He clicked her profile. It was public. Six posts. A little over a thousand followers. A bio that immediately made him laugh; "and yes, God bless even the mean girls."

"Okay," he murmured.

He scrolled. There were photographs of her with friends, places she'd been, food, old pictures, little pieces of her life that didn't seem curated to impress anyone. There was one of her sitting in a leather chair, dressed in black, looking directly at the camera with an expression that somehow managed to be both pretty and intimidating. Another showed her walking outside, surrounded by greenery and sunlight. There were childhood photographs too, the sort of pictures people usually kept because they meant something to them rather than because they looked good on a feed.

Daniel lingered longer than he intended. He didn't know what exactly he was looking for.

Maybe he just wanted to understand why his friend had posted her. Maybe he was curious. Maybe he thought she was pretty. Actually, that last one was definitely true.

He looked at her bio again. There was a law firm link attached to it.

A lawyer.

That made him pause. Of course she was. There was something about the way she carried herself in the photographs that made sense now. She looked like someone who would argue for a living. Someone who could make a perfectly reasonable sentence sound like a personal attack if she wanted to.

Daniel smiled to himself. He didn't follow her immediately. He closed Instagram and went back to whatever he had been doing. Twenty minutes later, he opened it again.

Athena's profile was still in his recent searches.

He stared at her username. Then he followed her. It was such a small thing that he didn't think it meant anything. Even when she followed him back. At least, not then.

***

For months, he didn't message her. He didn't like every photograph. He didn't react to her stories. He didn't try to manufacture an introduction through their mutual friends. There was no reason to. As far as he knew, she was seeing someone anyway. And Daniel wasn't interested in becoming the kind of man who inserted himself into another person's relationship just because he found the woman attractive.

So he stayed where he was. A follower. Nothing more.

For months, Athena existed somewhere in the background of his phone. He would occasionally see her stories while going through Instagram. Sometimes she was at work. Sometimes she was somewhere with friends. Sometimes she posted photographs that made absolutely no sense to him. Sometimes she disappeared for days and then came back as though she'd never left. Sometimes he dropped likes here and there. Just something subtle.

He began recognizing her without thinking about it. Her username would appear, and his thumb would automatically slow down.

That was all.

At least, that's what he told himself. He never went looking for her. Mostly. There were nights when work had exhausted him, when he was sitting alone with his laptop open and nothing left in his brain except the vague desire to scroll mindlessly. On those nights, if Athena had posted something, he would watch it.

He liked her sense of humor. He liked the fact that she didn't seem desperate to be liked. And, if he was being honest with himself, he liked looking at her. There was something particularly attractive about the contrast in her. She could look intimidating in one photograph and completely ridiculous in the next. She seemed confident, but every once in a while a photograph would catch her looking softer than usual, and those were the ones Daniel found himself remembering. He liked her growth mindset she sometimes showed in her stories, the way she was always pushing herself forward. He liked that she was a lawyer who clearly took her work seriously—sharp, driven, constantly hustling, and undeniably smart. There was something attractive about the way she carried all of it without making it seem like she needed anyone's approval.

He never told anyone. There was nothing to tell. She was just a girl Max had once posted on Instagram.

A girl he happened to follow. A girl who happened to be beautiful.

A girl who happened to be taken.

So Daniel did nothing. Months went by. Then, sometime later, he noticed something had changed. He couldn't have said exactly when. There was simply no boyfriend anymore. No obvious trace of him.

Daniel didn't celebrate. He didn't even let himself think too much about what it might mean. He just noticed. And that was when something shifted. Because for the first time, the idea of talking to her didn't feel completely inappropriate.

Still, he hesitated. What would he even say?

Hi, I've been following you for months because I saw you on my friend Max's Instagram and thought you were pretty.

Absolutely not. He would rather die.

So he waited. He watched.

And then Athena posted another story. It was her smiling at the camera, looking undeniably attractive. Daniel looked at it, smiled, and almost kept scrolling. Almost.

Instead, he replied with a simple "friday mood huh?"

It was something casual. Something that could easily be interpreted as a joke between two people who barely knew each other. He sent it before he could overthink it. Then he put his phone down. For a few minutes, nothing happened. Daniel went back to work. His phone buzzed. He looked at the screen.

She had replied. She replied short, but it was warm for him

athenajosephine: just mentally clocked out already. you?

He smiled before he could stop himself. And that was the first time Daniel understood that perhaps he had been lying to himself about one thing.

He hadn't simply been curious about her. He had been waiting for an excuse. He just hadn't known he was waiting. So he replied again.

alxiodaniel: same. been staring at the same email for 20 minutes. figured if i'm going to procrastinate, i should do it properly

And Athena, completely unaware that a stranger had first noticed her months ago through a friend's repost, had no idea that the man now appearing in her notifications had already been quietly sitting somewhere in the background of her life.

To her, Daniel Alexio was new. To Daniel, she wasn't. Not really. He had already seen her in fragments.

The lawyer. The sarcastic girl. The woman in black sitting in a leather chair. The girl walking under the sun. The child in an old photograph. The woman who wrote God bless even the mean girls in her bio and somehow made it sound like a warning. He didn't know her.

Not yet.

But he knew enough to want to. And that, Daniel would later realize, was where it all began.

Not with a message.

Not with a call.

Not even with a flirt.

It began much earlier, with someone else's Instagram story and a girl he had no reason to remember. Except he did.