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Melania Trump was the sister Stephanie Winston Wolkoff never had — “a really confident, perfectly coiffed, ultimate older sister,” the former senior adviser to the first lady writes in “Melania and Me,” her epic scream of a tell-all, which comes out Tuesday.

For 15 years, the women were “like Lucy and Ethel, or Snooki and JWoww,” lingering over lunch in chic restaurants, attending each other’s baby showers and surprise parties, and trading adoring emoji-laden texts. In fact, the greatest reveal in “Melania and Me” may be the fact that Mrs. Trump’s enthusiasm for emojis appears to rival her husband’s for Twitter. With strings of happy and sad faces and hearts galore, she telegraphs a remarkable range of triumphs and disappointments — and now readers will see how correspondence from first ladies has evolved since the days when Abigail Adams implored her husband to “remember the ladies.”

Even in its heyday, the Wolkoff-Trump merger was rife with red flags: Mrs. Trump rarely appeared at Wolkoff’s charity events, and persistently called the author’s son by the wrong name (“Taylor” instead of “Tyler”). Regardless, from the early 2000s to February 2018, when Wolkoff was abruptly dismissed from her role in the East Wing, the former Vogue staffer remained loyal to Mrs. Trump. She was protective of the first lady, believed in the potential of the Be Best initiative (if not its name) and worked to the point where her body buckled under the stress of office politics. In the aftermath of her dismissal — handled by email, in a message addressed jointly to Wolkoff and a similarly fated colleague — she was, by her own admission, “a freaking basket case.”

“I was there at the beginning,” Wolkoff writes. “I witnessed the transformation of Melania from gold plate to 24-karat gold. I believed she had the heart to match, that she was genuinely caring and loving and worth all of our attention. Throughout our early friendship, she lived up to what I saw in her. Watching her now, and seeing that only the gold shell remains, I have to wonder if that’s all she ever was, and I was the sucker who bought the fake watch on the street corner.”