They called each other Mr. and Mrs. Fox.

Years before raw-vegan restaurateur Sarma Melngailis and her gambler husband allegedly went on the lam with company cash, they used code names to flirt on Twitter—a secret romance hiding in plain sight.

Anthony Strangis was known only as “Shane Fox” to his 50,000-plus Twitter groupies and the employees of Melngailis’s Manhattan hotspot, Pure Food and Wine. And beginning in 2011, she appeared to happily adopt this pseudonym too.