Bucharest, 1994. The soup is cabbage and a bone she has boiled three times, the marrow long gone. She stirs it, standing, back to us, and when I ask if she is eating, she says it over her shoulder, quickly, the way she always says everything she needs us to believe before we can think: "I already ate." I am six. I believe her the way I believe the stove is hot. It will take me seventeen years, standing in a foreign supermarket in front of eleven kinds of bread, to understand that "I already ate" was never about food.
Andrei Romanov is a Romanian-born writer and independent historian based in Portugal. He is the author of Masters of the Ocean Sea (2026), winner of the London Book Festival Award for General Nonfiction and the Pacific Book Award for Best Biography. His work is held by major research libraries in the US and UK. amazon.com/author/andreiromanov Instagram: @andreiromanovauthor. “I Already Ate” is the winner of our LIE TO ME contest, part of our 2026 Micromemoir Marathon.