You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
This HaBO is from Em, who wants to find a pretty cool book, though I doubt its a romance given from the description:
I’m not altogether sure if the story I’m thinking of even came in book form, but I haven’t been able to find it again in other media, so I thought I’d give it a shot here.
Basically it’s a reincarnation story. These two lovers repeatedly reincarnate and meet one another, but only one retains the memories in each lifetime. I remember this gist and the twist (both of which are revealed at the end of the story), but I’m not sure if I’m remembering the set-up of the first part correctly.
In present day, the girl (I think?) meets someone she’s drawn to, but she doesn’t know why. The guy seems to know her, and is trying to get her to remember him. Things happen, blah, and then eventually, when the girl gets the memory of her past life back, she gets murderous and kills him. It turns out that she remembered him killing her in the previous life, where he was the one without the memories. So basically, each lifetime, one retains memories but forgets they murdered the other in the previous one (satisfaction from revenge?), and only remembers the “true love,” while the other has no memories until the point where it all comes back and he/she remembers being killed, so he/she kills in revenge and continues the cycle.
Whew. Now that I’m writing this down it’s definitely doesn’t sound like a romance novel, but hopefully someone recognizes it!
I feel like we had a recent reincarnation HaBO, but I don’t think it involved any murdering.
Could it be fantasy? Katherine Kerr’s Daggers Pell novels have a similar theme.