She and I have always been - and especially as of the last few years - more like coworkers; two tenured veterans of the same office, familiar with, yet individually aware of the quirks of our superiors.

She's maneuvered minefields with a diplomacy we inherited (hers still taut); always the Devil's advocate with one foot on each side of a tense and crumbling and rusty barbed-wire border stretch between nations.