As soap fans are well aware, family trees can get pretty twisted and complicated, and with Ryan Paevey’s recent return to Port Charles, some viewers have found themselves wondering, just how are Nathan and Nina related on General Hospital? Because while she refers to him as her brother, they actually have different parents and are technically cousins. Confused? Let us clear everything up for you!

All in the Family

When Nathan West first arrived in Port Charles in 2013, he was actually investigating the apparent murder of his sister, Nina Reeves. The cop’s full name is James Nathan Reeves, and he and Nina were raised together by their mother, Madeline Reeves. In a case of bad news/good news, Madeline was revealed as the one who gave Nina the potentially fatal overdose, but she then surprised everyone further by confessing that Nina was actually alive and in a coma. When Nina woke up, she and Nathan were finally reunited, and Nina was shocked that little “J,” as she called him, was all grown up.

In 2014, Nathan met Britt Westbourne while she was drowning her sorrows at the Floating Rib. Flirting ensued, but Nathan recognized her level of inebriation and remained a perfect gentleman. The fact that they never got physically intimate became a huge relief when, shortly thereafter, Ryan learned that Madeline wasn’t his biological mother, after all! She was actually his aunt. His birth mother was actually Madeline’s sister, Liesl Obrecht, which meant that Britt was his sister! Obrecht initially claimed that Victor Cassadine was Nathan’s father, though the audience was aware this was a lie. It wasn’t until 2018 that it was revealed that he was the son of notorious supervillain Cesar Faison, who also sired Britt. It was Faison who was responsible for Nathan’s death — er, “death?” — when he fatally shot his own son.

Nathan and Britt also had another brother, the villainous Peter August. Peter’s real name was Henrik Faison, and he was the son of Cesar Faison and Alexandra Devane. Peter was a nasty piece of work who happily watched his father die right in front of him in 2018, and in 2022, Peter met a violent end himself. Nathan and Britt were both smitten with the same woman, Maxie Jones. Nathan is the father of her son, James, and a widowed Maxie later had a daughter, Bailey, with Peter, making the children both half siblings and cousins!

Back to Nina and Nathan: While the two are biologically cousins, they were raised by Madeline together as brother and sister because Obrecht wanted to hide her son away from his real father. Raised as siblings, they continued to consider each other as such even after they learned what their true blood ties were. Nina was naturally overjoyed by the thought that her brother hadn’t been shot to death by Faison and that Nathan had miraculously come back to them very much alive.