Worried about fabricated denial? The opposite is conveyed (9)

I haven't cracked this one yet — but the brilliant team at Fifteensquared have:

Denial* around ate(=worried), with the "opposite" indicating the reversal of the implied order in the first part of the clue. However, I'm struggling to work out exactly what the definition is. Worried would seem to be the obvious one, but that's also part of the fodder. Perhaps it's meant to be some sort of &lit.