Can ‘appena’ really mean ‘just’ in the sense of explaining a reason, like “I only passed by to…”? I thought ‘appena’ with past tense like this gave a sense of an action immediately finished in the past (‘hardly’, ‘scarcely’).
Ciao @figgles and welcome - Appena = just, soon, as soon as, only, barely, hardly. So it’s a pretty handy word and in this context it can be just or only. (Nice that they came by to say sorry