Disclaimer: All facts gleaned from the filings stated hereafter are only as truthful as the petitioner. The tone of this article expresses a style of writing historically employed by America’s greatest writers and, as such, is for opinion purposes only. No intentional harm is due. Do not read if the topic of divorce (even your own) causes you emotional distress. Continue at your own risk.
There are silences that can live in a house long after love has gone. In the home once shared by Reed Engel and Vickie Dance in Chicago, that silence had become its own inhabitant—gentle at first, then deepening, until neither could deny its weight. On October 1, 2025, Reed Engel, 64, through his attorneys at GMR Family Law LLP, filed a Verified Petition for Dissolution of Marriage in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, seeking to end a union that began on October 11, 2002.
The petition, quietly factual and unembellished, traces a life now split in two. Engel, 64, and Dance, 61, both longtime residents of Chicago, have lived in Illinois for years—long enough for the law to take notice of what the heart had already declared. Their marriage, once sound, has suffered what the petition calls irreconcilable differences—the formal phrase for the quiet undoing of vows.
There is one child, now fourteen, for whom both parents have already shaped a shared path. The parties have reached agreements on parenting responsibilities and on the division of assets and support, their settlement to be folded into the court’s final judgment. Engel asks the court to dissolve the marriage, to affirm their parenting plan, and to grant any other relief deemed fair. It is a petition of closure—not anger or accusation—but a wish for stillness after the long hum of discord.
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