The pool Hinemoa lowered herself into at the edge of Mokoia is known as Waikimihia, a hot spring warmed the way many springs around Rotorua are warmed, from deep under the ground, close enough to the lake's edge that a swimmer arriving half-frozen from open water could reach it within a few exhausted steps of coming ashore. She had made it across. That much was done. But she was cold to the bone, alone in the dark on an island she had never properly set foot on before, and in no state to simply walk up and announce herself to a household she had crossed a lake without permission to reach.
So she stayed in the warmth of the pool, out of sight, and waited, thinking through what came next now that the impossible part — the crossing itself — was actually behind her. This is a detail worth holding onto, because it shows the same practical mind that packed the gourds was still working even after the swim. Desire and courage had got her across the water. They did not, on their own, solve the next problem, which was how to make herself known without exposing herself to shame or to people who were not hers to trust.
As it happened, someone did come down to the pool that night — one of Tūtānekai's own household, sent to fetch water in a calabash for their master. Hinemoa, still hidden in the steam and the dark, called out and asked whose water it was, and when she was told it was for Tūtānekai, she found some reason to interfere with the fetching — in the best-known telling, she reached out and broke the calabash, or asked pointed questions that unsettled the person sent to collect it, so that they went back to the house empty-handed and troubled, unable to explain properly what had happened at the pool. This happened more than once. Tūtānekai's patience wore thin at his water being interfered with by some unseen presence down at Waikimihia, and eventually he came down himself to find out who was causing the trouble.
It was Tūtānekai who found her, then, at the edge of the very spring that had kept her alive long enough to be found. Whatever words passed between them in that first moment, after everything — after the nights of flute and no path across, after the canoes pulled beyond reach, after a cold black crossing of a lake most people would not have attempted — is the part that every retelling slows down for, because it is the moment the whole story has been walking toward. He brought her inside, into the warmth and the light of the house, and their two families' objections, which had seemed so immovable from the Ōwhata side of the water, were met on Mokoia with the plain fact of her having arrived, undeniable and already there. In time the match that had been refused was accepted, and Hinemoa and Tūtānekai were together as they had wanted to be from the start.
What this part of the story adds to everything before it is simple but easy to miss if you only remember the swim. Courage got her into the water and across it. But it took a further, quieter kind of steadiness — waiting in a hot pool in the dark, working out how to be found without being humiliated, trusting that the right person would eventually come looking — to actually close the last small distance between the island and the house. Getting all the way to what you want is very often like that. The hardest, most visible part is not always the last part. Sometimes, after the great crossing, you are still asked to wait a little longer, in the dark, in the warmth you have earned, for the person who is coming to find you.