Stories vanish in a day; highlights stay for good. Type a username and open the collections a public account decided to keep.
This is the distinction the whole page rests on. A story is temporary: twenty-four hours after posting it is gone from the public side of Instagram, and nothing and nobody can bring it back. A highlight is a story its author deliberately saved to the profile, grouped under a title, and it stays there until the author removes it. So when a story viewer returns nothing for an account that clearly posts, highlights are usually where the material actually is — and unlike stories, it will still be there tomorrow.
Highlights stay on the profile as long as the author keeps them, so there is no rush and no lost window.
Collections come back in the order and shape they were saved, not as one shapeless pile.
A closed profile keeps its highlights closed too. That limit is Instagram's, not ours.