He first sees Philip three days after his death. The ghostly boy standing at the end of the harbor, watching him with starry eyes and tear-stained cheeks.
He does his best to ignore him.
But Philip starts showing up everywhere: in the house, on the streets, and so often that George feels he's going crazy.
Maybe he is.
The words float from the boy's mouth and encircle George's conscious with guilt. Why did you kill me? Why?
I don't know! He wants to yell, wants to scream it to the sky, to penetrate whatever heaven lies up there, to let the world know that he didn't mean to kill Philip.
It was self-defense, he tries next, his empty words doing nothing to fill the void inside of him, echoing through the vast hole in his mind, flooding his senses with enough anesthetic to make him numb to pain.
He tries running away, to try to erase Philip from his memory, but the boy's image only flickers intently, watching him with an air of knowing what he tried to do.
To take someone's life, that is something you can't shake.
The words hold some truth to them, George realizes. But it doesn't take away from the pain he feels inside. The ghostlike nineteen-year-old appears everywhere he turns, up to the point where George can't take it anymore.
He distances himself from his friends, his family, everyone he's ever known.
He thinks he's going insane.
Philip stands just outside his peripheral vision, watching with those large dark eyes and bloodstained clothes that drip onto the stone floor before vanishing. Talk to my mother.
George doesn't understand. He's crazy, a coward, a maniac. Talking to apparitions won't help his issues, but he decides to pay attention anyway.
The people walking down the street give him strange looks, some even crossing the road to the other side in order to avoid him. George doesn't give them a second thought; his attention is focused solely on the boy walking besides him, eyes blank vortexes and mouth a bottomless abyss.
Philip.
The boy he shot, the child who didn't deserve to die, the student who would never fulfill his destiny. Alexander Hamilton's firstborn, and George's greatest mistake.
He hoped that Philip was trying to help him, not ruin him further.
The Hamilton house stood alone at the end of the street, its windows covered in black cloth.
The sign of the mourning.
There were two kids playing outside the house, one boy and one girl. George supposed they were Philip's younger siblings, and his speculation was confirmed when Philip started towards them but stopped, realizing, perhaps, that maybe they couldn't see them.
Another girl, this one older than the two playing came outside and stopped in the doorway, staring at George with empty eyes.
Her brother's death had affected Angie greatly. She simply watched as George pushed open the gate, and walked towards her.
The kids were all watching him, their gazes passing through Philip as if he wasn't there and as one, looked off to another gate hidden in overgrown bushes and vines.
George didn't say anything, he brushed aside the foliage and found himself on a long dirt path heading to some wrought-iron gates looming in the distance.
The cemetery.
Philip floated noiselessly besides the young man as he made his way through the rows of headstones, bringing into focus the figures of Alexander and Eliza Hamilton.
Eliza looked up at George's approaching footsteps and her eyes immediately filled with tears.
George nearly turned around to get out of there as fast as he could, but Philip's blood-soaked tunic and wide eyes made him stop.
"I'm sorry."
Eliza smiled, the tears rolling off of her mourning gown and onto the headstone that separated the two.
Philip laughed, and for a moment, the blood and vacant look in his eyes vanished and was replaced by his usual cheerful demeanor.
And that was all the confirmation George needed.