Things are tough right now for General Hospital‘s Nina. Her one chance to win over her daughter has been swiped by Obrecht. Well, that’s not really fair. It’s not like it was intentional. But regardless, Willow doesn’t seem to be any closer to forgiving Nina and letting her into her life (provided she survives her leukemia battle) now than before.

But the same couldn’t be said for her and Carly! In fact, Willow forgave her for keeping the whole “Nina is your mother” thing a secret so fast, our heads practically spun! We got that Willow didn’t hate Carly with the fiery passion of a thousand suns like her actual mother, but what the heck? How could Carly get away with months of bad behavior, then get what amounted to a “No worries” after all that?

When Katelyn MacMullen chatted with Soap Opera Digest for their podcast, she was asked if she was as surprised at the rest of us over this effortless forgiveness.

“I was and I wasn’t,” she admitted. After all, Willow had kept secrets from Carly — like the big Sonny and Nina reveal that came out in court. “I remember immediately going, ‘OK, well, you did keep a secret from her.’”

And then there was the fact that Willow had kept her leukemia a secret. That’s something else we’d all struggled to understand. But as MacMullen put it, “Maybe the rationale was, ‘Had Carly known, I know for a fact that she would have told me.’”

But Carly didn’t know. In fact, the actress explains, maybe Carly’s thinking was more along the lines of “‘This girl is pregnant and having a really hard time. She didn’t know it was leukemia, so she didn’t want to give this information and cause an upset or a faint or whatever might happen with Willow.”

She didn’t know the information could have possibly saved Willow’s life (not that it did) and that was at least partially Willow’s own doing. And that’s especially true, MacMullen noted after “I had said something like, ‘If I found out that my biological mother is anything like Nina, I don’t want to know.’”

So she didn’t know. Carly was just respecting her wishes. Really, when you think about it, she’s a… hero? OK, we won’t go nearly that far. But at the very least, Willow understood why it happened. She just can’t seem to do the same with Nina.

As far as Carly and Willow, though? “They’ve grown pretty close,” MacMullen explained to Digest. “And with all that history and all that information, it kind of makes sense as to why Carly kept it a secret.”

Sure, we’ll go with that.