Thanks for the elaboration; in retrospect, given the simple requirement, that there are only two dict keys, one of which is know and the other to be determined, maybe just the direct dict methods are appropriate, e.g.
d = {'a': 'bob', 'b': 'stu'}
d_copy = dict(d)
d_copy.pop("a")
'bob'
d_copy.popitem()
('b', 'stu')
vbr
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