Author's note: I began writing this fanfic on September 23, 2023. Most of the events that have occurred on the show since then are being disregarded, though I've referenced a few of them here and there.
The revelation that Nina Reeves was the one who reported Carly Spencer and Drew Cain to the SEC for insider trading resulted in Nina once again being on bad terms with her daughter, Willow Tait, as well as Willow's husband and Carly's son, Michael Corinthos. While dealing with the blow of losing her fragile relationship with Willow, whom Nina had found out was her daughter not all that long beforehand, Nina received a phone call from someone who sounded a lot like her other daughter, Janelle "Nelle" Benson, who had supposedly died after falling off a cliff. The connection was bad and therefore Nina wasn't able to make out what the person on the phone was saying, and they hung up before Nina could respond. Nina decided to go to Nelle's grave. Upon arriving, she found that someone had spray painted graffiti of a broken heart on the headstone. Nina's phone was dead, so she went back to her office at Crimson to report the vandalism. She then returned to the grave to find that the heart was gone! She was reprimanded for making a false report, but she insisted that she wasn't making it up.
A few days later, Nina received another phone call, and went to the grave again to find the necklace with two half-heart pendants, which she had recently given to Willow (who didn't want it), on top of the headstone! Not wanting to get her fingerprints all over the necklace, Nina left it there and went back to her car, making the critical error of not taking a picture of it. Instead of calling the police, she called Willow and asked if Willow had left the heart necklace. Willow angrily told her that she had given the necklace to her friend, Sasha Gilmore, a long time ago when Willow was in the hospital recovering from her cancer, and had told Sasha to get rid of it for her, and if there was indeed a necklace, it was a fake. Nina then called Sasha, who told Nina that she didn't end up getting rid of the necklace, thinking Willow might eventually change her mind at some point and want it back. However, when she was packing up her stuff to move out of the apartment, she couldn't find it, and had concluded that her mother-in-law, Gladys Corbin, must have stolen it in order to pawn it off. Nina went to back Nelle's grave to find that the necklace had disappeared, and was mad at herself for not taking a picture of it.
Nina got yet another phone call a few days later. Going back to the grave, she found that it has been spray painted again, this time with the message "Every day is a new dawn." Nina took a picture of the graffiti and called the police again. However, by the time they showed up, the graffiti, not surprisingly, has disappeared. Nina insisted that she wasn't making it up, and showed them the picture. They checked the security cameras and saw that someone had indeed spray-painted graffiti on the headstone, then returned a while later and washed it off. The person was, not surprisingly, wearing a mask and gloves, so they weren't able to see who it was. Nina insisted that Nelle was alive and demanded that the grave be exhumed for a DNA test, as they hadn't done a DNA test when they found the body. Detective Harrison Chase explained that the body had already been identified as Nelle, as the person was wearing the clothes that Nelle was wearing the night she fell off the cliff, as well as carrying the fake ID Nelle had made with the alias of Barbara Langdon. Nina didn't back down, and eventually got the authorization for the grave to be exhumed.
A DNA test was performed, which showed that Nina did not share any DNA with the body. Chase told Nina that these results meant that Janelle was not her daughter after all. Not convinced, Nina demanded that Willow get a DNA test. Willow told her that there was no need for a DNA test since Carly already had one done behind her back, which proved that Willow was her daughter, but Nina ruined any chance they had of reconciling. Nina told Willow that she was asking for a test to see if the person whose body they found was Willow's relative. Willow reluctantly agreed to get a DNA test if it meany that Nina would shut up about it, regardless of the results. The test results showed that Willow did not share any DNA with the body, which everyone deemed as sufficient proof that Nelle was not Nina's daughter. Still not convinced, Nina insisted that Michael and Nelle's son, Wiley, get a DNA test and promised that if the test shows that Wiley shared DNA with the body, she will accept that Nelle was not her daughter. Michael and Willow agreed to have Wiley get a DNA test, and the results showed that Wiley did NOT share any DNA with the body!
Now convinced that something wasn't right, Willow wanted to see if she was biologically related to Wiley. Wiley's DNA was compared with both Willow's and Nina's, and the results showed that Willow and Nina did indeed share the right percentages of DNA with Wiley to be his aunt and grandmother respectively, which finally confirmed that Willow and Nelle were indeed sisters. However, the fact that no one shared any DNA with the body meant that it was very likely Nelle was alive. Carly remembered how Nelle tried to make it seem like her late son, Morgan Corinthos, was alive, how she insisted that Carly pushed her down the stairs while she was prengant with Wiley, and how, after Nelle's "death," the detective seemed a little too determined to put Carly away for murder. Most likely, Nelle's "death" was another attempt at framing Carly. Carly, while not forgetting about everything Nina had put her through over the past couple of years, agreed to not interfere in any way with the search for Nelle, and cooperate with the renewed investigation into the events leading up to Nelle falling off the cliff.